Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case over iPhone Slowdowns

Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by xahrepap on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @05:51PM (#25143665)

I own an iPhone because I got sick of these kinds of issues I was having with my Pixel phones. (would last ~1yr of perfect bliss. Then the honeymoon ends and the phone would just behave like crap). I decided to give another brand a shot.

I'll tell you what will really tick me off in another year or so... If my device is, without warning, notification, ability to change, etc, purposefully nerfing itself for ANY REASON. That will make me really upset. Especially since I can't just pop the back off and toss a new battery in there.

Good faith or not. It's an anti-consumer move. If my battery even pretended to be removable, you might convince me otherwise. But gluing the battery in under a glued in screen and then throttling my device based on the battery's age... Just really bothers me.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by yreg on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:10PM (#25143886)

Before this the old iPhones used to randomly reboot when the battery wasn’t able to keep them alive. (I had such phone.)

I don’t think slowing it down is “nerfing” compared to that. I speak also as someone who used an old iPhone 6 which was slowed down this way. Btw they throttled based on battery health, not age.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by fiblye on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:59PM (#25144393)

Yeah I definitely had that experience a few times.

Using the maps on my phone in a different country where nobody spoke my language and I didn't speak theirs with 25% battery life and having it suddenly shut down wasn't the funnest moment of my life.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by xchip on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @07:26PM (#25144668)

You would have bought a new battery, not a new phone

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by xahrepap on Thursday November 19, 2020 @01:09PM (#25152345)

When my Laptop runs low on power it pops up something like, "You're running out of power." They clearly have the technology to detect if the battery itself is going bad. Why can't my phone boot into that mode and say, "It looks like your battery's life is at X% would you like to slow your phone down to concerve power? [Yes] [Yes, always] [No, ask again when it's more dead] [No, Don't ask any more]"

You know... let the user know what's going on.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by yreg on Monday November 23, 2020 @10:17AM (#25187580)

Ofc they should have communicated it clearly, they failed in that regard.

Bad battery health (iPhone) != low on power (your laptop) btw.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @07:47PM (#25144849)

The "behave like crap" comes from Google constantly bloating their apps to drive upgrades. New phone: maps run smoothly. One year later: maps is a laggy POS.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by manfredo on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:01PM (#25143802)

So it'd have been better to just let people's phones crash on startup and become 100% unusable?

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by plorkyeran on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @06:06PM (#25143855)

The throttling also left my phone unusable while disguising the fact that it was because the battery needed to be replaced.

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Re:Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle 'Batterygate' Case ov... by xahrepap on Thursday November 19, 2020 @01:06PM (#25152320)

When there's a problem. I want to fix it. Not ignore it by making everything else work like crap.

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