Judge clears way for $500M iPhone throttling settlements::Owners of iPhone models who were part of throttling lawsuits that ended up with a $500 settlement from Apple may soon receive their payments, after a judge denied objections against the offer.
At the same time, they could have been more obvious about it. Quietly doing that in the background seems like they’re deliberately making what would be an otherwise mostly-usable device worse, so you buy a new one.
Something like popping a warning saying “Battery has degraded, would you like to reduce performance to extend battery life?” would have been better, letting the users choose to either replace the battery, and/or downrate the performance. Either way, doing it quietly was going to be a PR disaster when it came out.
If my mom saw that on her phone she would call me and say her phone was exploding. Or go and buy a new phone.
Doing stuff behind the scenes is fine because people are ignorant and easily panic. But it should have been visible in the battery power menu or something.
In the battery menu of my iPhone X, I saw a warning similar to “maximum performance might be affected”. The menu showed battery life was low (%69), warned about performance and recommended me to bring the phone to customer service.
I honestly think they didn’t disclose it precisely because there was no malicious intent behind it. It was something they did to extend the useful life of the phone, and I don’t think it occurred to them that it would be seen negatively.
It also doesn’t make sense as a shady tactic to spur phone upgrades because you can always just get a battery replacement to restore the original performance. You don’t need a new phone, just a new battery.
