Apple in 2020 agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit in the U.S. that accused the company of "secretly...

Apple Starts Sending ‘Batterygate’ Settlement Payments to iPhone Users::Apple in 2020 agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit in the U.S. that accused the company of "secretly…

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.worldEnglish
    81·
    10 months ago

    First comment on that story (as of right now) blames the media for not being able to report the issue correctly and then goes on to describe what he fails to recognize as a serious design flaw.

    • maynarkh@feddit.nlEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      It’s all the comments. I don’t know what else to expect from the forum of macrumors.com.

      I think they don’t understand or don’t want to understand the real issue. The problem is not that batteries degrade and Apple throttles the phone to protect electronics. The problem is that batteries are designed to degrade, are not replaceable, and Apple profits from this by having you buy new phones.

      Shameless plug of Fairphone here. I am not buying any headphones that are not from them any more. The sound is great, at least for me (I am no connoisseur), the whole thing works OK. But when one of the straps broke, I didn’t have to buy a new thing, I just needed to unscrew two screws, pull out and USB-C cable and put the new thing I bought for 10 bucks in.

      • CaptainPedantic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        My iPhone 6 was nearly unusable until they added in CPU throttling. It would try to draw more current than the battery could provide, which caused the phone to shutdown. Sometimes I would get the same issue during the boot process, which effectively created a boot loop. Resolving this issue was Apple’s stated reasoning for implementing the throttling.

        I am no Apple fan, but in this case, I think the only thing they did wrong was not communicate what they were doing and not give the user an option to turn throttling on or off.

        Honestly, this whole episode screams “Well meaning engineering team fixed a problem, but didn’t consider the optics of such a change.”

          • CaptainPedantic@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            Yeah. I did want to reiterate that usability of the phone was the primary driver of the change, not necessarily battery life.

            I got no indication of a dying battery other than needing to charge frequently until Apple implemented a battery health feature. That was after they fixed the shutdown issues.