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Tim Cook: 'Maybe we should have been clearer' over iPhone throttling

In a recent interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged the company should have been clearer with iPhone owners.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

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The iPhone-throttling issue that Apple brought upon itself last year shows no signs of going away any time soon, but Apple CEO Tim Cook finally acknowledged that the company should have been clearer with iPhone owners.

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For those of you who aren't following the story closely, it all started back in July of last year, when Apple released iOS 10.2.1 following reports that iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE handsets were shutting down randomly due to cold weather, low battery charge, or battery aging.

The release notes for this update stated the following:

Improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns.

Doesn't say an awful lot, does it?

Apple later expanded the scope of this code to include iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus devices with the release of iOS 11.2.

Later, in 2017, this throttling was uncovered when benchmarking form Geekbench dug through its data and found a correlation between device performance and battery age.

From there, things have snowballed into lawsuits and Senate committee probes.

In an interview on Wednesday with ABC News, Cook was asked whether he thought that Apple had done a good job of keeping customers in the loop as to the iPhone throttling issue, and right out of the gate he took on a defiant posture.

"When we did put it [the software update] out, we did say what it was, but I don't think a lot of people were paying attention."

Later, Cook went on to say that "maybe we should have been clearer, as well," which offers some hope that Apple now understands that a line in the release notes about power management isn't enough for people.

Cook did go on to apologize -- not for the throttling, but because people may have felt Apple had selfish motives for doing it:

"We deeply apologize for anybody that thinks we had some other kind of motivation."

Apple has also hinted that iOS will be updated to give users more information about their battery, and the ability to turn off the throttling feature, and that this will be out early 2018.

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