If you’d been rocking the iphone 11 these past few years and decided to splurge for the new iphone 14, you likely double checked the packaging to look for the charging block. But no, you never did find it. Maybe you wondered where the headphones were. Nope, not seeing those either. The box does look a bit smaller after all. In fact, no one got those “accessories” with their iPhone 14. Missing accessories is just one cause of several class action lawsuits pending against Apple.
Product Misrepresentation Litigation
According to Apple, by removing the charging block and the headphones from the iphone packaging since the iphone 12 (released in 2019), they’ve been able to reduce their yearly carbon footprint by 2 million metric tons, equivalent to 500,000 less cars on global roadways.The $3 trillion dollar company also happened to save over $6 billion in shipping costs, given that more iphone boxes could fit on each shipping palette.
If you flipped over your new iphone 14 box, the fine print does state that the phone and lighting cable are included, and that the headphones and charging block are “sold separately.” Still, if you felt a bit cheated while you added almost $40 extra to your cart to purchase both of those items from Apple, you’re not alone.
A class action lawsuit has been filed against Apple, claiming that the company misrepresented its products. “Where the utility of a good depends upon another good which is not provided by the manufacturer, the good is considered defective or at a minimum, diminished in value.” That this decision would negatively affect buyers of the iphone is something that the company knew and something that they should have more “prominently disclosed”, the suit alleges.
Investor Litigation
This isn’t the only legal issue that Apple is currently facing. Apple is also involved in a class action suit that it misled investors. Back in November 2018, Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors that China was not one of the foreign markets seeing sales weakness only to seemingly run the business under that premise by cutting production a couple days later and later lowering forecasts due to China sales weakness. Thus far, Apple has been unsuccessful in their efforts to have the case dismissed.
Competition Litigation
In June, Apple was also unsuccessful getting another class action dismissed–this one related to claims that the company engaged in uncompetitive business practices to prevent 3rd party sellers from selling their products. The lawsuit concerns a business relationship between Apple and Amazon and alleges that the two companies work together to “eliminate or at least severely reduce” competition from third-party merchants selling Apple products.
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