Over the weekend, Apple users finally began receiving their piece of the ‘batterygate’ settlement in the form of $US92 payments, as first reported by MacRumors. Apple admitted to slowing down old iPhones back in 2017 without notifying users, saying it was part of delivering “the best experience for customers.”
Roughly seven years later, iPhone users are getting some money back for that wonderful user experience. Apple admitted to reducing the battery life and performance of iPhones with software upgrades in 2017, as a means to extend the life of old batteries. A key problem in the ‘batterygate’ fiasco was that Apple didn’t tell users the latest IOS update was about to make their iPhones way worse – it just happened. The company was promptly hit with class action lawsuits over this practice and settled to pay over $US300 million in 2020.
The deadline to file a claim was Oct. 6th, 2020. The settlement was eligible to anyone who owned an iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, or iPhone SE. It appears millions of claims were filed, and some users filed more than one. One iPhone user reported receiving payouts for six claims connected to the lawsuit on Sunday.
Apple’s settlement allows the company to not admit any wrongdoing in the batterygate scandal, and Apple has consistently held they’ve been nothing but a darling throughout this whole thing. “We have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades,” said the company in 2018.
Apple did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
While it’s true that throttling the performance of an iPhone could extend the battery life, Apple could have been much more transparent that its software update was going to be a performance downgrade. Settlement payments may have totaled over $US300 million, but that’s less than 0.1% of Apple’s 2023 revenue, $US383 billion.