Millions of iPhone users in UK could soon get part of £750m

A consumer champion has launched a £750 million legal claim against Apple, linked to an incident in 2017 around a power management tool on older iPhone models.

Justin Gutmann has accused the tech giant of slowing down the performance of iPhone handsets – a process known as 'throttling' – by hiding a power management tool in software updates to combat performance issues and stop older devices from shutting down suddenly. He has filed a claim with the Competition Appeal Tribunal seeking damages of approximately £768 million for up to 25 million UK owners of a range of older iPhone models.

It alleges that Apple misled users over the incident by pushing them to download software updates it said would improve the performance of some devices but, in fact, slowed them down. The claim relates to the introduction of a power management tool released in a software update to iPhone users in January 2017, which was rolled out to slow down older iPhone models with ageing batteries, which may have struggled to run the latest iOS software, in order to prevent abrupt device shutdowns.

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Mr Gutmann said information about this tool was not included in the software update download description at the time or that it would slow a user’s device. He claims that Apple introduced this tool to disguise the fact that iPhone batteries were unable to cope with new iOS processing demands and that rather than recall products or replace batteries, the company instead pushed users to download the software updates.

The legal claim says Apple did add a mention of the tool to the release notes for the update on its website at a later date but says the company failed to make clear that it would slow down