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Apple has faced plenty of criticism over the last few weeks after it was found that the company was slowing down older iPhone models in order to keep batteries from failing over time. This has raised plenty of questions from consumers, and it looks like US government officials have some questions they would like to ask too.
The US Department of Justice and the Securities Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple violated security and disclosure laws by slowing down older iPhones without warning consumers.
An Apple spokesperson confirmed that an investigation is under way. Speaking with Reuters, they said: “We have received questions from some government agencies and we are responding to them”.
The spokesperson also added that Apple “would never do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades”. The US government isn't the first to begin investigating Apple over claims that it slows older phones to push people into upgrading. Italy's consumer officials are also investigating Apple over similar claims in addition to Samsung.
KitGuru Says: I don't necessarily think that Apple will find itself in trouble over this, particularly since iOS updates are coming in to give users the choice between longer battery health and performance. Still, it goes to show that there are plenty of eyes on the company, meaning that hopefully something like this won't happen again.
Matthew, I respectfully disagree with you here, not only will they find themselves in trouble, they’ll get hit extremely hard over this. The US justice department has been looking for the proverbial stick for quite a while (over Apple’s unwillingness to build a backdoor into their phones so they could be accessed by law enforcement agencies) and now they found one. Only 2 things can happen here : either Apple will be paying a totally ridiculous fine over this, or much more worryingly, they make a deal over this, and then you can safely assume that that backdoor will be part of the deal.