Apple Execs Face Jail in France after Lawsuit over Slowing Down iPhones

Megalith

Megalith

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There may be more to worry about than just getting sued if you’re a higher-up at Apple. It would seem that France has legislation that opens up the possibility of prison time for executives of the company.

It believes Apple could be liable for a fine in line with the value of all its iPhone French sales since the law came into force. The suit will be heard in a criminal court if prosecutors decide it is legitimate. The maximum penalty is a prison sentence of two years, a fine of up to 300,000 euros, and five percent of the firm’s annual turnover.
 
to be honest it's stupid, the logical way is to offer it as a setting like samsung does on their galaxy, energy savings or performance boost, but you just don't degrade the user's experience without giving him a choice, for exmple me i dont care about battery life, i do not use the phone none stop, but when i do i use it for heavy wokload, gaming and multi-tasking, what apple does would make my experience crappy, and i wouldn't see any of the benefits.
i doubt the exec would be jailed, the decisions come from apple HQ.
 
If only America also had a government that worked for the people again, instead of for the corporations. The legacy that Reagan left behind and all of his predecessors blindly followed, including Trump putting Reagan's broken ideology on steroids, still haunts us.
 
I imagine the prison experience in France is akin to staying at a 3-star hotel.
 
Chunder said:
If only America also had a government that worked for the people again, instead of for the corporations. The legacy that Reagan left behind and all of his predecessors blindly followed, including Trump putting Reagan's broken ideology on steroids, still haunts us.
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But corporations are people.

Anywho this lawsuit is about “planned obsolescence” which will probably be hard to actually prove. Underclocking the processor to save power is a half decent argument, and honestly semi necessary. It’s been a common occurrence for iPhones to decide to just shut the fuck off around 10-15%. Seems far rarer for them to be usable down to the nitty gritty 1-5%
 
Shutting off before the battery is completely drained will extend the useful charging life of lithium ion batteries. Just FYI.

What I am not sure about is the effect changing the discharge rate would have, if any, on the ability for the battery to maintain a charge.
 
Don't let them find out about the pesticides in the kolaide...

Sure they'll revolt, sleep it off and be back in line at 3am
 
"Apple’s fix appears to be throttling the CPU to prevent the phone from randomly shutting down". Apple was addressing an issue with older phones with older batteries, so I see no problem here, other than they should've notified the users affected with a popup.

"It believes Apple could be liable for a fine in line with the value of all its iPhone French sales since the law came into force."
And lastly: "France is also the only country in the eurozone whose debt to GDP ratio will rise over the next two years to 96.9 per cent."

Follow the money.
 
SeymourGore said:
I imagine the prison experience in France is akin to staying at a 3-star hotel.
Click to expand...

You are somewhat correct. Most European Union states prefer rehabilitation over punishment. To accomplish this their jails are nicer(owned by government, habitable, warm in the winters, cool in summers, libraries, access to educational opportunities, etc), the sentences are significantly less, (rare to have someone sentenced over 10 years), and slave labor is banned, any labor inmates do needs to be compensated at the market average. Everything America does the opposite of. The rates of inmates recommitting crimes once their out is significantly lower in the EU as a result. In the Scandinavian countries that go even further than the rest of the EU, the rates are even lower. (Recidivism Rates, Norway: 20%, Denmark: 29% Sweden: 37% Germany: 48%, France: 53%, America: 77%)
 
alamox said:
to be honest it's stupid, the logical way is to offer it as a setting like samsung does on their galaxy, energy savings or performance boost, but you just don't degrade the user's experience without giving him a choice, for exmple me i dont care about battery life, i do not use the phone none stop, but when i do i use it for heavy wokload, gaming and multi-tasking, what apple does would make my experience crappy, and i wouldn't see any of the benefits.
i doubt the exec would be jailed, the decisions come from apple HQ.
Click to expand...
they could also stop putting out worse and worse versions of iOS and adding meaningless features; they aren't solving new problems, they're just making stuff up and convincing people they need it
 
Nolan7689 said:
Anywho this lawsuit is about “planned obsolescence” which will probably be hard to actually prove. Underclocking the processor to save power is a half decent argument, and honestly semi necessary. It’s been a common occurrence for iPhones to decide to just shut the fuck off around 10-15%. Seems far rarer for them to be usable down to the nitty gritty 1-5%
Click to expand...

Exactly this.

People who have zero idea about electronics are quick to spin this whole story as some kind of planned obsolescence master plan from Apple. In reality it's helping older phones not shut off as you mentioned. Apple is in a lose-lose over this because if they did not throttle the clockspeed, and had 20% of the older phone user-base experience consistent unexpected shutdowns, Apple would have the same amount of negative publicity as they do now attempting to mitigate the issue.

What people should be upset about, and should actually make a stink over, is the fact that the battery is non-serviceable (even at an Apple store). That part is definitely part of their planned obsolescence plan. Not the software updates.
 
Chunder said:
You are somewhat correct. Most European Union states prefer rehabilitation over punishment. To accomplish this their jails are nicer(owned by government, habitable, warm in the winters, cool in summers, libraries, access to educational opportunities, etc), the sentences are significantly less, (rare to have someone sentenced over 10 years), and slave labor is banned, any labor inmates do needs to be compensated at the market average. Everything America does the opposite of. The rates of inmates recommitting crimes once their out is significantly lower in the EU as a result. In the Scandinavian countries that go even further than the rest of the EU, the rates are even lower. (Recidivism Rates, Norway: 20%, Denmark: 29% Sweden: 37% Germany: 48%, France: 53%, America: 77%)
Click to expand...


Oh, so a lot better than when I was with Papillon on that fucking island in the Med then ...... :ROFLMAO:


th
 
The problem isn't the throttling, the problem is the lack of actually letting the user know they should replace their battery.

I think everyone would be pissed if instead of having a Service Engine Soon light because O2 sensor is going out of whack, well the manufacturer would simply run lean/rich and say what the heck... "it's for the better, why let them know we observed degraded performance ?... let's just band aid the problem and move on..."
 
Well Apple just released this press release:

https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/

Slashing the cost of the batter replacement is probably the only move they had at this point. Like MMitch alluded to, they should probably explicitly state to the end-user when the battery is below a certain performance level with warnings of applicable performance loss because of it.
 
Sonicks said:
Well Apple just released this press release:

https://www.apple.com/iphone-battery-and-performance/

Slashing the cost of the batter replacement is probably the only move they had at this point. Like MMitch alluded to, they should probably explicitly state to the end-user when the battery is below a certain performance level with warnings of applicable performance loss because of it.
Click to expand...

I didn't think about battery replacement under warranty and/or apple care program... This open a new point of view... It could be very plausible that Apple simply throttles battery because otherwise they would need to do more warranty service. This makes even more sense..
 
I've heard the reason THEY say why it has to be done, you know telling us. But the real reason is to force you to buy a $999 iphone a year.

If it's all about battery life then all iPhone should have a replaceable battery that a consumer can buy and replace. I would sacrifice phone thinness for dropping $99 on a new battery or whatever they cost.
 
CacaSapo said:
"Apple’s fix appears to be throttling the CPU to prevent the phone from randomly shutting down". Apple was addressing an issue with older phones with older batteries, so I see no problem here, other than they should've notified the users affected with a popup.

"It believes Apple could be liable for a fine in line with the value of all its iPhone French sales since the law came into force."
And lastly: "France is also the only country in the eurozone whose debt to GDP ratio will rise over the next two years to 96.9 per cent."

Follow the money.
Click to expand...


There is a bit of an issue with part of that statement. Here is a segment from one of apples responses.

"Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future."

The iPhone 6, 6s, and SE are older phones sure but the IPhone 7 was top dog just a few months ago. So the 8 and X come out and suddenly the 7 needs to be slowed down to prevent it from crashing? And you can still get brand new iPhone 7's from all major carriers here in the US. That's where we get into issues of its not just the old phones this is being done to.

They really just should have made it a user option.
 
It has nothing to do with Apple, batteries age and as they age they loose sotrage capacity and discharge capacity. This requires that the hardware is throttled back. It is no different to an old car that looses performance over time.
 
aokman said:
It has nothing to do with Apple, batteries age and as they age they loose sotrage capacity and discharge capacity. This requires that the hardware is throttled back. It is no different to an old car that looses performance over time.
Click to expand...

I hate car/electronics analogies.

With a car, you can at the very least repair it to bring it back up to the stock performance. And if you want, you can easily put in newer or even older and better parts that will increase performance and handling and fuel mileage.

You are not locked to some stupid factory configuration that no matter what you do will always be slower after so many updates that are no longer optimized for the phone you are still using.
 
That "five percent of the firm's annual turnover" is the part that caught my eye: if France thinks Apple would just willing agree to fork over that kind of cash to them for something like this, they don't know Apple. Apple would effectively close all facilities in France, every last one of them, cost people thousands if not hundreds of thousands of potential jobs, and give France the iFinger on the way out of the country. ;)
 
Tiberian said:
That "five percent of the firm's annual turnover" is the part that caught my eye: if France thinks Apple would just willing agree to fork over that kind of cash to them for something like this, they don't know Apple. Apple would effectively close all facilities in France, every last one of them, cost people thousands if not hundreds of thousands of potential jobs, and give France the iFinger on the way out of the country. ;)
Click to expand...
Exactly... they are already at loggerheads with the EU because the EU doesn't agree with Irelands taxrate and demands a more "EU-aligned" taxrate and thus backtaxes (move to a very centralised USE... bad...)
The Trump tax reform is permitting a re-domesticating dollars & you can see this in the price of dollars skyrocketing as world banks are shoring up their dollar holdings for when companies move some of their offshore profits back home. All Apple needs todo is move all their eu holdings back to america, cause a nice mini liqudity issue for the already fragile banking system to weaken at its knee's. The Marxist push of the EU onto the world arena must be objected & the argument the world has had to play to the US tune for so long so why not the EU's doesn't work when that tune is socialism because that works oh so well *cough* Venezuela
 
They wont get jailed but I hope it makes them sweat.
Hopefully this is a lesson on why they should be transparent about how they treat the consumer.
 
aokman said:
It has nothing to do with Apple, batteries age and as they age they loose sotrage capacity and discharge capacity. This requires that the hardware is throttled back. It is no different to an old car that looses performance over time.
Click to expand...
A lower power battery does not need throttling to remain stable, this is a fallacy.
It either has enough power to function or not and should shut down appropriately if there is not enough power.

Apple have decided to reduce peak power to extend battery life on older batteries which is fine.
The mistake they made is not making it clear this will happen as it is a change in how the phone operates that the customer is not aware of.
Apples failure here is to be transparent and looks like it was deliberate to avoid bad press.

This is purely about apple and how they treat the consumer.

This might help you
https://hardforum.com/threads/htc-a...s-with-old-batteries-like-apple-does.1951359/
 
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Will make no difference whatsoever. The market has spoken and they only want the two choices, despite the fact that they are locked down and you are not really free to do whatever you want with those choices. Deal with it, it will not be getting better.
 
This is just them doing the bidding of their Germanic EU Overlords. France will imprison some hapless Apple exec (no doubt in mid-bite of his croissant or canapé with glass of crisp white at hand), and hold him until the US offers up one of the jailed VW execs in exchange.

They'll walk the respective prisoners across the Chunnel at the same time. The Brexiters will snatch them both from a mid-tunnel access hatch. Just sayin'...
 
Chunder said:
If only America also had a government that worked for the people again, instead of for the corporations. The legacy that Reagan left behind and all of his predecessors blindly followed, including Trump putting Reagan's broken ideology on steroids, still haunts us.
Click to expand...

As a Republican myself I couldn't agree more.

In terms of this Apple thing, the whole time I am rolling my eyes at the lawsuits because I am sure Apple int he License Agreement you have to agree to before using the phone they put somewhere they can do what they did by slowing the phone down. Nobody reads it, but I am sure Apple has crossed every T and dotted every I to make sure that they could not be sued.

All those lawsuits are going to be thrown out.
 
I see a lot of people acting defensive of Apple still...Not sure what someone has to gain by holding a position of denial but Apple is in the wrong here. It doesn't matter how big of a bully in the market they are, they must be held accountable.
 
Sonicks said:
Exactly this.

People who have zero idea about electronics are quick to spin this whole story as some kind of planned obsolescence master plan from Apple. In reality it's helping older phones not shut off as you mentioned. Apple is in a lose-lose over this because if they did not throttle the clockspeed, and had 20% of the older phone user-base experience consistent unexpected shutdowns, Apple would have the same amount of negative publicity as they do now attempting to mitigate the issue.

What people should be upset about, and should actually make a stink over, is the fact that the battery is non-serviceable (even at an Apple store). That part is definitely part of their planned obsolescence plan. Not the software updates.
Click to expand...
They can change it in store for $29. However, I totally agree with every point you make otherwise.

The iPhone 5(multiple but doesn’t help they made a 5s) had an issue where it would die between 21-17% of battery life left. It was worse on some of the iPhone 4/s that friends and family used. Many were EOL but people really liked those for some reason. I hated the small screen.

That wasn’t a good look for Apple or frankly anyone with a non user serviceable battery. All phones should have a removable battery but my letter writing campaign hasn’t had much success.

I’ve also changed a bunch myself, I wouldn’t consider it to be much for someone who is detail oriented and handy (and has the correct tools).
 
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