Op-ed: Apple was right to throttle iPhones, but some things still need to change

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

This week, we learned that the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple took actions that violated securities laws when it throttled certain iPhones’ performance without informing investors or users. This follows previous reports of class action lawsuits on behalf of consumers as well as public officials from both the United States and France calling for answers.

Consumers and many members of the press have been outraged. Some have gone so far as to accuse Apple of throttling the phones to make them obsolete more quickly so consumers would have to upgrade, and they insist that users should have been able to choose whether their phones did this or not. Other critics have simply said Apple should have at least been more transparent about the throttling.

It’s easy to poke holes in the theory that Apple implemented throttling to drive quicker adoption of new phones (which we’ll get into shortly). Whether most users should have been given the choice is debatable. But Apple definitely should have been more transparent.