For those of you who bought an iPhone, do you feel misled over the battery and the fact that you must send your phone off to Apple when the battery needs replaced? There’s a group of people who feel that Apple didn’t make it clear that the built-in battery can’t be replaced by the customer until after the phone launched. One person in particular, Jose Trujillo of Cook County Illinois, has filed a class-action lawsuit. Is this just another frivolous lawsuit that is so common these days, or a legitimate concern?
The battery replacement process is by no means cheap or convenient. It will end up costing users $79 for the replacement battery along with a $6.95 shipping charge. Then if you want a loaner phone while your battery is being replaced, you’ll have to pay an additional $30. In the lawsuit, the claim is that the battery will be completely dead at 300 charges, however, Apple says that the battery will last much more than 300 charges. In fact, Apple says that the battery “is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity after 400 full charge and discharge cycles.”
The fact that the iPhone hasn’t even been out for 300 days tells me that there’s no way to know if the phone will be completely dead after 300 full charges and discharges as the lawsuit claims. It’ll definitely be interesting to see what the judge says about this one. I still am wondering though, why on Earth didn’t Steve Jobs think to design a phone with a battery that could be replaced by the user. I’d think there’d have to be a good reason, but I haven’t heard it yet. Any ideas?
Source: Beta News
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Tags: Hardware, Apple, iPhone, Lawsuit
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This seems kinda frivolous. There are plenty of products that don’t have user replaceable batteries. Is iPod’s battery removable?
My guess is that a removable battery would have been at the expense of the iPhone’s ultra thinness.
The lawsuit is frivolous but I think the fact that the battery isn’t user replaceable is ridiculous. I don’t think it has much if anything to do with the thinness of the phone or an iPod. I think it is about money. I bet Apple has a little profit from the battery replacement. Also, some people may decide to invest in a new iPhone or iPod when it comes time to replace the battery since it costs so much to replace it.
It makes sense for Apple to replace the batteries because then they get the money for it. If Apple made the iPhone with a battery that could be replaced by the user, they would have to charge less for just a battery than for battery + service + shipping. It’s like they want a monopoly on everything to do with the iPhone.
This is a frivolous lawsuit. It is also one other reason that I will wait till version 2 or 3 before I would consider getting an iPhone.
I also think that it is a ridiculous lawsuit. I remember buying Pocket PC’s back in the day that didn’t come with user replaceable batteries, and instead of sending them in to get repaired I just took it apart myself and did it. That way it costed me $20 instead of $80, so the situation seems about the same. People just need to wait for the “do it yourself” kits to become available.
If anything, the class-action suit should be brought against Apple for selling an “8GB” model that only has 7.24GB of usable space. Last time I checked, 7.24gb is a hell of a lot closer to 7GB than it is 8GB. There’s the REAL lawsuit that should be sought…just a thought.
But that’s how it is with any memory using device. The OS will always take some space, and there’s no economic way to buy an 8.76GB HD. Technically, the Hard Drive in devices is the size they advertise, they just don’t tell you you can’t use it all.
WindowsXP takes up 6.3GB of my 40GB HD (that’s a lot!).
Netster is definitely right. Vista takes up about 15GB (and you thought 6GB was a lot
) and when you buy a PC they don’t take that into account. Of course I think that in the case of the iPhone the size is much more important since you don’t have that much storage.
My customised XP takes 3.4GB (all updates installed and updated) Still more then I though. One of reasons for not buying vista is size it takes it, its just not needed
I agree that the amount of space Vista takes up just isn’t needed. The problem is that they continue to maximize the amount of backwards compatibility, and by doing that they have to include the older legacy code. So it’s probably like you have all of XP on your drive while you have Vista installed.
One of the things that still astonishes me is that they were able to cut the install time in half with Vista (I can finish the installation within 20 minutes).