Apple Hit with New Lawsuits in Wake of iPhone Throttling

Despite strong sales during the holiday season, the end of the year may mean bad news for Apple. After the company confirmed that it slowed down older iPhones in order to preserve battery life, several people filed suit against the company.

Most recently, five iPhone owners in Florida, New York, and New Jersey filed a class-action suit against Apple after the company revealed it used software updates to slow their phones. Four of the five said that they bought new iPhones as a result of the throttling.

This suit alleges that Apple’s failure to notify customers of the slowdowns and failure to advise them that they could replace their batteries constituted a breach of contract.

“Apple) breached the implied contracts it had made with the Plaintiffs and members of the proposed class and sub-classes by purposefully slowing down older iPhone models when new models came out and by failing to properly disclose that at the time the parties entered into an agreemet,” the suit alleges.

For its part, Apple has not commented on the various lawsuits, but did issue a statement saying that as iPhone batteries age, they can cause phones to slow down or shut off unexpectedly which is why the company slowed them down.

‘Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions,’ Apple said.

To be fair, the company’s explanation does make sense from a technical standpoint. However, it feeds into a long-running conspiracy theory regarding Apple and planned obsolescence. Beyond that, the company could have handle this better by notifying consumers of the slowdowns and making it easier to replace batteries. Currently, the only way to replace an aging iPhone batter is to pay Apple a large fee or to do it yourself, but the latter will void your warranty.