Apple Apologises To Consumers, Cuts Down Charges Of Replacing Out-Of-Warranty Batteries

A week ago, the news of Apple accepting to deliberately slowing down iPhone batteries broke out. What was in the beginning, just a few conspiracy theories, soon became reality and iPhone users demanded answers from the company. In the aftermath of Apple accepting the allegations, it was sued for forcing people into buying iPhones.

In a post on its website, Apple has apologised to its consumers and said that a number of changes will be made to regain the trust of its consumers. The post goes on to announce that the company is slashing the price of replacing an out-of-warranty battery as well.

We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

Apple conceded that it would cut the price of an out-of-warranty battery replacement from US $79 (Rs. 5000 approx.) to US$29 (Rs. 1850 approx.) for an iPhone 6 or later, starting next month. Along with that, iOS would be updated with features to let users see whether their battery is in poor health and is affecting the phone’s performance.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades.

For years, iPhone users claimed to notice a discernible system slowdown with some iOS updates. However, the issue came in the spotlight thanks to a widely circulated Reddit thread.

Following that, Geekbench founder John Poole did some performance testing on various iPhones running different versions of iOS. Poole found that Apple does, in fact, limit performance on older iPhone models with lower-capacity batteries in the interest of battery life and preventing unexpected shutdowns.

Apple continues to insist that it’s never artificially slowed down phones,  just that it’s aggressively managing phone performance to maximize the lifespan of iPhone batteries. In another article that Apple published, it explains:

This feature’s only intent is to prevent unexpected shutdowns so that the iPhone can still be used. This power management works by looking at a combination of the device temperature, battery state of charge, and the battery’s impedance.

Only if these variables require it, iOS will dynamically manage the maximum performance of some system components, such as the CPU and GPU in order to prevent unexpected shutdowns.

The silver lining here is that the consumers have a clear picture and the decision of changing batteries on their old iPhones will now be cheaper than what it was before.