> why not do nothing and let the phones reboot

Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.

With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.

With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.

> Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern

They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.

The whole discussion is incredibly moot, because Apple should be shipping devices with more easily replaced batteries.

The degradation would still happen. You want your car to go into limp home mode even if the part that failed is replaceable.

This issue would still have drastically different framing if the given reason was true and users had the freedom to easily replace batteries in old devices, as well as OS-level warning pop-ups which let the user know that it's time to replace a battery and that their phone will be slower until they do.

Anything less is deceptive and anti-user.

If it was true? All the evidence supports it. My wife’s phone was throttled and mine wasn’t. Replacing degraded batteries brought devices back to full speed. How can you draw any other conclusions?

The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.

It's quite easy to draw the conclusion that other alternatives were considered such as an easily-replaced battery, but Apple's management decided on a course of action which was plausible enough to be accepted without much further questioning, and wouldn't give the user back any freedoms, and would ultimately lead to more phone sales.

I don’t subscribe to that at all. I see other manufacturers dropping support for their phones after one or two years and I see apple supporting them for a long time. They want to sell services and they want you to have a working phone to use them.

Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.