The idea I’m arguing against is that Apple either did nothing or purposefully made it worse. They tried to fix one bad problem (random shutdowns) and it caused a different, although less severe, problem.
Apples move to retard performance to keep the phone from suddenly dying was a GOOD move. It wasn’t a scam as some others have claimed.
But obviously they should have communicated to the user that they knew there was a battery issue.
It is a scam if they're not making it clear to the users why their phone is suddenly being slowed down. The fact is, even if battery issues are a perfectly fine reason to be doing this, by not making that clear to users and instead leaving them in the dark with a now extremely slow phone (Just in time for their new releases!) they are scamming their users.
If you took your car into a dealership, and instead of telling you that you had a bad battery (That they've known was already going bad in similar cars) they told you that they don't know what's wrong with it, but that they have lots of other cars you can buy, would you consider that a scam? I certainly would.
Why is apple the only company with this problem?
It’s the only one people care about enough. Apple gets a major "scandal" almost each year about something that affects every single smartphone company on the planet. Think of the antenna-gate or the bending issues. Lots of non-Apple phones have shown these issues, and the random shutdowns are no exception [1].
[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/12/20/some-nexus-6ps-have-...
(updated to add a link)
It's all about expectations.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cz2ghoxghk3&sort=byPopularity&...
If Apple hadn't redlined the CPU to hit benchmarks the battery wouldn't have been in such a poor state to need to be shut down/throttled so early in its lifecycle.
They are 100% to blame this situation and have taken the least consumer focused choice up until this point.
That doesn’t seem like a reasonable solution.
But if it is that reasonable than surely there is a long list of electronic devices that do such a thing...
The implication that I keep getting from people seems to be that Apple is running their phones at 140% and when the battery can’t keep up they then slow it down to make up for the CPU being underprovisioned on battery.
I think it’s far more likely that Apple is running the phone at 100% of what it was designed for. When the battery ages they were running into problems with the phones having to shut themselves down (perhaps the newer chips were more sensitive to power fluctuations?) so they’ve started throttling to under 100%.
In a desktop analogy: I don’t think this is the equivalent of some company selling overclocked CPUs and lying about how fast they were. I think this is closer to a case of the computers just ended a clogged with lots of dust and had to throttle to prevent serious damage after a few years.
Obviously they should’ve told the user but I don’t think they set out from a malicious standpoint.
Note that this problem only occurred on devices where Apple fully designed the chips (iPhone 6 and later). "Off the shelf" chips, and those used for Android, simply have a lot more of a voltage window.
On the whole I don’t think this would have caused anyone to spend money they wouldn’t have otherwise. Perhaps they would have stayed with their phone longer.
It’s hard to tell, and this is certainly worse than if they had just told people about the battery in the first place (although I imagine THAT would’ve become a scandal two).