After Apology, Battery-Related Class Action Lawsuits Against Apple Grow

To date, lawsuits in California, Illinois, New York, Texas, Israel, and South Korea have been filed against Apple. Though the cases vary slightly, they each say Apple has worsened the consumer experience by slowing older iPhone models to prevent a shutdown due to less efficient batteries.

On Thursday, Apple apologized for how it has handled performance on iPhones with older batteries and how it has “communicated that process” to the public.

According to “A Message to Our Customers,” Apple explained:

To address our customers’ concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple’s intentions, we’ve decided to take the following steps:

• Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
• Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
• As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.

It will be interesting to see where these class action lawsuits go from here. I would expect we’ll be seeing more cases filed before this issue moves towards resolution. Stay tuned.