Apple Fined 25 Million Euros for OTA Updates That Throttled the Performance of iPhones

[Tsing]

Image: Apple



Apple will be paying a pretty penny for throttling its customers’ products without consent. French watchdog DGCCRF (Directorate General for Competition, Consumption, and the Suppression of Fraud) has fined the company 25 million Euros for sending out iOS updates that slowed down older iPhones.



This all began back in 2017, when Apple released iOS 10.2.1 and 11.2. These updates included a power management feature that would cap the performance of iPhones with older lithium-ion batteries. The excuse was that aged batteries could no longer supply normal peak current demands, so throttling was required to prevent devices from shutting down unexpectedly.



While the reasoning was sound, iPhone...

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[Brian_B]

That'll teach 'em
/s

 

[Dan_D]

Awesome. They deserve it. Unfortunately, I doubt that it's a high enough fine to make them stop doing it. I'd be willing to bet Apple makes far more on iPhone upgrades than that.

 

[Zarathustra]

This is so stupid.

Normally I hate on Apple, but this is one area where they actually did the right thing.

They throttled the phones to prevent them from drawing more current than the aging batteries could supply, which are full performance would have resulted in crashing and restarting.

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to do in the name of stability

What's more, if you just replace the battery, full performance is restored.

ALL phone makers should do this.

 

[Brian_B]

The only knock I will place on Zara’s opinion is that changing the battery out in an iPhone isn’t trivial, and there for a time Apple was trying to force you through only Authorized Repair Centers for it.

That part may be worth the fine. Other than that, yeah, I do agree that performance throttling is the correct technical solution; Apple could have communicated it a bit better (they did try to hide the fact it was occurring), but I don’t think there was any better alternative.

 

[Zarathustra]

The only knock I will place on Zara’s opinion is that changing the battery out in an iPhone isn’t trivial, and there for a time Apple was trying to force you through only Authorized Repair Centers for it.

That part may be worth the fine. Other than that, yeah, I do agree that performance throttling is the correct technical solution; Apple could have communicated it a bit better (they did try to hide the fact it was occurring), but I don’t think there was any better alternative.

That is fair. Communication and transparency are something Apple have always failed at though.

In the end, if you have to choose between random crashes/restarts and slower performance I know which I would choose.

Maybe they wouldn't have raised as much of an eyebrow if they had acknowledged it and advertised it as a feature, with an enable/disable switch in settings. But Apple hates offering its users technical settings. They hate it to the point of absurdity.