Oliver Haslam·

U.S. Government Official Questions Apple’s iPhone Throttling Tactic Following Lawsuits

There have been wall-to-wall stories about Apple’s iPhone battery situation and its decision to artificially limit how fast a phone’s CPU can run in order to cope with degraded batteries.

We learned a couple of days ago that a French consumer fraud group was taking Apple to task over the situation on top of multiple lawsuits being levied against the company back home. Now it seems that one U.S. official is also wading in, asking a series of questions surrounding the matter.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Senator John Thune (R–S.D.), Chairman of the Commerce Committee, has written to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking questions about how the company came to the decision to limit CPU performance in order to accommodate poor or degraded batteries.

In a letter to Chief Executive Tim Cook, a copy of which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Thune asked how Apple has tracked customer complaints of processing performance, and if Apple has explored offering rebates to customers who paid full price for a battery replacement before the company offered discounted rates last month.

Interestingly, Thune also managed to take umbrage with Apple’s decision to offer reduced prices on replacement batteries as a result of the fallout from the situation.

According to the Senator, customers believe that Apple should be offering replacement batteries for free rather than discounting them. Apple normally charges $79 for a replacement battery but is now charging just $29 for the entirety of 2018.

Since it became clear that Apple is throttling older iPhones, many have taken that as confirmation of a long held belief that the company purposefully slows devices down in order to make users upgrade to newer devices sooner than they normally would.

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