Right before Christmas an ugly piece of news concerning Apple has struck the Internet. For more details, please check out either my own little article or one of thousands of articles written about it online. Long story short, it has been proven that Apple has been, without telling anyone about it, quietly sending updates to their older smartphones that made their batteries much less efficient. As it now turns out, a number of iPhone users took particular dislike to this event, and decided to sue Apple.

Yesterday, there were eight lawsuits against Apple – it is quite possible there are more today. Most plaintiffs come from the United States, although there is also a single lawsuit by a citizen of Israel. Some of the lawsuits are coming from a single plaintiff, while others are a group lawsuit. Their overall theme can be summed up by one published by Reuters – plaintiff disagrees with Apple’s practice of not informing their clients about the battery downgrade and believes that the company should either offer battery exchange or at least inform their clients about the downgrade. Apple’s explanations that the downgrade is neccessary in order to keep the older phones’ batteries efficient are often found to be inconsequential, as the company failed to inform its clients about that issue. Amounts of compensation money differ widely from lawsuit to lawsuit – for example, one Violetta Mailyan, California, sued Apple for a hilarious amount of $999 billion.

What do you think? Should Apple admit its guilt and pay the lawsuits (although probably not as large as almost one trillion dollars)? Or is Apple blameless and the plaintiffs should not get a penny? Or maybe there is a midway?