Payments Expected Soon in U.S. iPhone Battery Lawsuit ⇥ mercurynews.com

Ethan Baron, Mercury News:

Owners of some older iPhone models are expected to receive about $65 each after a judge cleared the way for payments in a class-action lawsuit accusing Apple of secretly throttling phone performance.

The Cupertino cell phone giant agreed in 2020 to pay up to $500 million to resolve a lawsuit alleging it had perpetrated “one of the largest consumer frauds in history” by surreptitiously slowing the performance of certain iPhone models to address problems with batteries and processors.

I remain stunned that anyone at Apple thought it would be completely fine to kneecap iPhones with underperforming batteries without telling users. Asking for forgiveness instead of permission works when you borrow a coworker’s pen, not when you alter the product characteristics of millions of smartphones without a word of communication. It has got to be one of the stupidest decisions made by this company in the past decade.