Apple is facing a $2 billion lawsuit in the UK over its decision to throttle older iPhones as their battery health degraded. The accusation against Apple is that it deliberately hid defective batteries in millions of iPhones by reducing the performance of those devices.
This is a unique accusation compared to other Batterygate lawsuits because it alleges that the batteries themselves were defective. Apple is currently fighting this lawsuit, calling it baseless. The fallout from this controversial decision made years ago by Apple continues to haunt the tech giant.
Apple is currently facing a $2 billion lawsuit in the UK over its controversial decision to slow down older iPhones as their battery health declined. The lawsuit, led by consumer champion Justin Gutmann on behalf of UK iPhone users, accuses Apple of concealing issues with batteries in certain phone models and surreptitiously installing a power management tool to limit performance.
Apple, however, has called the lawsuit “baseless” and claims that most iPhone batteries were not defective. The company admitted that a small number of iPhone 6s models had defective batteries, but those users were offered free battery replacements. Apple also said that its performance throttling only reduced an iPhone 6’s performance by an average of 10%.
In the aftermath of Batterygate, Apple has been hit with multiple lawsuits from aggrieved users. Batterygate was the practice of slowing down older iPhones as their battery health deteriorated, and was first discovered by users on Reddit and 9to5Mac. In the United States, Apple agreed to pay $500 million to settle one of these lawsuits, and $113 million to settle a separate multistate investigation.
In response, Apple issued a public apology and offered discounted battery replacements to affected users, as well as giving them the choice to enable the throttling feature. The company has also introduced new iOS features to help prevent long-term battery health degradation. Although the United Kingdom lawsuit is still ongoing, Apple has denied the accusations and appears determined to defend its position.
