Apple hit with lawsuit after admitting to slowing down iPhones with depleted batteries

A day after Apple acknowledged slowing down iPhones with degraded batteries, a Los Angeles man is pursuing a class action lawsuit in the matter.

Owners didn't agree to the prospect, and it hurts the devices' value, according to a filing by plaintiff Stefan Bodganovich, cited by TMZ. The case is said to be particularly concerned with the impact on iPhone 7 users.

The suit asks that Apple stop throttling older devices, and pay compensation to affected people.

Over the course of December, a number of people on Reddit and elsewhere have speculated that iPhones perform faster after battery replacements, mostly citing anecdotal evidence. Apple effectively confirmed that situation on Wednesday, but with the provision that it only throttles phones to prevent sudden, potentially damaging shutdowns.

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions," the company said in a statement. "We've now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future."

Official battery replacements can be free under AppleCare+, but normally cost $79 plus tax.

126 Comments

coolfactor 2332 comments · 20 Years

About 6 years ago

Just another person making this world muddy and messy.

Apple doesn't owe anybody any money.

danv2 29 comments · 14 Years

coolfactor said:

Just another person making this world muddy and messy.

Apple doesn't owe anybody any money.

It owes a shit load in taxes and is gonna pay up as per the EU lol. Regarding this situation: if they were transparent then they would not be getting fucked on this deal. They should have made it a feature, and left it to the consumer to decide. When you make calls like this on behalf of the customer, then they will come at you with fangs. More importantly, a prompt should pop up "its time to replace your battery for $80" instead of "lemme slow you down bro w/out telling you bro" etc.

There is a clear cut difference here, and they made a mistake on assuming what each person would want.

Soli 9981 comments · 9 Years

coolfactor said:

Just another person making this world muddy and messy.

Apple doesn't owe anybody any money.

They don't, but this was expected with a lack of transparency on the issue. That said, based on all the data I would've taken the same moves Apple did to keep the device working instead of having it shutdown or have considerably worse battery life.

I doubt we'll see any official recall for this issue, but because of this outrage I can see a future update having an option in Settings » Battery for a a Throttle toggle switch that works kinda like Low Power Mode, except that it won't disable "mail fetch, Hey Siri, background app refresh, automatic downloads, and some visual effects."

Bebe 145 comments · 7 Years

What compensation? Free battery replacement? Good luck :D

NemWan 118 comments · 8 Years

And taxpayers should sue NASA because they've been turning off features we paid for on the Voyager space probes as the power level drops because of the plutonium decay.