this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I know I’m going to get downvoted to oblivion here, and people love to hate on Apple. But this was in response to older phones with old batteries sometimes not being able to keep up with the demands of the latest iOS and features and unexpectedly shutting down. So they would “dampen” the demands to keep them running.
We want to keep our old phones forever but we also want them to do the stuff that the latest phones can do. Something has to give.
This is litigation culture run rampant.
At the same time, they could have been more obvious about it. Quietly doing that in the background seems like they're deliberately making what would be an otherwise mostly-usable device worse, so you buy a new one.
Something like popping a warning saying "Battery has degraded, would you like to reduce performance to extend battery life?" would have been better, letting the users choose to either replace the battery, and/or downrate the performance. Either way, doing it quietly was going to be a PR disaster when it came out.
I honestly think they didn’t disclose it precisely because there was no malicious intent behind it. It was something they did to extend the useful life of the phone, and I don’t think it occurred to them that it would be seen negatively.
It also doesn’t make sense as a shady tactic to spur phone upgrades because you can always just get a battery replacement to restore the original performance. You don’t need a new phone, just a new battery.