It’s true.
I joined in a 2019 class action lawsuit against Apple. The suit alleged that Apple charged me and a few (thousand?) others for file storage on its iCloud servers. But Apple didn’t actually store my stuff on their iCloud servers, because it didn’t have enough of them. So it jobbed out the storage and didn’t tell us.
Yeah, I know: apocalyptic, end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it stuff.
I can’t honestly say that I ever felt much wronged by this bait-and-switch. (In truth, I never even noticed it.) But there it was; the wheels ground slowly, and Apple finally caved.
Last August a federal judge signed off on a settlement in which Apple agreed to pay $14.8 million to (who knows how many) “make whole” misled customers. And yesterday I got the check for my share. (It’s above.)
In case the print is too small on your screen, here’s a closeup of the, uh, money shot:
Yeah; 49 cents.
Not quite enough for a stamp to send it to the bank.
Some folks did better, though: the lawyers who brought the suit were awarded one-third of the total ($3.7 million) for fees, plus $400,000 for “out-of-pocket” expenses.
The two lawyers had asked for another million plus. They argued, the judge wrote, that
they have “undertaken significant risk, performed enormous amounts of work in a complex case that is in its fourth year, and achieved an excellent result for the Class.” They point to various aspects of the case and settlement to bolster their request. For example, to help establish complexity, they point out that the case “involved 12 expert reports, 10 depositions, 7 adversarial motions, and thousands of pages of complex discovery produced by Apple.” Etc.
The judge wasn’t buying it. He accepted Apple’s contention that they should only get “an ordinary fee award for an ordinary case.”
That’s easy for a trillion dollar company to say. Being an idealist, I’m just gratified that some sort of justice was served. Yet some others caviled. There were something like 1800 comments at the website listing the settlement. Most were like this sample . . .
The ingrates. Those two lawyers worked hard. And somebody has to teach Big Tech a lesson or two.
Me, I was on Cloud 9.
Or rather, Cloud 49.
If that makes any cents.