Apple to pay up to $500M to settle U.S. lawsuit over slow iPhones
I’ve always thought the coverage of this issue got things completely backwards.<p>Apple had an issue with old phones unexpectedly shutting down. They determined this happened because aged batteries were not capable of delivering peak current anymore and the CPU was “browning out” under heavy load.<p>They added a software feature in an iOS update that throttled the CPU in this condition to prevent a crash, at the expense of lower peak CPU performance.<p>From my perspective, this demonstrated real dedication to customer care and old device support from Apple. A phone that is moderately slower is still more valuable than one that randomly crashes. Intuitively, I’d expect that this would decrease sales of replacement iPhones, not increase them.<p>People latched onto the fact that Apple did this “secretly” - but Apple has never exposed this sort of implementation detail, and they’ve never wanted battery replacement to be part of the normal user experience for their devices. If Apple had shipped an iOS update that started telling people “Your battery is degraded, pay us to replace it to stop the crashes!” they obviously would’ve been raked over the coals also. There is no magic solution here.<p>So I never saw any indication that this was malicious on Apple’s part.