Apple has been compelled to add a statement regarding the outcome of a ‘planned obsolescence’ lawsuit to its homepage in Italy. The court ruled showed that Apple did not provide adequate information about the impact of performing the iOS 10.2.1 update, which introduced the infamous iPhone performance throttling for degraded batteries.
Apple lost a lawsuit at the end of 2018 in Italy, where a court said that Apple had not appropriately disclosed the changes to device performance in the iOS 10.2.1 update. Remember that Apple originally instated the performance throttling algorithms without any disclosure in release notes.
This meant that most people were unaware of the change in behavior until months later when it became a global fiasco. Apple’s effective rollout of the discounted battery replacement program and Battery Health options in Settings were not disputed in the lawsuit. It was just that these measures were instated too late, only after Apple had been ‘caught’.
Apple is set to pay a multi-million euro fine and has been forced to add an advisory statement on its website to explain to customers what had happened. The addition was spotted by @setteBIT.
The full statement reads (via Google Translate):
You have to scroll to find the notice at the very bottom of the apple.com/it page, but at least the font is larger and bolder than the normal fine print.
This practice was deemed incorrect, pursuant to articles 20, 21, 22, and 24of the Legislative Decree no. 206/2005 by the Italian Competition Authority.
