Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com Tens of thousands of South Korean iPhone users lost a lawsuit seeking compensation from Apple on Thursday, accusing Apple of deliberately reducing the performance of older models to force users to buy new ones, Yonhap reported.

The Seoul Central District Court ruled against 9851 iPhone users who sued Apple, but did not give specific reasons for the ruling. The court also ordered the plaintiffs to pay their legal costs.

Apple's "battery gate" incident dates back to late 2017, when Apple was accused of deliberately reducing the performance of iPhone models to ensure that the device's battery life meets demand.

The lawsuit, filed in 2018, alleges Apple intentionally concealed that the iPhone battery may have difficulty running the latest iOS software. Instead of recalling products or offering replacement batteries, the company advised users to download the latest software updates.

The plaintiffs argue that their iPhones suffered performance degradation after the update. The affected phones are iPhone 6 and iPhone 7.

In addition to this lawsuit, it is reported that more than 62,000 South Korean users have filed similar lawsuits against Apple, demanding compensation of 12.7 billion won (currently about 69.723 million yuan), and the average amount of compensation sought by each user is 200,000 won (currently about 1098 yuan).

Hannuri, the law firm representing the users, said in a statement that the ruling clearly reflected the limitations of the local legal system, namely the mandatory submission of evidence at the beginning of the trial and the lack of a class-action system. The law firm said it would review whether to appeal.

CTOnews.com has learned that Apple initially denied deliberately reducing iPhone performance, but later admitted that it was doing so to protect battery life and argued that the purpose of the measure was not to allow users to buy new phones.

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