Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook apologises for not being clear that the company slows iPhones only with the ageing battery and not the ones with the newer batteries. He also promised that in the future updates, Apple will "give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery" and let them also know that how this battery health will affect the performance of their device.
To compensate this hiding of facts Apple is offering a discount on battery replacements. Anyone with an iPhone 6 or later, can buy a replacement battery for just $29 instead of $79 earlier starting late next month. The cheaper price is in line with the third party repair shops, giving a relief to an extent to their customers.
While Tim Cook's message was in an apologetic tone, he still refuses the fact that Apple slows down old iPhone to push users to buy the new one. "First and foremost, we have never - and would never - do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," he said.
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The company states the purpose of this slowing down of iPhones is to protect the decaying batteries. This slow down in performance will increase the battery life of the smartphone. If they don't do such an act, the batteries will run a high risk of total shutdown.
Whats the effect of this on Apple?
This disclosure has called in for a number of class action lawsuits. A French consumer rights group filed a suit against Apple on Dec. 27 that accuses Apple of degrading its old phones in order to sell new ones. In France, it's illegal to degrade old products to promote the sale of new ones, meaning that the suit filed in France by the group Halte à l'Obsolescence Programme is the only lawsuit that carries the possibility of up to two years in prison.
Apple faces more than eight different lawsuits from iPhone owners in places including California, New York, New Jersey and even Israel that claims that the Apple should have previously disclosed the fact, that it slows down the iPhones. South Korean officials said they will look into the matter and might even ban the sales of the iPhone as well we charge them a huge fine in the country.
The argument and lawsuits are based on basically two claims. One, that Apple hurt the performance of the phones in secret and two, that doing so made it more likely that someone would buy a new iPhone rather than fix their old one.
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Further issues for Apple
One of the lawsuits filed in the state of Eastern District of New York is that of a fraud stating "Had Plaintiffs been informed by Apple that a simple battery replacement would have improved the performance of their iPhones, Plaintiffs would have chosen to replace their batteries which were clearly a more cost-effective method rather than upgrading to a new iPhone that was extremely costly."
The lawsuits end Apples one of the rockiest years, with a lot of financial success and a lot of controversies including a bug that prevented iPhone owners from typing "i" and several software issues. It has also faced criticism over a lukewarm reception for its iPhone X and due to unseen reasons have to delay the release of its smart speaker, the HomePod, to 2018.
