Apple’s general practices and products have been deteriorating now for many years.

But this time they’ve been caught red-handed intentionally slowing down older iPhone performance with their updates and without telling customers what they were doing. Apple claims it was doing this to protect the consumer from iPhones with weakening batteries that may fail altogether. Really Apple? That’s the best you could come up with?

Apple now has a huge PR problem on their hands. But as bad as the PR problem is and will become, it will likely be dwarfed by the legal trouble ahead for Apple. The intentional and secretive slowing down of iPhone performance can be seen as doing direct harm iPhone users. There are already several lawsuits in the works, and I imagine there will be several more to come.

Will Apple begin to learn the lesson here? I doubt it.