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 $113 million in fines to settle consumer fraud lawsuits around a controversy known as "batterygate," in which iPhone users discovered that Apple installed new software that made devices with older batteries operate slower.
In addition, CEO Tim Cook in 2019 wrote in a letter to investors that "some customers taking advantage of significantly reduced pricing for iPhone battery replacements" was partly behind a lower-than-expected iPhone sales.
The mercurial and Twitter-obsessed Tesla ($TSLA) CEO changed his handle overnight to "Elon Tusk" with an elephant emoji, and tweeted that there would be "some Tesla news" coming at 2 p.m. on Thursday.
Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel isn't one to typically tease future products, but he did hint that Snapchat has bigger ambitions for e-commerce during a talk at a conference on Monday. Snapchat has "pretty cool products coming on the e-commerce side that we’re excited about," Spiegel said onstage at Morgan Stanley's Tech, Media, and Telecom industry conference in San Francisco.
After packing up its plans to open a new campus in New York City, is it possible Amazon will cross the river and set up shop in Newark, N.J.? That city is holding out hope that Amazon's exodus from New York doesn't mean that it's done expanding in the region. Aisha Glover, president and CEO of the Newark Alliance, told Cheddar on Tuesday that her job is to "gently nudge them and remind them that Newark is still there."
SoundCloud, the German streaming service that was on the brink of collapse before a financial rescue in 2017, is doubling down as a platform for creators with a new service that will allow artists to upload and push their content to all of the major streaming providers, including Apple, Spotify, and Amazon. SoundCloud CEO Kerry Trainor told Cheddar it's an "exciting and natural addition" to SoundCloud's value proposition as a place where artists go to distribute their music.
The fallout continues over Amazon's decision to pull out of New York City. Many housing developers scooped up property in the area in anticipation of the 25,000 new employees that would have been coming to town. So what does that mean for the future of real estate in Long Island City? Amy Plitt from Curbed NY talked to Cheddar about how it will impact everything from rents to sidewalks.
While nearly every mid- to large-sized bank rushed to announce blockchain trials and experiments three years ago — only to conclude that they couldn’t find a useful application for the emerging technology — JPMorgan Chase has found its business case: payments.
Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Strategies and former campaign manager of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, knows exactly why Amazon's HQ2 plans in New York City fell apart. "It's not that we didn't get it because of some geopolitical economic trend or something out of our control. We didn't get it because our own politicians and Amazon themselves were too incompetent and too arrogant and too tone deaf to get it right," Tusk told Cheddar.
Amazon's blog post announcing it will pull the plug on its New York City headquarters is nothing but a bluff to bring politicians back to the negotiating table, said D.A. Davidson Analyst Tom Forte. "Absolutely Amazon's bluffing," Forte told Cheddar Friday.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, these are the top stories that moved markets and had investors, business leaders, and entrepreneurs talking this week on Cheddar.
Wham-O, a company best known for mass-marketing iconic toys like the hula hoop and Frisbee, manufactures most of its toys in China. But only now that has chosen to branch out into e-bikes does the company anticipate feeling the sting of the ongoing trade war. "To date, it hasn't really affected us that much," Wham-O President Todd Richards told Cheddar. "Now with this new technology and this new product, we foresee a little bit of a cost impact."
