A South Korean court has dismissed a complaint seeking compensation from Apple for limiting the functionality of older iPhones. The case alleged that Apple was forcing customers to buy a new phone by bottlenecking the processor in older phones.
“This complaint is dismissed,” the South Korean court judge said without giving a specific reason. The lawsuit against Apple was filed by 9,800 Korean users of the company, who sought two billion won ($1.64 million) in damages.
The South Korean court’s ruling comes as a group of Apple customers filed a new class action complaint about five years ago to seek 200,000 won ($163) in damages from Apple each. The complaint in question, which was filed by 64,000 people, alleged that Apple was forcing users to install a new software update that caused performance degradation on older iPhones.
The court case refers to a feature that came into the spotlight in 2017. This feature is related to energy consumption and tries to prevent sudden shutdown of phones that use old batteries. Reducing energy consumption is done as a result of limiting the performance of the processor and finally the processing speed of the device drops.
Prior to the 2017 controversy, performance limitations on older iPhones had not been publicly announced. This caused many customers to be shocked and take a stand against Apple. Apple has finally admitted that it slows down the processing speed of iPhones equipped with older batteries.
After apologizing to users, Apple introduced a new scheme whereby all users of old iPhones could replace their phone batteries at a discount. The company then added battery monitoring to the iPhone so users could disable the power management system introduced in iOS 10.2.1.
Apple was sentenced to pay 500 million dollars in compensation in 2020. At that time, a court in the United States announced that Apple had secretly limited the functionality of old iPhones, and for this reason, it should pay a fine. Apple users in other countries such as Belgium, Chile, Spain and Italy also complained about this company.
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