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cballowe t1_ixpdl1o wrote

Reply to comment by fatpandana in Mercedes-Benz to introduce acceleration subscription fee by kishiki18_91

You can win but it's going to take months and millions of dollars to litigate - it's a distraction and not worth fighting. Doesn't mean they did something wrong, just that they got to a number where it was cheaper to pay than to fight.

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fatpandana t1_ixpdq1k wrote

if it was cheaper, they could just avoided the whole court cases long before it got to court. if it was just a retune, you could just fix it long before it even getting to court.

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cballowe t1_ixpeewq wrote

Eh... Users complain and file suit or whatever and even if you fix it they still pursue the case. They had fixed the issue with additional controls by 2018, the settlement happened in 2020 based on a case filed in december 2017.

The states were charging that apple was making changes to cause people to buy new phones, apple was contending that they were trying to prevent unexpected shutdowns due to old batteries losing capacity over time.

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fatpandana t1_ixpevfc wrote

it happened between 2014 - 2016. apple admitted in 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42508300

It wasnt just shutting down. It was straight up perfomance lowering.

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cballowe t1_ixpg088 wrote

The issue prior to that fix was that the phones shut down mid day due to running out of battery. Lowering performance on a phone with batteries degraded to the 80% level or worse in order to not have it shut down before the end of the day makes sense.

When the feedback you're getting is that people are complaining that their phones are shutting down and you then task some engineers to fix that, you get a fix. Apple said early on that it was a small number and it probably was, but lithium batteries have somewhere between 500 and 2000 charge cycles before they degrade to that level so over time more and more of the older phones would start falling into that mode.

But the accusations early on were "you're making my phone worse to force me to buy a new one" which wasn't the case. From an engineering perspective the change made the useful life of the phone longer (fixing the battery life issues).

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fatpandana t1_ixpgf5b wrote

Cause and effect. Feedback forced statement. Statement forced lawsuit. Denial of the problem and hiding problem under the rug has consequences. that is full 3 years to admit fault. This is for things that are fully software controlled.

Imagine for cars. Normally perfomance u paid for now software controlled with pay 2 get getting perfomance. How easy it is to nerf perfomance to force a new purchase? even easier than an iphone.

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