Apple to pay $3.4 million after settling iPhone planned obsolescence lawsuit

Apple will be paying $3.4 million after settling a lawsuit in Chile over its planned obsolescence, which impacted older iPhone 6 and iPhone 7 models. This is the first such settlement in Latin America and marks 3 years since the lawsuit was first filed against Apple.

Apple agrees to settle yet another iPhone planned obsolescence “batterygate” lawsuit

As per Barrons, 150,000 users of iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone SE sued Apple after it was found out that the company throttled their smartphone’s performance. Users who filed the lawsuit will have to provide proof of ownership of devices and that they faced reduced performance issues.

Each of the users will be able to claim $50 per iPhone, however, if there is more than one claim per serial number (in the case of a phone that was sold and used by multiple users who filed the lawsuit), the compensation will be divided.

Back in 2017, Apple was caught throttling iPhone performance to preserve battery longevity. However, the company did not inform users of the change, until it was caught. Apple had apologized for the lack of communication and offered cheap battery replacements, and even added an option in iOS to disable battery optimizations, which would disable iPhone throttling at the expense of shorter battery life and random restarts.

The company was accused of programmed obsolesce, which meant that Apple was downgrading the performance of older iPhones so that users would be forced to upgrade to newer models. Even though Apple has been supporting older devices with software updates for almost 5 years, this issue

However, the damage was done and Apple has been facing lawsuits around the world ever since. Apple agreed to pay $113 million in 34 states in the United States, to settle a lawsuit. Recently, it was asked to pay €180 million as compensation for iPhone 6 throttling issue in multiple European countries. It is also facing a lawsuit in Portugal worth €7 million, and another class-action suit in Italy over batterygate.