They created the problem by hiding it from their users and disempowering them, leaving them no way to control or monitor the compromise between performance and battery life.
All they needed to do was engage with the user. But nooooo, because Apple.
“Do you want your phone to crash because your battery is old - yes or no?”
The issue here was not that the battery life was shorter. It was that the batteries could not deliver enough current to run the processor at full speed. There’s no choice to “empower” the users with.
No, that was not the issue, and "crashing" was never on the table. The issue was that they artificially (and for obvious reasons) made the phone look like it needed to be replaced, when all it needed was a new battery. Key point: this effect kicked in long before the battery became simply unable to run the phone at full speed at all.
Asking the user, "Your phone's battery is no longer meeting its specifications. Do you want to reduce your phone's power usage to provide additional operating time?" would not have been an unreasonable thing to do. Basically the same question the phone already asks when the charge drops below 10%!
This would empower the user to make the same decision with their phone that they would make with any other battery-operated device that is showing its age, from dimming their flashlight to turning down their radio to driving slower.
So? What difference does that make? The battery ages to a certain point, eventually the phone shuts down prematurely. The phone then slows itself down to try to hide the battery loss from the user.
The user is aware of NONE of this. The user thinks, "Darn, time for a new phone already."
Except it's not time for a new phone, it's time for a new battery.
The real question is, why is this OK with you? Why do you, as a user, want less insight and control over your devices? Why carry water for a trillion-dollar company without being paid to?
> No, that was not the issue, and "crashing" was never on the table.
That’s the difference it makes. They were preventing “crashes”. Apple want to you have a working phone so that they can sell you services. They extended the lives of out-of-warranty phones with degraded batteries. They are known for having industry leading support periods for their phones and this is no different.
People like my wife didn’t care that her phone was slower. She cared that it worked. She never bothered to change the battery. She just upgraded when she would have anyway.
I noticed today that her iPhone 8 is in a throttled state. She doesn’t care.
Should they have told the user? Sure. Should they have to pay enormous amounts of money for extending the lives of old hardware? No. Especially when the other manufacturers let their phones rot. Literally doing nothing would have made apple better off and driven more sales due to rebooting handsets.
All they needed to do was engage with the user. But nooooo, because Apple.