As you’ve probably heard, Apple is currently facing a barrage of lawsuits and government probes over the iPhone slow downs, with a French consumer group accusing Apple of planned obsolescence. However oddly enough it now appears that Samsung is also a target of such accusations over in Italy.
In a report from Reuters, the country’s antitrust body has launched a probe into both Apple and Samsung over allegations that the companies used software updates to slow down their mobile phones to push customers into buying a new one. While Apple has admitted doing this, Samsung had actually denied this in the past, and in Samsung’s defense, updates issued by the company for their phones have never come under scrutiny for such practices in the past, so it does seem a bit strange that the company is being targeted for this.
According to the group, they claim that Apple and Samsung orchestrated “a general commercial policy taking advantage of the lack of certain components to curb the performance times of their products and induce consumers to buy new versions”. Neither company has commented on this yet, although we can imagine that Samsung will most likely deny these claims.
On Apple’s end, CEO Tim Cook did promise that a future update to iOS will allow users to disable the throttling, although this means that users will be at risk of unexpected shutdowns and reboots, depending on how badly their batteries have degraded.