Apple's $500M iPhone throttling settlements from 2020 edge closer to payment
appleinsider.com
Owners of iPhone models who were part of throttling lawsuits that ended up with a $500 settlement from Apple may soon receive their payments, after a judge denied objections against the offer.

Judge clears way for $500M iPhone throttling settlements::Owners of iPhone models who were part of throttling lawsuits that ended up with a $500 settlement from Apple may soon receive their payments, after a judge denied objections against the offer.

  • ffolkes@fanexus.comEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Sadly, very few people seem to understand this. I’m all for seeing a big company have to take responsibility, but the way people just blindly follow this is very disheartening. You can’t have true accountability without accuracy. They hear “throttling old phones” and assume the rest. The supreme irony is, throttling was the only way to keep older devices running longer. When I was doing kernel development on the Note2 and Note4, people constantly reported sudden reboots or otherwise rapidly depleting battery while using the camera. The old batteries just couldn’t handle the sudden spike in demand for near 100% CPU/GPU utilization + full display brightness + camera hardware powered on + heavy RAM/IO use, all at once. So the voltage would drop, even for just a few milliseconds, then the CPU would starve, and the device would reboot. Just like pressing the reset button on a PC. Limiting the CPU was the easiest solution for everyone. Do I think they should have done it silently? No. Do I think they did it to avoid being thrust into the spotlight when more and more of their users were reporting reboots? Yes. I think modern devices handle this much better because they learned from the past. Manufacturers didn’t realize back then what the degradation curve would be years into the future against acute spikes in battery demands.

    • dsmk@lemmy.zipEnglish
      01·
      1 year ago

      The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

      I was affected by this way before they were sued, started offering cheap battery replacements, and added a setting to disable the throttling. Today you might turn on battery saving and not notice any slow down, but older iPhones were not like that. Depending on the throttling, everything would lag.

      Mine was lagging left and right after 1 year. I managed to make it better by disabling animations, etc, but after a while even that wasn’t enough to keep me happy. I went to my local official Apple store and the suggestion was to buy a new phone because mine (then owned for ~1 and a half years) was a 3 year old model.

      I had no idea what the problem was and there was no way to disable this. Apple’s fix was to buy a new phone. When I managed to get the money, I did buy a new phone… that was my first and last iPhone though. The phone I got next (from a then new brand called OnePlus) lasted 3 years on my hands without hidden throttling or random shutdowns.

      I understand why they did it and why it’s useful. The problem is that they did it behind people’s back without providing any information or a way to disable it, and then had their stores suggesting a new phone as a fix. For me this is scummy behaviour and shouldn’t be praised.