Apple’s Shocking Announcement – A Threat to its Reputation?

So Apple has got another complaint from its group of elite customers. Although the issue is not new, the cause of it has come to light through the announcement of Apple itself.  This time the case is really serious and shocking to a greater extent. A suit was even filed this Thursday by two of the iPhone users, making the issue bigger. Apple hasn’t reacted to the lawsuit yet. The reason behind all these is nothing but the performance of Apple’s older phones. Apple’s iPhone users have been claiming their phones had been slowing down with age. This Wednesday a statement from Apple provoked the users to make the lawsuit. The statement of Apple cleared the reason why old phones become slow by noting that they included a feature in their software update to intentionally prevent phones from sudden shut-downs.

A sudden shut-down or blackout is pretty common in smartphones. It happens due to the inability of Lithium-ion batteries to provide sufficient amount of power required by devices when the battery is low, in cold conditions or when the device is old enough.  In this case without any modification in RAM and battery power management it becomes tough for a Li-ion battery to stay awake till the battery reaches 0%. Eventually it needs to shut down to protect all the electronic components as at that time they need more power to survive. Click here to know more about the science of battery slowdown. To tackle such condition Apple introduced some sort of memory or battery management technique that prevents such sudden shutdowns. They introduced this software update last year but the tradeoff of such benefit seems to be unpleasant to the owners of older iPhones.

Before Wednesday’s statement by Apple, many consumers were unaware of the true reason of such a slowdown. Apple deliberately kept it a secret. But I guess budget friendly Android users are familiar with this problem. As those Android devices have the option to turn off the battery management function so, users can decide according to their wish. In case of iPhone, things are out of its owners’ control.

One of the IOS developers tweeted after the incident on this issue saying that it affected iPhones reputation so badly that the effect could linger for about a decade! As Apple created a whole new level of standard to its users, such step that was unknown for a while, hit them really hard. People these days are skeptic and conscious about how technologies are using them rather than how we use them! This iPhone scandal has added another layer of doubt on tech users’ mind.