<story><title>Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle &apos;Batterygate&apos; Case over iPhone Slowdowns</title><url>https://text.npr.org/936268845</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapriciousCptl</author><text>So, I&amp;#x27;m somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there&amp;#x27;s any supporting evidence, or anything that&amp;#x27;s come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I&amp;#x27;d possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.&lt;p&gt;But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there&amp;#x27;s just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#x27;t out in the open, but again, it just doesn&amp;#x27;t seem that bad to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reducesuffering</author><text>I think this is the crux of the issue. Apple had to make a call for their customers: ensure the low battery is as long-lasting and predictable as possible around 1-5%, or keep high performance as the phone battery degrades quicker and shuts off. I think many people thoroughly understand how crucial it can be to have that last 1-2% and going into a situation where you think you have 5%, but then the phone dies, is a pretty bad experience for the &amp;quot;premium experience&amp;quot; that Apple sells. So for most customers they made the right call to preserve the battery.&lt;p&gt;This is an engineering trade-off and not something that typically gets publically broadcast to customers. I&amp;#x27;m sure there&amp;#x27;s lots of other niche feature tweaks like this to the iPhone that we&amp;#x27;re unaware of. They definitely could&amp;#x27;ve and should&amp;#x27;ve been more transparent about this, but I understand why it didn&amp;#x27;t occur to them.</text></comment>
<story><title>Apple Agrees to Pay $113M to Settle &apos;Batterygate&apos; Case over iPhone Slowdowns</title><url>https://text.npr.org/936268845</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>CapriciousCptl</author><text>So, I&amp;#x27;m somehow developing a pro-Apple bias these days. This whole batterygate to me is kind of based on conjecture-- that Apple slowed old phones with the intention to sell more new ones. If there&amp;#x27;s any supporting evidence, or anything that&amp;#x27;s come up in discovery that Apple acted in bad faith, I&amp;#x27;d possibly change my (admittedly biased) mind.&lt;p&gt;But really, slowing the phones down to extend battery life is a reasonable tradeoff and there&amp;#x27;s just not a preponderance of evidence suggesting Apple acted in its own interests and hurt existing users. The main problem is this &amp;quot;feature&amp;quot; wasn&amp;#x27;t out in the open, but again, it just doesn&amp;#x27;t seem that bad to me.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>invisible</author><text>I agree that it&amp;#x27;s possible they weren&amp;#x27;t being malicious. The part that gets me is that they didn&amp;#x27;t decide to instead allow folks to set a max battery charge to extend their battery life. It&amp;#x27;s pretty widely accepted that charging a battery to 100% over-and-over will cause battery degradation.&lt;p&gt;It seems fair to me that decisions that are hidden from consumers and obviously degrade the consumer&amp;#x27;s experience should negatively affect a company (and more than just the loss of goodwill).</text></comment>