Apple finally paying iPhone users affected by ‘batterygate’

Good news for iPhone users! The long-awaited payouts from Apple’s $500 million settlement over the “batterygate” issue are finally happening. If you filed a claim, you can expect to get approximately $92.17 per claim. For some lucky folks, this could mean receiving close to $1,000 in total payouts.

So, Apple got hit with a lawsuit claiming they pulled a fast one on consumers by intentionally slowing down older iPhones as the batteries wore out. They said sorry, dropped the price for battery replacements, and let users choose to turn off that slowing-down thing. On top of that, they added some new features to iOS to ease the effects of battery aging.

In their apology letter about the whole iPhone slowdown mess, Apple explained the update like this:

“Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.”

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Apple sneakily introduced performance throttling to avoid iPhones unexpectedly shutting down, blaming it on the fact that aging iPhone batteries couldn’t handle peak performance. The catch? They quietly slipped this into iOS 10.2.1 back in February 2017 without bothering to tell customers about the change.

Back in March 2020, Apple agreed to cough up $500 million for the settlement, though they kept insisting they did nothing wrong. Out of that sum, $310 million is heading straight to the consumers, translating to roughly $92 per claim for iPhone users.

If you missed the boat and didn’t jump on the lawsuit bandwagon by filing a claim, tough luck – the ship has sailed. The deadline was way back on October 6, 2020. If you owned an iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, or iPhone SE, you could have submitted a claim for each of those gadgets.

MacRumors caught the scoop first – Apple’s initial payouts of $92.17 are en route to consumers as part of the settlement. It matches the promised timeline, with the first payments hitting consumers’ pockets in January, just as the settlement had laid out.