It seems that Apple Inc. ended the year 2014 and began the year 2015 with several lawsuits hanging above its head.
Apple Inc. sold iPhones and iPads in 2014 with storage space of 16 GB, which is almost the amount of space that is needed for the mobile devices to upgrade to iOS 8. The customers from Florida felt cheated and decided to sue Apple Inc. for this. The plaintiffs, Paul Orshan and Christopher Endara filed a legal complaint yesterday in the state of California. The plaintiffs are residents of Miami.
The plaintiffs claim that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) advertised 16 GB of storage space in the mobile devices while it sold iPads and iPhones with usable space below 16 GB. The amount of usable space decreases even further in iPhone 5S after the OS was upgraded to iOS 8.
According to the lawsuit, it is quite clear that Apple Inc. only notes the storage space size after the system software has formatted it. But then, the iOS software itself takes up a lot of space, which means the space that can be used for storing other data decreases significantly and decreases even more when you upgrade to iOS 8.
The complaint filed claims that Apple Inc. has misled and deceived their consumers and the public in general by making deceptive representations of more space. The iPhone maker withheld and omitted the information that consumers usually consider when buying a new phone.
While misrepresenting the amount of storage space in its iPhone and iPad, the company also advertised, quite ironically too, that the iOS 8 is the largest system software update so far by the company. Obviously, this does not mean that Apple Inc. is actually referring to the size in Gigabytes of iOS 8. The size of iOS 8 has not been disclosed in any of the marketing materials by Apple Inc and these marketing campaigns only highlight the positive aspects of iOS 8.
This lawsuit is seeking class action status for all those who purchased these mobile devices that were advertised with 16 GB of storage space. The complaint makes another accusation; Apple Inc. is using this as a technique to drive their consumers towards the paid online storage service, the iCloud. When the storage in phones becomes low, users can transfer their data to iCloud.
The plaintiffs are also accusing Apple Inc. for not collaborating with third-parties to use their utilities to transfer data to desktop computers. The Apple users are unable to move their files and so, with limited storage, they are further driven to use the paid services.
Staying true to their tradition of not coming out with immediate responses, Apple Inc. currently is not making any comments on this subject.
The company has been sued before for similar issues. In 2007, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was sued for wrongly advertising the storage space of iPods. Back then, the complaint stated that iPod, claimed to have 8GB of storage only provided 7.45GB. Meanwhile now, the storage differences are over 20% in some devices.
