[thebruce87m]

When they originally brought out the feature, it supported the new phones but the OS update was also made available for older models that were outside of warranty since Apple continue to support their hardware years after release. Simply doing nothing and letting the batteries in the older models degrade further would cause them to reboot more and become unusable. Surely this would drive sales more? Isn’t supporting device that are out of warranty the opposite of planned obsolescence?

My wife and I both had iPhones when batterygate happened. Turns out her battery was degraded and mine was fine. She never did get her battery replaced, she was quite happy with the (reduced) performance she had. If it had been randomly rebooting it would have forced her to buy a new model. Instead she just waited until her next upgrade cycle and didn’t care, despite me telling her to get it replaced.

The battery is a consumable part. For my (second hand) iPhone 11 Pro Max it’s a £69 charge to get a new battery. After multiple years of use and two owners this isn’t unreasonable, not that it needs it of course (yet). I’ll still get years more of use out of this phone, and multiple more OS upgrades, all while other manufacturers pump and dump the next version of their handsets. We should be forcing every manufacturer to support handsets for 5 years minimum to save on e-waste.

[fartcannon]

Its a circle of planned obsolescence. Battery gets old, so they degrade phone performance. There's no way for you to change that. They get sued, lose, and maliciously comply by making a switch that maybe causes your phone to reboot randomly. Its all formulated to think, 'I need to replace this'.

Phone manufacturers should be forced to unlock their phones, release drivers and provide user replaceable batteries. Then you can say Apple isn't trying to force you to upgrade.

[thebruce87m]

I don’t follow this logic at all. If they had simply done nothing the phones would have rebooted randomly when the batteries degraded. Why go through the whole process at all if they wanted you to replace the phone? The random brownouts would be annoying enough to make you do that anyway.

There’s a reason this whole thing was dubbed “batterygate” - it was to do with one thing - the battery.