3aIT Blog

 

iPhone XYou may or may not remember there was a big fuss back in 2017 when it was revealed by Apple that they had been "secretly" slowing down old iPhones. They have now been fined 25 million euros by France's competition watchdog for this practice.

The reason given for this slowdown was not malicious. As phones age, their batteries degrade. Apple claims they were artificially slowing down phones to offset this process and ensure that the phones continued to operate reliably despite the degraded battery.

Back in 2017, this only applied to the various flavours of the iPhone 6, and the iPhone SE. Since then, Apple have made this process a lot more transparent to the end user (the issue here was not that they were doing this, but they were doing it without making it clear it was being done). The list of phones it can apply to has extended to the various versions of the iPhone 7,8 + X.

This 25m Euro fine has been levied due to the original "deception". They claimed that users "were not informed that installing iOS updates (10.2.1 and 11.2) could slow down their devices" and that Apple "committed the crime of deceptive commercial practice by omission". Apple have agreed to pay the fine.