Let's go back a little more than two years in history: it's December 2017, and the iPhones 8, 8 Plus and X have just been released. Amid all the euphoria at the end of the year, the Cupertino giant was surprised by the controversy about the slower than older iPhones, a problem that has tarnished its reputation and that continues to this day.
For those who do not remember, here is a brief retrospective: to try to solve a massive problem of batteries that equipped the iPhones 6, 6 Plus, 6s and 6s Plus, Apple released an update for iOS 10, in early 2017. With the promise that their problems would be resolved, many people installed the update, but some time later they began to notice that their devices were slower (something deliberately done by Apple to mitigate the problem of old batteries that no longer withstand the peak processing of devices).
Precisely for this reason, users (and even government agencies, including Brazilians) began to accuse the company of scheduled obsolescence, claiming that the company would have intentionally reduced the performance of older iPhones through software updates.
If the company was already beginning to forget the ghosts of the past, a new judicial result made it a point to bring it all up again. In France, Apple was fined EUR 25 million (~ R $ 117 million) for Directorate-General for Competition, Consumption and Repression Fraud (DGCCRF) something like the Brazilian Procon.
The DGCCRF, which is part of the French Ministry of Economy, concluded that Apple did not report that the aforementioned iOS update could slow down iPhones, as disclosed in a report by the agency.
These updates, released in 2017, include a power management feature that, under certain conditions, and especially when the batteries were old, could slow down the operation of the iPhones 6, SE and 7. It is not possible to revert to the previous version of the operating system , and many consumers would have been forced to change their batteries or even buy a new phone.
When the iPhones battery / slow controversy was at its height, Apple publicly apologized for the lack of communication and reduced the value of replacing iPhones batteries for a year, until the end of 2018. Ma also said that always “ designed its features to preserve the iPhone's life for as long as possible ”and never implemented them to“ force upgrades ”.
According to the latest information, the Cupertino giant will pay the millionaire fine and has pledged to publish a statement on its official website, which should be done by the end of this month.
via AppleInsider
