How Apple’s little iPhone Trick is Costing Owners Thousands

Published in El Pais, January 7th 2018

A few weeks ago, a user on the social news site Reddit noted his experience on how his iPhone was working much faster after a battery replacement. The post attracted wide attention and accusations that Apple was deliberately slowing down older phones. In response Apple did admit this was true, their reasoning was to preserve battery and preventing the phone from crashing. The reaction from the public has been widespread condemnation and multiple class action lawsuits across the United States as many feel they their devices were deliberately slowed down to force them to purchase an expensive new phone.

I myself do not have a problem with Apple slowing down older phones to preserve battery life and preventing phone crashes, I am even fine with them not making it an option for iPhone users. What I do have a problem with is the secrecy behind this policy. It is quite clear that many would simply opt to repair their phone rather than buying a new one if Apple had been open about what they were doing. Simply being secretive makes it look like they were making use of the of planned obsolescence strategy, regardless of their intentions.

Planned obsolescence is the practice of making a product with a short life span to encourage users to buy replacements sooner. This technique is hardly new, automakers started doing it in the 1920s when they started releasing new models every year to give the allusion older cars were out of date. Fashion itself is the biggest culprit as the industry encourages you to replace your existing clothes with the latest fashion. As you can imagine, this is a marketing strategy which is not popular with consumers so companies who chose to go this route obviously make it a secret, hence the accusations that are being thrown at Apple, regardless of whether they are true.

The negative impact on the consumers is obvious, we are forced to spend more on products than we theoretically need to and while we can try and fight this with our wallets, in oligopoly’s such as the one in the high end smart phone market (Apple and Samsung) it can be difficult. To fight this, we will need the government to intervene and the European Union (EU) is a good role model to follow. In the EU all products must be covered by a 2-year warranty by law, compared to the one year covered by manufacturer in most parts of the world. This would force major companies to rethink whether it is worth it to intentionally shorten the product life span and protect consumer’s right.

Nothing lasts forever, sooner or later you will need to get a new phone, but for the price Apple is charging, we should be able to hold on to it for as long as we like. Hopefully this will be a wakeup call for consumer rights and that Apple will have learned its lesson. In the meantime, think twice before making that replacement purchase.