this terrible event columbia's e.-l. and rebel group is urging the government to resume talks the president suspended ago she sions following rebel attacks after a cease fire lapsed yelling leaders say the incident should not derail the peace process in march military has admitted its soldiers killed ten referential muslims captured by buddhist villagers their remains were found in a mass grave in rakhine state last month it's thought to be the military's first public admission of wrongdoing since it launched a crackdown in rakhine in august is president donald trump is still insisting that any immigration reform must include funding for a border wall with mexico it comes a day after a federal judge blocked the government from ending protection for undocumented immigrants brought to the u.s. as children suggested making comprehensive reforms to the u.s. immigration system. those are the headlines the news continues keep it here on al-jazeera inside story is next and more news after that going to air.

investigating apple prosecutors in france want to know why the company slows down its older i phone it's it's claimed it could be a ploy to get users to upgrade lawsuits are also under way in the u.s. so how will all of this impact on consumers trust in apple products this is inside story. hello welcome to the program i'm adrian finnegan for many customers apple at its i

phones are the best in the business the ultimate in excellence that was until last month when the company admitted to slowing down older models it said that it was done to protect battery life but users have been told some suspect that there was another motive at the u.s. senate has demanded answers from apple c.e.o. tim cook a french prosecutor is also now launched an investigation we'll get to our guests in just a moment but first the reports from paris. in france one in five smartphone uses owns an i phone each new model causes much excitement but not everyone is happy with the u.s. manufacturer a french consumer watchdog has filed an legal complaint saying apple deliberately slows down old i phone models to encourage customers to buy new ones we're having that they're doing what we called planned obsolescence two or two. to paper to buy

a new one and it's a market thing and raping care that we have enough proof to make this. hope says apple uses software updates to slow down its phones the watchdog says recent updates coming sided with the release of the i phone eight in france such a practice is illegal under french law it is a crime to deliberately shorten the lifespan of a product in order to try and force consumers to buy new ones but is found guilty can be punished with a prison sentence a large fine and companies can be forced to pay up to five percent of their annual earnings in paris some apple customers welcomed the investigation. before it's important to know what's going on because we are all hostages of multinationals merits and looking once i bought a new find that i have to charge all the time and the updates make it slower i

think it's done on purpose even though it's illegal here after a flurry of similar lawsuits in the u.s. last year apple admitted to intentionally slowing down its old phones saying it was done to help prolong battery life some analysts say the company should have been more transparent everyone knows that their phone starts to lose power after a certain time and this is actually quite a clever way of dealing with it was interesting is how it's been presented in rather a negative light on thing that's apple's fault for not communicating better that they were doing this to help the users al-jazeera contacted apple in france for comment but has not received a reply faced with a criminal investigation though the stakes here for the tech giant are high natasha butler al-jazeera paris. well as the tasha was saying apple says it slows down phones over time to extend battery life this is the company's statement from december twenty eighth all rechargeable batteries become less effective as they chemically age apple went on

to say that i.o.'s updates aim to manage older phones to prevent unexpected battery shutdowns but that can also mean longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance as a result apple says it will soon issue an update that gives users more visibility into the health of their i phone's battery so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance. let's bring in our guests then for today's discussion from london we're joined by good movie who saw in a tasha's report a technology writer and blogger he's the author of rebel code linux and the open source revolution from shannon china via skype wang boyan a writer for tech know the english language publication that covers china's tech industry and from new york we're joined by dean crutchfield a branding expert welcome to you all gentlemen let's start with you then does apple's explanation as to why they've throttled back performance on some i phone models make technical sense does it stand up to scrutiny i think it does and

there's an important point to make here which hasn't been drawn out enough people are talking about phones being slowed down and apple has said that it does do that but only in certain circumstances for example when it's drawing excessive power from the battery so this is not about slowing down phones all the time it's about certain moments as you rightly mention when you launch an up when you scroll through things then you may see some slowing down so it's not true that they are slowing down their phones in general they are stopping the peak power causing problems so the basically apples introduced the performance slowed down to ask sometimes some points when you're using the phone you'll notice the slowdown to mask a deficiency in battery power the computing power of the phone hasn't changed it hasn't got any any slowing what are the ethics of this. i mean personally i think as i said in the exit of the show before that apple has communicated this

extraordinary badly they could have said and should have said we are trying to help people use their phones for longer actually extending the life instead they made this change without telling people and that was the big mistake i think one brand in. apple has apologized for its poor handling of the issue its cut the price of a battery replacement but if this throttling is is software controlled is a new battery going to restore performance to my i phone yes yes just as you say there was no new battery is replaced unsee the old devices the problems will return to you know. standard ok this isn't then as far as you're concerned a case of programmed obsolescence as some people have suggested in indeed the. france taking a serious look at that issue apple isn't deliberately slowing older phones in order

to get us all to buy a new i phone. i think this is you know this is a battery problem is no other processor problem so the promise about the battery runs the batteries on is you know. chemical ends so at home in order to extend its last friend so apple have to start you know slow down. that the problem is a little bit too you know save the battery life is just like you know went with the new used car. we have if you are running windows on a laptop you have the battery you have a three options that energy saving average and was brought up you know you can trust that i think these are the same functions as you know in i phone as you know . i think rush failed in new york. is apple going to lose

sales to use this negative publicity what's the fallout going to be for the company the loss of faith couple i suppose with the realisation that a customer can replace a battery for what thirty dollars and restore performance rather than spend one thousand dollars on a new one. well there mean this is not a technology issue this is not a product problem this is a this is about apple's brand and their consumers love for that brand that their consumers trust in that brand so that the big question here is is this a close shave or a deep cut and i believe apple is bleeding and their response so far adds to the momentum of the of the of the chatter that's going out there i think bezos often says a brand is what people say about you when they leave the room and there's a lot of people talking about apple right now so this is a much bigger problem than i think they anticipate it could be i think therefore they have to but they have to behave in a way that recognizes that crisis can be like a bomb for a brand like apple and it can actually create a lot of problems in terms of people's perception of their brand so it's not what

you say it's what you do and here's the interesting thing if that product strategy was meant to benefit the consumer how come it wasn't communicated or conveyed in any of the collateral any of the information surrounds the product and there's a lot of information about it so why have consumers been duped into thinking there's something wrong with their phone it's the first major hardware issue didn't it the i phone on the c.e.o. tim cook's watch how much responsibility for the poor handling of the issue does he have to accept you only have one throat to choke on as the c.e.o. ok. can apple. be criticized for timing major upgrades of its operating system to coincide with the release of a new phones is that it is is that ultimately behind this issue well not really in the sense that is the natural time to do it if you're launching new phones you tend to launch new software and therefore people on the older phones

want to have some of those benefits and there for you again you could argue that they're actually doing the users a favor i mean i agree that this is really about batteries i think is a very important point to using i don't see how it's a favor i just don't get it. well because you given the new features i mean when you upgrade the software on a new phone the old version the slowdown by some of those retailers their phones being slowed down so. they don't know that only because the batteries all are as i'm just glad to say i don't know how to say good point is you know you should be able to change your battery more easily but the issue is how easily you can change or bashing i think apple and other money factors have been up fault in not make it clear that by changing your battery more regularly you can actually boost the performance of your phone and they should make that easier and they should make that cheaper and so that's the really big issue here and it affects all manufacturers do you know i mean you know apple has sort of other men have never

promoted the initiative to other manufacturers a just as apple do make phones that have no user upgradeable parts unlike the old days where when batteries could be removed i mean to some extent this is a problem of their own making isn't it absolutely i think that they got themselves in this trouble and they need to get themselves out and the way they're reacting right now is slow it's very corporate it's very self interested they're taking a fifty thousand foot view and they've got to get down to fight for where the consumer is and how frustrated that consumer really is thinking about apple that's a major problem they've got to get down to the consumer level and understand how they're feeling dean what would be the implications for a politically lost any of the class action lawsuits currently filed against it on this issue or even if it was found guilty of planned obsolescence it in france where it as we were hearing earlier it's illegal. they were i think it would have a very detrimental impact on their brand in a very detrimental impact on their wallet but their wallets pretty big here the

bigger issue is their brand reputation that is as we know worth billions of dollars and that could be impacted by this debacle so really they need to be very mindful of that that the success of apple isn't because of the company it's because of the consumer that loves the apple products and here we're hearing that the the actual apple products are being slowed down without consumers knowing so i think that makes it rather opaque and i think you know the other the other guest here we are looking at apple to be more transparent what i want to hear is hide nothing tell all what's been going on here and why have you been doing it this way then you want to respond to the what by i absolutely agree i'm a great fan of transparency and i think if this leads to apple and all manufacturers being more transparent than i would be a tremendous gain for the consumers because they will see what's going on in the devices which they own at the moment apple and other companies are treated almost as if you don't own the device and you just sort of get it by favor of the companies so we need more transparency and we need something as

a movement called right to repair you should have a right to repair the things that you buy and that means putting in new batteries putting in new screens at the moment are poor and other companies make that very hard and i think that's got to change and i would avoid a lot of these kind of problems. you've been very patient so i know i know you want to comment on this did you want to respond to what you've heard. yeah speaking of transparency i think you know i was since starting branches out of eight i was you know begin to you are beginning to use the. back book running like a micro s. there's a beauty editor inside the mac book you know in the head that users if their batteries how is our house e always need to be replaced i think they were asked it's just lack of this function is this is it it is nice the transparency you know there is indicator inside i.i.s. to tell people if your battery is you know affecting your whole performance on your

phone and your battery maybe you need to be replaced yeah i think that's what transparency honesty wise on is consumer product least samsung has a two year warranty on all of its smart phone batteries and it is two years what you'd expect a smart phone battery to last. you know if the battery can be replaced you know no matter from you know yourself are from the consumer you know the consumer services i think you have two years is. is that good less than for a normal battery yes clinton should people who spent a thousand dollars on a new i phone x. expect to experience similar performance issues in two years from now as the battery in their devices ages. i think you probably can because it's in the nature of this technology if you think about it it's pretty crazy to go to

a lump of metal that stores electricity inside your phone it's a miracle it works at all so i don't think there's any way to guarantee that it won't happen for however advance of technology but one thing i would say is that i think people need to start asking do they really need to upgrade because they've got these amazingly powerful pieces of technology in their pockets or effectively supercomputers in their pocket why do they keep needing to upgrade and it's obviously part is to the kind of apple magic but maybe society needs to star asking do we need to have this upgrade cycle dean it's obvious that consumers are pretty angry about this issue however we don't expect our cars to go on forever without seeing some sort of drop in in performance so why should we expect we expect our phones to do so yes i mean you know with a car you get it you get a warranty you get a fill you get a twenty thousand mile one hundred thousand mala hundred fifty thousand mile warranty it's proactively offered to you to have your car as it were upgraded or checked to make sure it's still working and all the back lights are working so it

offers it to sampson offers you a two year warranty what we have here is apple offering nothing and including no information about the very fact that it exists so that's the issue it's opaque they need to become transparent this issue will force transparency because customers are going to be clamoring for them to be more open and to be more transparent and the fact is all of this litigation that's going to be coming against them is going to force them also to be more transparent what is their next step what are they going to offer beyond a cheaper battery replacement where's the warranties where's all that information and where's that offer when one thousand dollars is a major investment for most people but are consumers naive to expect. their phones to last more than twenty four months to still feel brand new after two years. well as you say it's a lot of money but the technology is amazing but i think they do need to think whether they need to upgrade it or whether it's good enough i mean personally i

don't upgrade my phone one for five or six years because it does everything i need and why do people upgrade i mean if they need it and it's good money is worth spending but if they don't then as you say it's a lot of money and what are they going to get for it is apple a victim of its own marketing here mean consumers are buying into apple's premium quality and brands states's therefore they expect the exceptional but here we have apple facing a crisis that it appears not to know how to deal with exactly i think that's you know this is this is they're taking a very corporate stance that showing lots of self-interest in terms of protecting themselves and protecting their business strategy and that's the accusation is this a deliberate business strategy with obsolescence in these phones that will make people perceive the need to buy a new phone because they don't know what's actually happening with it caused by apple so to me it's a crisis management situation they're not handling it very well the top line of any

crisis is hide nothing tell all and guess what they've been hiding this for ages and they haven't been telling us about it so it's a really massive floor and their response that they've been caught short and the very fact that they're doing these reactionary issues like cheaper back to a place once in a sense is except in seville to silence and those that will be picked on by those people who are looking to take them to court or it's a let's imagine you are speaking to cook right now that we had him on the program what would you say to him. i would say to him that you've got to you've got i like to call it a prep strategy you know what's the purpose of the you know of why you were doing the she said that what was the reason was it for you was it for the consumer or was it for the phone let me understand give me some examples you know whether it's i phone four i phone six what are we talking about here and then get back to the purpose of apple wanting to satisfy its consumers and to do everything it can to make that satisfaction to deliver it so i think that's what they need to do but clearly hide nothing tell all is going to be very awkward for them because of the

situation legally where they don't want to be accepting too much because of the implications that has for the court of the court of public opinion likely coming back with a guilty verdict would you would you agree with that i mean what would your advice to tim cook be well i certainly do agree that transparency has to be the way forward and i would also urge him to be proactive in letting people do what they want with their own equipment this idea that they have a right to repair if apple could as spouse that and say look we are on your side we believe that you do have the right to repair things as you wish then i think that that would help to forge stronger bonds with its customers and i think other manufacturers need to do the same hopefully we could see a very competitive situation whereby more and more manufacturers would bend over backwards to make it easy to know. if there are corelli against. many of us or our i phone uses a lot of us a bugged by the fact that i phones aren't running as quickly as as the as they used

to what are we to do what would your advice be i mean it's one thing about getting the battery replaced there are five people in my household that's going to cost us a lot of money to get our batteries upgraded or replaced do we do we wait do we do we buy new phones where we do what's your advice. i've advised us of grading the battery i think it's the simplest and most effective way of getting better performance as another reason why apple and the other manufacturers should be offering batteries as cheaply as possible because it is the easiest way to get better performance from your products the fact that they try and turn into a profit center i think is unacceptable because they shouldn't be price gouging people for something that should be a basics of necessity for upgrading our product did i asked you earlier about your advice for apple what about your advice to the apple consumer is that what you would do the people who perhaps have her i mean honestly take a stand i think. their trust has been look trust is clearly being eroded here you

know when there's a problem with the toyota car you know as we've seen and the kill function in volkswagens cars you took your car in and you got a free upgrade you didn't have to spend any money on that correction that they made a problem with that they admitted they fixed it here's a situation where deliberately apple's been slowing down people's phones they've been perceiving these not being right to me is a is it enough to reduce the cost of the battery replacement or should you be obliged just to replace it if the customer so wishes i think it's going to get to that point where there's an expectation i shouldn't be paying you for a battery replacement because you've never made it clear in your collateral that that's something i would need to do so now that i am aware of that and it's been a deliberate strategy on your part you need to be responsible for that and i don't think i should pay for that replacement right gentlemen there i'm afraid we're going to have to leave it thank you all for being with us skin moody. and dean crossfield as always thank you for watching don't forget you can see the program again at any time just by going to the website at al-jazeera dot com for further

discussion on this join us at our facebook page that's at facebook dot com forward slash inside story and you can also join the conversation on twitter our handle at a.j. the inside story for me adrian figure the whole team here though thanks for watching i'll see you. the need for to live through something very strong to communicate need someone an ambitious young artist from the mean streets of mozambique to set out to reveal the unseen truth about his country's. future to the mozambique he didn't close to see

this year he did because did no good in politics changes to. the new african photography mario must allow. at this time on al-jazeera. the latest news as it breaks the government of mali so market has pushed to have a series the laws that if that will make argentina's economy more competitive with detailed coverage in two thousand and sixteen when the government stops at the dozen that's all the cost of college or jumped by sixty percent the clues disappear at least for a year from around the world the military and the establishment in the capital bangkok know that it's very difficult for them to win support in parts of thailand like this. education with a difference in the interpretation of his law is absolutely different from mine as a muslim woman a taliban school for girls in afghanistan reveals a way of life rarely seen. your goal to not only tell them about their bills and

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international city they are very interested in that global perspective that al jazeera provides. i'm richelle carey and these are the top stories right now on al-jazeera hundreds of people in southern california remain trapped after landslides emergency teams struggle with more heavy rain on wednesday at least seventeen people are known to have been killed survivors are recalling stories of dramatic rescue as a warning.