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- A criminal lawsuit in France has been filed against Apple.
- Apple has been accused of intentionally slowing down their phones.
- They have responded, saying that this was to preserve battery life.
An organisation has filed a criminal lawsuit against Apple after the company admitted to slowing down old iPhones in order to ‘aid battery life’. The organisation Halte à l’Obsolescence Programmé (HOP) or Stop Planned Obsolescence, are the first to bring about the possibility of criminal charges being levied upon the American tech giant. In their statement, HOP claims that Apple has engaged in ‘planned obsolescence’ by deliberately slowing down older devices in order to encourage customers to purchase the newest available model.
HOP claim that this contravenes French law, citing a law made in 2015 that forbids companies to sell products that are designed to fail in their usable lifetime. If HOP’s lawsuit successfully leads to a criminal court proceeding, Apple executives could face jail time of up to 2 years, with the company facing a fine of €300,000 and an additional 5% being taken from its annual turnover.
This revelation has recently come to light due to decree no.2014-1482, which came into effect in March 2015, and states that ‘obligatory information’ must be given on the life of a product. The decree only applies ‘to goods put for the first time on the market as from 1 March 2015’. HOP have pointed to this in the law, claiming Apple is liable for the criminal charge for all iPhones sold in France after this date. This would include the iPhones 6s, 7, 7 Plus, and SE, with the 8 and X perhaps being deemed too recent to be included in the lawsuit.. However the included models represent a huge number of phones and a large potential criminal liability if state prosecutors decide to pursue the case against the American giant. In France, Apple have already seen some of their worst figures in recent years, with year on year declines in sales. In late 2017, Apple had just 20.6% of market share compared to 78.4% for Android phones, so a criminal case could be another big blow for Apple in France.
Since the revelation, Apple have admitted that they did indeed slow down iPhones but deny that this was intended to boost sales of their newer models and instead argue that the move was designed to make older models last longer. In a statement Apple apologised for the misunderstanding, saying they would never aim to ‘degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades’, adding that their aim is always to create products that their customers will love ‘and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that’. To combat this negative wave of news, Apple announced that they would reduce the price of out of warranty batteries from $79 to $29 and introduce new software to better track battery performance.
Despite this, a number of other lawsuits have been filed, including 8 in US district courts for fraud. The largest lawsuit has been filed in Israel for a reported £93 million, citing a breach of duty by Apple to its customers for failing to reveal information about the battery performance of iPhones. However HOP have been the first to sue for criminal charges. Whether this will be taken to court is not yet known. In fact, HOP have a continuing lawsuit against Epson in which it accuses the Japanese company of purposely slowing down their printers to boost sales of new ones, very similar to the charges brought against Apple. A French government investigation into Epson is ongoing and may indicate what might transpire in Apple’s case. An investigation into Apple will certainly be launched but ‘planned obsolescence’ is often hard to prove with companies being able to use safety, battery life and designing error as reasons for obsolescence.
Many are wondering whether this criminal lawsuit in France will be the first and last of its kind against Apple. Planned obsolescence laws do not exist in the majority of G20 countries including the US, UK and Canada. Even in countries which do have such laws, it is difficult to prove that companies like Apple, have deliberately slowed down their products in order to boost sales of newer versions. Perhaps because of this heads will be turned to prevention instead of punishment, such as requiring producers to advertise the life expectancy of their products. Even if the criminal court case fails, due to the sheer backlash that Apple has faced, it still has the potential to impact upon the way in which Apple advertises its products and maybe in which other companies do so as well.
Written by Chris Tynemouth. Edited by Natasha Rega-Jones and Keval Dattani.