> What about those of us that already paid to have the battery replaced?

Devil’s advocate: one doesn’t complain if they buy something the day before it goes on sale at a store. It’s just bad luck.

But this is intended as an apology, not a sale. Apologies don't come with big asterisks if they want to be taken seriously. And PacketPaul's experience was even worse because the reps did not believe his story. You can always take to twitter if you want to get something like this fixed, however.

Actually, you do complain and then get the store to match it or use your credit card price protection.

Or just go to the cashier and tell them you want to return it and buy it again at the discounted price. They don't even make you walk to pick a new one.

If you had it replaced in an Apple Store I'm guessing they'll make it right for you. Call the store and tell the automated system you want to speak to a manager. It'll get you to a real person and given the PR around this issue I'd be surprised if they didn't give you something of at least this much value.

What about the people who bought new phones because of performance issues?

Your issue wasn't because of a faulty battery though, it was normal battery degradation. You would have had to pay for a new battery in any case. If it was less than a month ago you might want to try to press them to refund the difference, but otherwise you did get a tangible benefit from the new battery in the time since you replaced it, so there's a cost for that.

Normally degraded batteries are still usable at 50% charge. If the remaining capacity was truly unavailable they should not have been displaying a fictitious state of charge. But of course, then the pitchforks would be out right away with no chance of hiding this slick way to force upgrade sales.

The real reason why they implemented this extreme method of "protecting" the battery is that they are deathly afraid of what will happen when these older batteries are fully discharged.

This happened regularly on all my laptops, though, so it doesn't surprise me it was happening to people's phones. Reported percentage was based on design capacity instead of last-full capacity, and shifted so 100% is "Full". So when the percentage reaches right about the point where all that's left is the degraded part of the battery, it suddenly jumps to about 3%.

(Since figuring that out almost a decade ago, I've been using my own battery-monitor script to see both percentage and health, so it's easy to see what's going on and just how bad my battery has gotten. Maybe the default notifications are better now?)

Go to Apple and ask them to refund the difference. If you got it replaced at an Apple store, they'll have it all logged and will do this if it matches the issue being described.