Five-Years Later, a New Batterygate Suit is Filed in UK

17 JUNE 2022 - The thing that would not die: A piece from Engadget says Apple is being sued over “Batterygate.”

Roughly five-ears ago, Apple copped to intentionally slowing the performance of some of its older phones. Apple said it did that to keep units with failing batteries from going crashy-crashelson. Detractors argued the real reason Apple did it was to trick people into upgrading to newer devices.

Now, seriously five-years later, consumer rights campaigner Justin Gutmann has brought suit against Apple at the Competition Appeals Tribunal in the United Kingdom. Citing a report from The Guardian, Engadget says:

Gutmann argued that Apple didn't disclose that it was going to deliberately throttle users' phone before it did so and that the company didn't give them the option to disable the setting. 

The piece has Gutmann arguing that, “Apple introduced the slowdown feature to disguise the fact that older batteries could no longer cope with new OS updates.” Quoting the campaigner:

Instead of doing the honourable and legal thing by their customers and offering a free [battery] replacement, repair service or compensation, Apple instead misled people by concealing a tool in software updates that slowed their devices by up to 58 percent…

He’s not suing on behalf of people who replaced their phones or paid full-price to replace their batteries. Rather, the piece has him suing on behalf of anyone in the UK who purchased an affected iPhone. That’s anyone in the country who bought an iPhone 6 through iPhone X. If it loses, Apple could end up paying as much as “£750 million to over 25 million people,” according to the report.