Apple's iPhone battery replacement credit atones for batterygate

You may have found money waiting for you, or at least credit at the Apple Store, as Apple is making further amends for purposely slowing down older iPhones with deprecated battery life.

It's offering a $50 (£54) credit to anyone who paid full price for a battery replacement between January 1, 2017 and December 28, 2017 on an iPhone 6 or later. Of course, the replacement had to have been done at the Apple Store or an authorized retailer.

The company was caught throttling iPhones with subpar battery performance late last year in an effort to avoid sudden device shutdowns. The fix was to swap out the battery, which restored the performance of older iPhones.

Apple even went as far as offering to replace the batteries in older iPhones that showed no deprecation.

Why this amount?

It's not just a random number. The credit is based on the fact that Apple dropped the price of battery replacements when 'batterygate' become a news scandal.

In the US, for example, the battery replacement price went from $80 to $30. But people who already had their battery replaced at full price saw no benefit to this price drop.

It's not a refund, like some people would have liked, but it can go toward replacing your older iPhone with an iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X, something you were probably going to update to anyway.

Matt Swider
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