this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Well it is a complicated situation that the media (predictably) reports poorly. Although it's very possible, and even likely, they contacted Apple regarding the issue and received no reply.
On the one hand, Apple did remotely throttle the CPU power on older devices.
On the other hand, they supposedly did so in an effort to preserve battery life.
So what appeared on the surface (and may have been, I dunno, I'm not an electrical engineer) to be Apple just throttling older devices in an effort of planned obsolescence, could be seen as the opposite.
The problem is that they didn't disclose this anywhere or give owners the option to opt out of it.
As an Apple hater, I'm inclined to suspect the planned obsolescence but I'm not going to judge them for this specifically, because I simply don't know, and there more than enough other, less controversial reasons to hate Apple.
My iPhone 6 was nearly unusable until they added in CPU throttling. It would try to draw more current than the battery could provide, which caused the phone to shutdown. Sometimes I would get the same issue during the boot process, which effectively created a boot loop. Resolving this issue was Apple's stated reasoning for implementing the throttling.
I am no Apple fan, but in this case, I think the only thing they did wrong was not communicate what they were doing and not give the user an option to turn throttling on or off.
Honestly, this whole episode screams "Well meaning engineering team fixed a problem, but didn't consider the optics of such a change."
Yeah that's pretty much what I said 🙂
Did it give you any sort of warning that your battery was dying?
Yeah. I did want to reiterate that usability of the phone was the primary driver of the change, not necessarily battery life.
I got no indication of a dying battery other than needing to charge frequently until Apple implemented a battery health feature. That was after they fixed the shutdown issues.
Oh I see my mistake now, thanks for clarifying