[Bud]

No, they do not, and that's an outrageous, silly, completely unsupported accusation.

Apple also does not "intentionally throttle" older iPhones as a "feature of the update" for some sort of nefarious bullshit "planned obsolescence" reason. The opposite is true: Apple reduces the clock speed very very slightly on older iPhones, so that they can be used LONGER and have a LONGER service life. The alternative would be, when the battery is starting to lose capacity, just having the iPhone randomly shut down. This would quite obviously be an inferior outcome for the user, so Apple thoughtfully checks for reduced battery performance in aging devices and reduces clock speed slightly to save power if necessary.

Apple's reward for this? Literally YEARS of bullshit, bad-faith, poorly-researched lying stories in the tech media about how they are supposedly "forcing" users to buy new devices, when in fact, they are enabling iPhones to last even longer. Anyone with any clue knows, of course, that iPhones receive many years more software updates than competing products, and are also in service for years longer than competing products, but somehow, this BS narrative has still taken hold, likely because many folks are lazy, desperate for any excuse to slam Apple, credulous, and don't really care what the truth is.

[salamandersauce]

Because they didn't tell ANYBODY there were doing this. Did they give a pop up explaining that your phone was being throttled because the battery was degraded? No. Did they announce this "feature" at WWDC one year? No. Take your iPhone to a Genius complaining it was slow? Did they recommend you just replace the battery? No, they recommend you buy a new one.

Part of the problem is that Apple stuck too small batteries in their devices for years so they degraded fast. They KNEW they were making the phone slow for users in 2-3 years. Having a slow phone IMO is more of push to replace a phone than a bit worse battery life.

[SilverRed]

The original hate on this was very much justified for the reasons you listed. But these days they now have prompts explaining this and how to resolve it as well as a battery status page you can check any time.

[salamandersauce]

Yes. As result of them getting caught hiding it and being sued.

[IncRnd]

Hopefully, Apple learned from their experience.

By the way, isn't it nice when the hardware manufacturer doesn't degrade performance on failing hardware but instead tells the user?

[Bud]

Honestly, I think the best alternative in this case would have been to degrade performance (btw, it's a very very slight degradation that most users would not even notice in routine use) and also inform the user.

But I agree with you, in that I do hope Apple has learned from this ordeal. I just wanted to speak out against what I see as very unfair, bad-faith attacks.

[FireBeyond]

And yet many many people absolutely noticed it.

[darksaints]

Apple lost it's lawsuit because they throttled phones when they reached a battery health level that was higher than the threshold for warranty replacement. Thousands of users, including myself, had a nearly new phone throttled and so we went to apple and asked them to replace the battery if it was going bad. They wouldn't. And so they got dragged through the mud because they fucking deserved it.

[PolCPP]

Because someone decided it was better to be opaque on the iPhone and do that than do the same thing they had on macs and throw a warning when the battery was on bad state.

At least all the drama ended with having a warning and a toggle for battery status.

[wolpoli]

> Apple reduces the clock speed very very slightly on older iPhones

On an iPhone 6s, the performance decreased by 42%. That's not how I would characterize very very slightly.