If you happened to have purchased an iPhone before December 2017, there’s a chance you have been given a tidy little sum of money by Apple this week.
To be more specific, a US class action lawsuit settlement went through back in 2020 in regard to the battery throttling of a handful of the company’s major iPhones. You had to have claimed for this suit before October 2020 to be entitled to a payout of $92.17. Any iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, and 6s Plus running iOS 10.2.1 or later and any iPhone 7 or 7 Plus running iOS 11.2 or later was included in the suit.
As Michael Burkhardt pointed out on X, you could be entitled to multiple payments if you had multiple iPhones around this time. In reply to that post, X user @LiamFromOrlando had received the payment in an old bank account he no longer has access to, presumably as it had been almost four years since making the claim.
It’s important to note that this does not necessarily mean that Apple is guilty of throttling its devices to the degree the case claims, but, as class action lawsuits involve huge groups of people, it had a lot of voices behind it. There’s a chance Apple lawyers saw the $500 million settlement as a worthwhile expense given the potential costs of a drawn-out lawsuit and the PR campaign that would have to follow.
Apple’s throttling problems aren’t done yet
A potentially more costly case is currently going ahead in the UK that could be worth up to £2 billion. Apple attempted to block it back in November, but Just Gutman, a consumer advocate, is arguing on behalf of a potential 25 million users in the UK, and it is going to trial. This suit is much larger in scope than the previous one, or the recent Canadian settlement, as it goes from the iPhone 6 all the way up to the iPhone X.
Proceeding with a trial doesn’t mean that Gutman is likely to win, just that the argument has enough merit to investigate. Back in November, the Competition Appeal Tribunal said there was a “lack of clarity and specificity” in Gutman’s case, which needs to be addressed before being heard. It might be a while until we hear more, but this appears to be the biggest throttling case Apple has fought yet.
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