Back in 2020, Apple agreed to pay $500 million to settle a class action lawsuit that claimed that Apple had throttled the performance of iPhones. If you submitted a claim by the deadline of October 6, 2020, then your portion of the payout should be hitting your bank account soon.
This was first reported by MacRumors. Lots of people have started reporting that they’ve received around $92 per claim from Apple, such as this X (formerly Twitter) user, and others in the comments on the original report. The amount per claim is significantly higher than the originally reported $25 per claim. This is because the total settlement amount gets divided between all of the claims. The more the number of people who make a claim, the lower the settlement amount each person gets.
Those who didn’t submit the claim are ineligible for these payouts, which are coming in well over three years after a settlement was reached. To be eligible for a payout, you had to have had one of the following eligible devices before December 21, 2017:
An iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6S, 6S Plus, or SE that ran iOS 10.2.1 or newer
An iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus that ran iOS 11.2 or newer
This case has its roots in the way iOS handled battery management at the time. If your iPhone’s battery health was poor or if it was unable to supply enough voltage to ensure peak performance, the device would slow down due to throttling. At the time, people would experience seemingly random slowdowns on their iPhones and Apple claimed that this was a feature introduced to prevent random shutdowns. On older versions of iOS there was no way to check battery health and if any battery related issues were causing slowdowns.
Since then, Apple has issued software updates to better reflect the current health of your iPhone’s battery and to inform you when performance is being throttled. For about a year after this issue came to light, Apple also offered discounted battery replacements for your iPhone.
