Implying Apple cares about that. It’s what they refer to as “the cost of doing business”, if recalling and repairing the phones was cheaper than this they’d have done it.

If they want to make a statement that companies are expected to do the right thing then they have to levy a fine that actually hurts when they don’t. This won’t do that.

Remember the Samsung battery issues being all over the news a few years ago and everyone saying, “Apple never has these problems”? Meanwhile Apple was literally breaking people’s phones to reduce fires and paying people off to keep quiet about their battery fires. Nice. 🔥

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The iGiant could now potentially be forced to cough up £853 million ($1.03 billion) in damages if it loses the collective action case, Guttman told The Register.

This paves the way for millions of consumers, who were left paying for battery replacements or new phone models, to receive the compensation they deserve," Gutmann said in a canned statement.

Today, however, brings us one step closer to levelling the playing field and holding one of the world’s biggest and most powerful corporations accountable for its actions."

The decision by a three-person tribunal at the Competition Appeal Tribunal is not a finding of fact Instead it approved a “Collective Proceedings Order” – a rough UK equivalent to a class action – on grounds that the plaintiffs or proposed class representative (PCR) have a decent chance of winning the case by arguing that Apple was not transparent about the fact its software updates impacted users’ iPhones.

This impacts both the questions of the existence of abuse and the manner in which loss to the class is to be assessed," states the Tribunal’s decision [PDF].

France fined the fruit-phone outfit €25 million for failing to notify users that software updates would mean older iPhones will get slower over time.

The original article contains 528 words, the summary contains 205 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!