Apple facing several lawsuits over intentionally slowing down old iPhones

This is so stupid. I used an iphone 4s last year until I got my phone replaced and it was impossible to do anything besides making calls. I'd rather have 2 hours battery life then 5 and take me 4 times as much to do anything. This makes no sense at all as far as putting the user in first place. This is clearly a way to make more sells. Besides, not telling the user you are slowing their device is a crime. Apple should have as much as lawsuit as possible, because they should not always win at users cost.

Just to help iphone users understand the depth of this criminal action... the intentionally crippled phones run at 0.4 of their original capability - that is a reduction in processing speed from 1400MHz all the way down to 600MHz. Why, because the battery deteriorated 20%??? Ha!

Stop asking " why does Apple ....?" They will not answer. Waist of time, negative energy! Will drain your (emotional) energy and shorten your (battery) life. Just do not buy Apple.

Or do not buy a new phone at all. Be happy with the one you have. How old is = your "old" phone? FYI, mine is 6+ years old. And it works! Amazing but true. Yep, user replaceable battery (1x new battery in 6+ years.)

If you do continue to buy inferior products...O.K. But do not complain that profit driven companies will accept you money. Do not buy and the problem (product and/or company) will dissapear.

Everyone who has been targeted should, at least, get a FREE battery replacement.

A guaranteed way to skyrocket their new phone sales... make all the recently released and older phones painfully slow and obsolete. All you Apple lemmings... bend over... Apple is driving!

Apple should have been up front and transparent about slowing the processors. It was stunningly naive to think that no one would check the processor's speed if their phone ran slow, and then sing about it on the internet if the processor was clocked back by Apple. Blunder. Stupid, cloistered-in-a-boardroom-behind-closed-doors, blunder. The lawsuits will sniff through as much internal Apple communications as possible. If they find one email, memo, text, or mouse fart that relates increased new phone sales to slowing old phone processors, a wall of sh*t will certainly hit the fan (.....boy). If they don't find anything, the implication will still exist.

Sound engineering decision to trade off burst CPU power demand with battery capacity. Only mistake was not making this tradeoff more transparent to the user.

Profit,profit,profit!!! "We must sell our new phones by any means necessary". I would love to be at the meeting where slowing down phones was brought up..

Those who buy iphone, must know that the company decides and dictates the choice of the cliant. It is not a buyer's domain any more. Every thing casts a long and looming shadow of strict regimen. With android people have options and choices.

The pure fact that they build in the batteries, beeing not able to get changed is a point not to buy a phone from them. If the batteries would be replaceable the whole problem would not exist. Or at least not that big.

Edit: A small Notification on startuplike "Your phone is set to lower speed because your battery is degradet" would be enough. Anything else is pure betrayment to buy a new phones.

Oh and of course it was all in the interest of a better experience for iPhone users😬

Apple is run by a sodomite, what else did you expect😩

no one forced you to buy the rubbish (or toxic waste). enjoy the explosive batteries and other perks of your "phones." from here out it will only get worse.

Lawsuit = good.

I want to see this disgusting company taken down one was or another. If something needs to be "slowed down" (make it, taken to a halt actually) is Apple itself, along with all their s..t, how much omnipresent and above it all they think of themselves, and all the BS and s..t they stand for. This company has gone from utterly amazing, to unbearably pathetic, to finally unacceptably devious.

My disrespect for this company is only matched by how much they disrespect everything and everyone aroind them that still keeps throwing money at them.

I loathe apple. You've only to see the BBC panorama documentary apples broken promises, mysteriously absent from YouTube, to understand what kind of company they are

I can only hope that Apple will be burned here. What a rottened trick. What Apple does is nothing more then planned obsolescence .

Only to make people more eager to buy a new phone sooner then they wanted to. What Apple does is malicious and nothing more then a fraud.

Their reasoning is kind of BS as no other manufacturer has the problems that Apple describes.

Why don't Apple revoke their rotten trick?

All our digital cameras have lithium ion batteries. Why don't those go bad in 1or 2 years and cause camera problems?

"Apple ... denied any malicious intent (e.g. trying to trick people into upgrading to a newer iPhone)." And did so in secrecy without notifying the owners or giving them the option to choose. Yeah, right!

If only camera manufacturers did the same thing, then a lot of us would not be clinging onto our 5 year old cameras and the market wouldnt be nearly dead.

In France it is totally forbidden and heavily punished (5% of the turnover) for manufacturers to program the death of a product. Like for printers, washing machines etc.

Buy a ink printer in france and it last a decade. Buy one in usa and try to keep it running for a couple of years !

Apple is already under a huge pressure regarding taxes and a lawsuit by the goverment will be underway in january about this battery scandal.

Apple is doing right - halfways!
Batteries, especially LiIon batteries are becoming weaker over the time of usage/charge cycles. The internal resistance is growing and so they become less powerful. A faster clocked processor needs more power (current) that an exhausted battery isn‘t capable to deliver, so the voltage will break down and the system will crash due to undervoltage.
My partner had an old iPhone 5s with an exhausted battery. It happened very often when using the camera that the whole phone crashed, probably due to higher power consumption when using the camera.
Everything became fine after a battery swap!
We would have prefered if the system had clocked down to keep the system running! Nothing else Apple is doing in the current discussion.

But - Apple should display the bad battery status to the user and offer a battery change to a lower price than before!

Apple again. LOL. They should've made the batteries replaceable in the first place. Who needs those things to be so annoyingly thin and bendable anyway?

Every time i read something like this on the news i am reminded that i made the right choice in 1998 to NOT buy into Apple.

Now, where's my popcorn?

Basturds.

Me too.
All victims shall stand up

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/29/business/tech/france-targets-apple-epson-possibly-landmark-legal-action-planned-obsolescence/#.WkXGdBY9g0M

Pure bs. Apple wants you to be on a yearly update plan for your phone, that much is clear. So they figured to give it a shot. It didn’t work but they will try it again. I think the battery in my 3yo iphone 6 is just peachy, thank you very much for asking Apple but dont slow down my phone just bec you think it may be iffy. l will worry about that when the sht breaks.

Law suits agains Apple, a bit of karma striking back, I guess

This is no different than Windows computers running slower and slower with age due to the operating system having so much extra added, bloated registry, etc.

Actually this is just the result of two other major issues:
1. Apple, Google, etc often don't explain accurately what they change with an update. In my opinion nobody should update their devices until Apple, Google, etc change this.
2. No option for installing an old OS version. No option for installing security updates without having the latest OS version (like Windows PCs).

Well, Also the same thing it comes in mind, and noted here, the concept of "transparency", it should be valid for others elettronics manufacturers company devices, like camera for instance, that I do believe that whenever there is a firmware/software to update, If I'm not mistaken, they are not always up front to tell us what are the "PROS" and the "CONS" of such a firmware updates, as We know that often consumers complain that often such device, like cameras they behave, let's say..differently;)..

pure evil.

Apple is not the only manufacturer guilty of planned obsolescence.

Who cashes in with a class action lawsuit? The lawyers.

It's called a trade off. Batteries deteriorate over time. After two years you can have a faster phone that lasts less long, or a slower phone with better battery life. One or the other.

Apple opted to keep the battery life as long as it could over the life of the phone by balancing the clock speed against the fall in battery capacity. In my book that was the right call and a smart move. (And I don't even own an i-anything.)

This is known thing with the battery powered devices, and one reason why a removable battery was a expected for consumer devices, not because when you run out of power you could replace it with extra battery in pocket etc, but because you could add lifetime to the working hardware.

And now we are in the situation that Apple made more popular, glued batteries so that one can't just open case and swap battery and again have a device like a new.
And of course help to avoid the problem that people throw batteries away with normal trash. But there is as well a fix for that, give a bonus for new battery buyer who brings in exchange their old battery, say -15% off?

i switched to a touch tone phone about 20 years ago. i liked the newer rotary dial phones since they needed no hardware or software updates though they could be slow to dial. about 5 years ago i found a very good deal on a touch tone phone that has an LCD display showing caller ID and other features, though i don't use them often. dialing is faster despite the software, though the older touch tone phones without displays were just as fast.

In terms of dollar amount, this probably is the biggest consumer fraud in history. How much money was wasted by duped consumers? How about environmental waste?

An international law should force companies to manufacture smartphones with removable batteries. Is this normal that you cannot’ replace by yourself an old battery on a smartphone by a new one ?

I really hope these lawsuits are successful.

How anybody buys anything from this company is unfathomable.

Although this specific issue is new, the meme of "apple forces obsolescence" has been around for years (primarily due to the fact that latest and greatest OS's don't run as well on old hardware compared to the earlier version of the OS that shipped with the phone).

There is no evidence that this actually drives sales of new Apple hardware; if anything it would drive more people to competing platforms. But you don't need evidence when you have a perfectly good conspiracy narrative.

Apple's failure here was a lack of communication to the user that the throttling was taking place.

Does anyone know if an affected phone is still throttled when connected/powered through a charger?