Apple Is Facing 8 Class Lawsuits For Deliberately Making Old iPhones Slow Down

Apple is currently facing eight lawsuits in California, New York and Illinois. Some consumers have expressed their displeasure with the tech giant for being murky with the sales and performance of iPhones. The smartphones are configured to throttle in performance when the batteries get old, deliberately making the old customers purchase new ones.

A study claims that once a battery life has seen better years, the phone generally begins to malfunction, which is a configuration to trick users into discarding their old phones for new iPhone handsets. Worse still, the batteries get obsolete really sooner than expected. Instead of changing the battery, the user is forced to discard the product for a new one.

This strategy has been working in favour of Apple because consumers keep returning over and over, leading to an unprecedented boost in sales. Obviously, are agitated with this finding.

All the lawsuits filed so far are seeking class action to represent every user of the brand, nationwide. One of the lawsuits filed in San Francisco claims that it’s a battery defect not to be able to withstand the demands of the processor speed. Instead of Apple to address the issue of a battery defect by including a free battery replacement, it took advantage of this ‘defect’ by defrauding its consumers.

Over the past years, consumers have contended with apps crashing, blamed an aging computer processor for developing a sluggish performance and have resorted to replacing a new handset or computer when the ideal solution could have been a replacement of a battery. ‘If it turns out that consumers would have replaced their battery instead of buying new iPhones had they known the true nature of Apple’s upgrades, you might have to start to have a better case for some sort of misrepresentation or fraud’ Rory Van Loo, a Boston University professor in Consumer Technology Law said.

However, Apple refutes this claim by emphasising in a mail, that when lithium batteries age, they are incapable of ‘supplying peak current demands’ and this aging ‘can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components’.

 The iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE launch were reportedly designed to correct the battery flaw from shutting down and exhibiting similar malfunctions peculiar to the previous iPhone models. For this reason, the company has come under a backlash for not been straightforward to the consumers. It’s only logical that a battery’s capacity will reduce as it ages; this, however, should not affect the processor.

The aggrieved users argue that they reserve a right to be notified of a flaw whatsoever. ‘Users expect either full performance, or a reduced performance without notification’, Mr Poole, Geekbench developer said in a blog post. In absence of notification, Mr.Poole suggests that instead of replacing the batteries, users are made to believe that their mobile phones are due for a change.

This strategy has been working really well. Every time there’s a new launch, it coincides with the expected period when the aging batteries begin to make the handsets malfunction.