A fine of 25 million Euros has been slapped on Apple for allegedly slowing down older iPhones without informing the consumers. The penalty is imposed on the company by a France regulator, DGCCRF, which mentioned that the company didn’t tell about the slowdown to any of its users.
In 2017, Apple agreed to the point that the company slowed down the older iPhones, but the primary reason behind that was to increase the life of those phones.
A lot of users suspected that the company slowed down the older iPhones to encourage people to buy recently launched iPhones. The company responded to the allegations by making them more durable as the lithium-ion batteries in the iPhones lost their capability of supplying peak current as per the latest requirements.
Apple concluded its statement by saying that if the phones are not slowed down, then they will shut down to protect its electronic components. So, to curb the issue, Apple issued an update for iPhone SE, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6 to provide a better battery performance.
As reported by BBC, the slowing down of iPhones was confirmed on Reddit by the users saying that the speed of their iPhone had slowed down but again speeded up when the battery got replaced.
The French regulator said that Apple didn’t inform the iPhone owners that by installing the latest update their iPhones will eventually slow down considerably. Apple was supposed to notify the users about any issue related to the update on its French website for an entire month.
DGCCRF has clearly said that Apple has committed a crime by hiding the update issue from the iPhone users. Apple has confirmed to pay the fine.
Apple slowed down several other phones, including iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, and 8 Plus running on iOS 12.1, iPhone X running on iOS 12.1 or higher, iPhone XS, XS Max, XR running on iOS 13.1.
