France is investigating Apple for purposefully rendering their products obsolete and forcing customers to buy new devices.
RT:
The Paris Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into Apple’s alleged efforts to render its own devices obsolete in order to force users to upgrade. The complaint follows successful judgments against the California tech giant in France and Italy.
“Following a complaint, an investigation was opened in December 2022 into deceptive marketing practices and programmed obsolescence,” the office said in a statement on Monday, adding that the complaint was filed by an activist group called ‘Halte a L’Obsolescence Programmee’ (HOP).
The group’s complaint centers around the practice of ‘serialization’, whereby spare parts like microchips or speakers are matched with serial numbers to a specific generation of iPhone. This prevents third-party repairers from using generic parts, and as models are phased out by Apple, so too are the associated spares, forcing customers to shell out for a newer model.
Apple, HOP claims, can detect when a phone has been repaired with unauthorized parts and can remotely “degrade” its performance.
An earlier complaint by HOP led to Apple being fined $27 million by a French consumer watchdog in 2020 for slowing the performance of older iPhones via mandatory operating system upgrades. A similar decision was made in Italy a year earlier, with the country’s antitrust authority imposing a fine of $10.8 million on the California company.
These types of allegations against Apple are not new. You may remember the Batterygate scandal from several years back. Apple basically ensured that the battery in their iPhones would degrade to the point where the device would become unusable thus forcing people to buy a new phone.
This is another variation of the same scam. By ensuring that third parties can’t properly repair their fragile phone devices with generic parts, they are deliberately pushing customers into buying a new $1,000+ iPhone.
Apple under Steve Jobs was an innovative company, but it greatly stagnated under the homosexual ass rapist Tim Cook. Cook as I have described in many other articles before, has turned Apple into a company with a business model centered largely around selling unlimited numbers of iPhones.
There has been little if any meaningful innovation in the iPhone since 2015/2016. So to get people to buy new phones, Cook has relied on these types of obsolescence scams and weird marketing gimmicks to keep selling mostly unchanged versions of the same product.
Planned obsolescence is something many companies engage in, but Apple is one of the most egregious offenders. I’m surprised that the company hasn’t collapsed over these shady practices yet. Their current products are mediocre at best and are only still being sold because of Apple’s brand and reputation which was largely built decades ago under Jobs.
