AP
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Apple apologized on Thursday for slowing down iPhones with older batteries.
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The apology is extraordinary: Apple isn't apologizing for a hardware glitch or a software error; it's apologizing for a choice it consciously made.
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Apple is adding new features to iOS to tell whether your battery is healthy — features it should have had since the beginning.
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It may be the most far-reaching apology Apple has had to make, and it could change the way the company does business.
Apple's apology on Thursday was an extraordinary move for the company.
The iPhone maker just doesn't say "I'm sorry" very often, so any apology at all is unusual. But even by other standards, the statement it issued regarding the slowing of iPhones with older batteries was an uncommon one — and it could have important implications.
Apple isn't apologizing for a hardware flaw, as it did with the Antennagate controversy that plagued the iPhone 4. And it's not apologizing for lackluster software, as it did in 2012 when the launch of Apple Maps was a fiasco.
No, Apple is apologizing for one of its decisions. What Apple is apologizing for isn't a bug; it's a feature.
Now that it's been caught, Apple has basically been cornered into making the consumer-friendly moves it should have made in the first place. For the next 12 months, it will replace the batteries in customers' iPhones for $29 each instead of the previous charge of $79. And its iOS operating system will get new features that will allow users to monitor the health of their batteries.
But more important than those particulars, the apology could fundamentally change a key piece of how Apple does business.
iPhone 'glitches' could have been fixed by swapping the battery
Many iPhone owners have upgraded their device because their older phone had gotten slow and buggy. Now, we know that in at least some cases — at least in the past year — merely swapping the battery could have fixed the problem, rendering it unnecessary to buy a new phone.
David Paul Morris/Getty Images
Did Apple purposely keep the battery-performance slowdown a secret to drive sales? Apple says no, that it was just trying to prevent phones from shutting down. You can read its apology and decide whether that's credible. Either way, what matters is that Apple knew what it was doing and users didn't.
Now, having apologized, Apple is committed to giving users the information they need to decide whether to upgrade their phone or whether they can just get by with replacing their battery. I know at least one iPhone user who — after Apple's statement — now intends to swap batteries rather than buying a new device.