Apple is facing legal action in the UK after a claim was filed by a consumer rights activist following the company’s famous ‘Batterygate’ saga in 2017, when it was revealed that the iPhone maker had secretly and deliberately slowed older iPhones with ageing batteries.
As reported by The Guardian, researcher Justin Gutmann has filed the claim seeking £750 million ($907 million) for up to 25 million iPhone owners in the UK with a range of older iPhone models, including the iPhone 6 which was at the center of the controversy five years ago.
The ‘Batterygate’ saga saw Apple deliberately slow the performance of older iPhone models, a move the company said was to prevent performance issues. The iPhone maker faced a major backlash, offering reduced price battery services for users with performance problems, refunds to customers who paid for full-price battery repairs, and a promise to release software updates that offered users the option to turn off performance throttling as well as showing the health of the device’s battery through the form of a percentage.
Gutmann’s claim centers around how Apple purposely slowed down older iPhone models to disguise how the devices we inadequate for new iOS updates.
“Instead of doing the honourable and legal thing by their customers and offering a free replacement, repair service or compensation,” continued Gutmann, “Apple instead misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58%.”
In 2020, Apple agreed to pay up to $500 million to settle a similar class action lawsuit in the United States.