It‘s not. Instead it‘s the only reasonable way to deal with degrading batteries - a limitation all manufacturers have to deal with. Apple opted to prevent unexpected shutdowns by slightly throttling performance - the correct decision for most users, but they didn‘t tell the user about it, which of course serves as a great excuse for colorful, exaggerated headlines like the one in your linked article.
And you can get a replacement battery for $70. I got one for my 6s after two years before the whole batterygate thing started because it wasn’t holding a charge. Between my son and I, we kept it for four years. The only reason I didn’t keep it for another year was because I wanted a larger phone with a larger battery.
I literally linked an article that says they've had to settle for half a billion (!) because Apple did this without informing the users they were doing it. And Apple had an obvious financial incentive to not mention it to users. People found out almost by accident that their phones were still working well, except for a part that is replaceable (and much cheaper than a new phone).
In what world is this not a valid example of planned obsolescence?
Mistake? They made the decision to slow down devices without telling users and profited from that decision.
My iPhone 5 became slower after 1-2 years. If the battery was bad, I never noticed it (no shutdowns or anything like that). It coincided with a new iPhone and iOS version... I tried every trick, from formatting the phone to reducing animations. Then I found a thread on Apple forums about this and someone was suggesting getting a new phone!
I did buy a new phone (OnePlus One) and it's still working after ~5 years. The battery doesn't last as long, but it doesn't die when I receive a call or play a game.
Because of this, that iPhone 5 was my first and last iPhone.
It slowed down the phone a lot, not "slightly". I wasn't asked if I wanted the slow down, there was no way of disabling it, Apple didn't acknowledge it, and I had no reason to believe the battery was in a bad state.
Last year I upgraded from a mid-range phone which was almost 4 years old. It didn't have any "slow down" feature and it never shutdown, so as you can imagine, I'm not willing to give Apple a pass here.
The iOS 14 runs great on my iPhone 7. it will also run on the 6S, or the 2016 iPhone SE. The new SE will probably get OS updates for around 5 years or so.
From the article, "It said the lithium-ion batteries in the devices became less capable of supplying peak current demands, as they aged over time.
That could result in an iPhone unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
So, it released a software update for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE which "smoothed out" battery performance."
The alternative is that Apple could tell the user the phone battery was going bad, so they'd buy a new battery rather than a new iPhone. The other alternative is that Apple could test the battery and apply the throttling only when appropriate (rather than generically over entire models). Weirdly, both decisions contributed to Apple's bottom line. What an odd coincidence.
All apple devices I’ve used in the past years tell you when the battery is degraded to the point it needs replacement. However, especially iPhones can be in situations where the battery may still be fine for most usage, but still not be good enough to support the required power draw - for example when it’s cold outside (aka winter). I much prefer my phone to slow down in these situations over shutting down as earlier versions did.
Apple denied for years there was a slowdown of old devices under any circumstances. By not telling users, Apple encouraged users to buy new devices rather than new batteries, fraud in the moral sense (if maybe technically not in the legal sense).
They did not slow down the battery “generically over entire models”. They slowed it down when the battery was degraded. Wouldn’t it be much easier for Apple just not to issue OS updates for older phones if they wanted to encourage users to get new phones?
Making units more disposable makes perfect commercial sense. Making them overtly more disposable might figure out into customer decisions which would be bad for profits. Better be subtle about it.
In that regard, not slowing down the devices with degraded batteries would have been substantially better. The behavior before was substantially more annoying: The phone would just shut down.
That would have led to bad publicity. Worse, people could have figured out by themselves the batteries were the problem. The trick is to annoy users, not make their workflow entirely impossible, and than to give them misleading advice so they'd buy a new phone.
