[matthew28845]

Purism is insinuating that the primary reason why Apple throttled phones was to force you onto a new one, which is false. I think most people would rather have a phone that runs slow than a phone that randomly shuts off (increasing the lifespan compared to doing nothing and making people think their phone was broken.) Where Apple went wrong was not telling anyone they were throttling their devices, and not letting you force them to run at full power (which they changed later after the media backlash.)

[fsflover]

> primary reason why Apple throttled phones was to force you onto a new one, which is false

If you believe Apple's marketing, it's false. If you look at customers' reaction, it's likely true. There were a lot of complains after every update, and the only known solution was to buy a new phone.

[acdha]

Or replace the battery. I had one of the affected phones and it performed exactly the same with a new battery as it had with the original one during the first couple of years.

[fsflover]

The whole point of the class action lawsuit is that most people didn't know this.

[acdha]

That’s not the claim which Purism made or which is being repeated in this thread – because there’s obviously limited marketing value in saying “battery health used to be hard to tell on our competitor’s device but it’s been easy for over 6 years”.

[fsflover]

Reread my above comment. The effective result of Apple's action is forcing people to buy next phone.

[acdha]

Yes, that’s the claim Purism is using in their marketing but it’s predicated on the reader not checking the details and realizing that to the extent it was ever true, it was limited to a short period of time in 2017 between when the battery management behavior changed and when the UI warnings were added.

It’s also worth noting that multiple government investigations and lawsuits have failed to turn up any evidence supporting the conspiratorial claims about forced updates.

I know that Purism’s marketing strategy has to be convincing you to buy a product which is inferior on many counts but I think it’s a mistake to do things like this attacking their competitors because the “free is better” framing is fundamentally about trust. If they’re dishonest about something we can easily assess, how much can we trust the claims they’re making about things which are much harder to prove?