[eridius]

Ok I read it. That "article" states from the very beginning that it's wacky theory. It doesn't even attempt to offer evidence for anything. It's literally just "hey, what does Google Trends show for the search 'iPhone slow'".

Apple has been accused of planned obsolescence before, and the claims have always proven to be complete bullshit. There's a very simple explanation for why people complain about their phones being slow around the time new devices come out, and that's the fact that a new OS is released at the same time (as your link even states), and it's very common for new OS's to not perform as well on old hardware as the previous OS. This is partially because the new OS typically adds more functionality, which takes computing resources to use, and partially because the new OS is predominately only tested on new and current-gen hardware, and not tested much on older hardware. This is very well-known, and it affects pretty much every computing product ever. The only reason you're not really seeing this with Android phones is because a) new Android phone releases don't correlate with OS upgrades, and b) most Android phone users either don't or can't upgrade to the latest OS anyway.