On March 1, Apple will start charging an extra $20 for battery replacements on out-of-warranty iPhones, according to an update on the AppleCare+ webpage

The new price will be $99 for the iPhone 14, and while these models are currently under warranty, they won't be after the one-year anniversary of their release in September 2023. 

At that point, the higher price point could encourage customers with broken batteries to simply buy a new phone rather than shell out nearly $100 for a replacement part. 

Apple has adjusted prices multiple times in recent years, as supply chain issues have raised production costs. Just last month, labor unrest at an iPhone supplier in China led to a production shortfall. The company struggled with similar disruptions throughout the pandemic.  

There is also a history of consumers pushing back against Apple's practices around batteries. The company in 2020 was forced to pay $113 million in fines to settle consumer fraud lawsuits around a controversy known as "batterygate," in which iPhone users discovered that Apple installed new software that made devices with older batteries operate slower. 

In addition, CEO Tim Cook in 2019 wrote in a letter to investors  that "some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements" was partly behind a lower-than-expected iPhone sales.  

Share:
More In Technology
Elon Musk claims X being targeted in ‘massive cyberattack’
Hours after a series of outages that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk is claiming that the social media platform is being targeted in a “massive cyberattack." Musk said on a post Monday that the attacker is either a large, coordinated group or a country. Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. A sustained outage appeared to begin just after noon Eastern.
Load More