Home > News

Apple Agrees to Pay Up to $500 Million for Slowing Down iPhones

By Simon Batt
Apple Fined Featured

It isn’t news that Apple distributed updates that slowed down older iPhone models, but we may finally see a conclusion to the debacle. While the case hasn’t been wholly approved at the time of writing, Apple has agreed to pay a $500 million fine for slowing down its older models of iPhones.

Why Is Apple Under Fire?

Apple is in legal hot water after they deliberately slowed down iPhone 6, 6+, 6s, 6s+, 7, 7+, and SE with an update that throttled performance.

Apple Fined Iphone

This first came to light when users noticed a drop in performance after the system update. In response, Apple stated they slowed down the phones to preserve the battery. As the phone’s battery aged, the operating system would throttle the processing power to prevent issues such as sudden shutdowns.

Consumers, however, weren’t convinced. Due to the sneaky nature of this slowdown update, many believe that Apple slowed down older models to encourage users to purchase new batteries or upgrade their phones to the newest model. This is something Apple has denied; in the court case, they claimed their actions were not malicious.

Whether the update was meant to benefit the public, or it was a scheme to get people to upgrade their phones, the court case tackled one flaw. Due to Apple staying silent about the throttling, it caused people to purchase brand new phones in the belief that their old one was reaching the end of its life. In actuality, users only needed to get a new battery to reduce the throttling.

Users have stated that if they had known of this feature from the start, they would not have bought the phone in the first place. As such, regardless of Apple’s true intentions, their secretive nature landed them in a court case.

Apple has since tried to rectify the problem by lowering their battery prices from $79 to $29, as well as offering a way to disable the throttling. Despite this, Apple still faced legal problems and decided to settle in order to avoid litigation.

What Will Apple Do Now?

Now that Apple has settled, it has to pay up. Named members in the case will receive $1500-3000, and the attorneys will get around $90 million. Anybody who has, or does, own an iPhone 6, 6+, 6s, 6s+, 7, 7+, or SE can claim $25 from Apple.

Apple Fined Money

The court has stated that Apple must pay a minimum of $310 million, so if only a few owners claim their money, the other members of the case may receive more. Conversely, the fine has a $500 million maximum, which will reduce the payment owners get if exceeded.

It is currently unclear how users will receive their $25. If you are or were once the owner of one of the phones mentioned, it’s worth trying to find proof of purchase to make your claim if needed.

Fixing Past Mistakes

Apple faced criticism when users caught the company slowing down the older iPhones. Apple claimed it was for beneficial purposes, while users claimed the company pushed them to upgrade. Whatever the reason was, Apple must now pay up to $500 million, including paying $25 to older iPhone owners.

Did you own an older iPhone that was affected? Let us know below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Simon Batt Avatar
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.