Apple Issues an Apology (and a Discount) Over iPhone Battery Debacle

In a rare move, tight-lipped Apple has released an apology along with a technical explanation of how their batteries work, follows several recent stories (and lawsuits) concerning older iPhone battery degradation.

"First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades," the unsigned letter reads.

The letter is the culmination of what started as a series of Reddit posts discussing how iPhone batteries seemingly get worse over time. Those posts led Geekbench blogger John Poole to map out iPhone 6S and iPhone 7 battery performance over time. Along with the slowdowns, the phones would unexpectedly shut down with increasing frequency.

As the phones degraded in service over time, Poole came to the conclusion that Apple was manipulating users by making them think that "the slow down is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance."

"This fix will also cause users to think, 'my phone is slow so I should replace it' not, 'my phone is slow so I should replace its battery'. This will likely feed into the 'planned obsolecense' narrative," Poole writes.

Apple's letter today includes a brief technical explanation of how and why rechargeable batteries degrade: the chemicals used to charge batteries, like everything else on the planet, age and degrade over time. Apple now believes that "continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries," has contributed significantly to phone battery degradation.

The company also links to a series of tips that can be used to keep batteries more effective, like keeping them out of cold weather.

Apple is taking two steps to make amends to users who feel cheated by their iPhones. One is offering a price reduction for out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacements—from $79 to $29—for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replace for all of 2018.

There will also be an iOS update that will "give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone's battery," though there were no further details on what this would look like.

In 2015, the iPhone was named the single most profitable product in the history of the free market. Since its debut in 2007, the company has become increasingly reliant on it selling well. Having a legion of angry would-be iPhone buyers isn't a great business plan.