Apple facing ‘battery’ of iPhone lawsuits

Apple has been slapped with a series of lawsuits since it admitted Thursday that it deliberately slows down the performance of older iPhones in order to save battery juice.

Three class-action complaints, brought by customers in Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and California, claim that Apple fraudulently hid from consumers the fact that certain iPhones exhibited lower performance over time.

If those customers went to an Apple Store to inquire about their sluggish phones, they were encouraged to simply buy a new iPhone rather than replace the battery, the suits charge.

All three suits against the Cupertino, Calif.-based tech giant concern phones older than the iPhone 8, which was available for purchase in late September.

“Apple knew that battery replace- ments would have improved the performance of the types of older devices owned by plaintiffs,” according to one of the lawsuits, Abdulla et al v. Apple, which was filed Thursday in an Illinois federal court.

Another lawsuit, Bogdanovich v. Apple, which was filed in federal court in Los Angeles, argued that Apple breached an “implied contract” and that the company “interfered” with private property (i.e. the already sold iPhones) when it deliberately caused the slowdown of the central processing units of the devices.

A similar lawsuit, Keaton Harvey v. Apple, was waged in Northern California Thursday, alleging that before the company admitted the slowdown, it “made deliberately misleading statements that were intended to conceal the nature and scope of that defect.”

Apple did not respond to requests for comment.