Device design is always constrained by the current technology. It isn't impossible to make a phone with current battery tech that doesn't overheat after a year or two of normal use
Apple just pushed design to far and underestimated the cooling/heat dissipation required
Heat had nothing to do with it. The internal resistance of the battery increases as it wears out, lowering the peak output current.
Increased heat when operating near the current limit is a symptom, not a cause. Adding a fan or a chonky heatsink to your iPhone wouldn't magically raise this limit.
I don't believe I ever said heat was the cause, if I did I misphrased my point. Excess heat was absolutely the symptom, but it was a symptom of a design that was pushed beyond the limits of regular operation.
A two year old lithium battery under normal use will hardly degrade at all. Any design that pushed the limits so far that a degredation of a few percent over promised and under delivered. In Apples case it could be remedied with a software update, but that doesn't mean the device held up to the original performance claims over a standard life cycle of device use.
The phone didn’t overheat. That’s just the point. The options were either the phone slows down to keep the phone from shutting off when the battery got weak or the phone shuts off. What was the other alternative?
You keep mentioning cooling / heat - this is the first I’ve ever heard of this in relation to batterygate, and in fact the first I’ve ever heard of any battery “overheating” (generating more heat?) as a result of a normal ageing process - where are you getting this from?
My understanding was that the concerns were related to degraded batteries having a lower voltage potential.
The hardware and software were shipped with performance optimized to the initial voltage curves of the battery. Once that voltage curve decreases slightly the device will either reboot when the processor attempts to run at a higher clock speed than the battery voltage can support, or the battery can technically keep up though begin to overheat as the operating voltage is a higher draw than the battery can safely handle.
Dont get me wrong I'm not aware of any concerns over the phone actuary catching fire like that one generation of Samsung years ago, but the degraded battery would either lead to reboots or excess heat.
