Apple fined $27m for slowing down older iPhones

The tech giant Apple has been fined more than $27 million, after being found to have deliberately slowed down older iPhone models.

Apple previously released an iOS update (10.2.1 and 11.2) which would cap peak performances for batteries, meaning that the devices would often abruptly shut themselves down. Apple failed to inform its users that it was capping performances, and provoked controversy when this inbuilt flaw was discovered.

 

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According to a report by BBC News, the French competition and fraud watchdog DGCCRF has now fined the tech giant 25 million Euros for  having: "committed the crime of deceptive commercial practice by omission" and for: "Failing to inform consumers represented a misleading business practice using omission."

Back in 2017, Apple posted a letter on its official website and later posted a technical article in its Knowledge Base, in which the corporation apologised for its lack of honesty about performance issues.

The company wrote: "We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making."

Take a look at this news report on the issue: 

It added: "Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed."

They also released a software feature called 'Battery Health' to give users a method of checking the maximum battery capacity of their iPhone.