Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the response they gave after years of flat-out denials? You may not consider that the same thing as lying, but it's in the same family.

The "battery slowdown" was only in place for a year or so before it was widely known.

Not really. Based on your follow-up responses, it seems that you're conflating the slowdown on older hardware running new software versions (which is standard with any software update as new features will never run as quickly on older hardware as they would on new hardware) with the throttling done for older batteries. This wasn't done intentionally to slow down the devices so that people would buy newer models it was done for the opposite reason - to extend the daily longevity of phones whose batteries were nearing an efficiency target where they would require service. The mistake Apple made was not directly stating that this was being done to conserve battery life as the alternative was for the phones to simply shut down completely.

> I don't believe so - I don't think they ever explained that older phones were being throttled, but I don't think they denied it in the face of accusations, did they?

My memory is that it was common knowledge for several years that upgrading the OS to a version more than 3-4 years past the hardware release would cause a dramatic performance hit. For as long as I had access to an iphone, that was a known issue, as in, many people with older iphones would agree, any apple forum would have topics about it. Maybe it got more press coverage in the year leading up to the admission. Maybe there were multiple factors and the one they admitted became prominent in that year.

Oh sure, newer versions of iOS used to slow things down, but there are two separate issues.

1. Do increasingly heavy OS releases slow older machines (yes. Though ios12 has reversed this trend.)

2. Does iOS deliberately throttle older machines.

The latter is the particular issue. It relates to 2 or 3 iPhone models with only when they have dodgy batteries, so I don’t think the accusation of generally nerfing old phones really holds.

I do agree, however that Apple absolutely should have made it clear what was happening. Very poor communication, but not, I think malicious

Fair points

Lying by omission is lying in my book.

You are right but arguing semantics. They kept the same battery life true but they did this by slowing the phones below the specs they advertised, thats plain lying.

It took a year of people calling them out before they admitted it. True they never admitted to lying, but they did admit the year long omission, they just claimed it as a feature, classy.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/21/apple-adm...

But is omission lying by common industry sense?

You have batteries that decay and processors that scale; It's a feature of the processor that it scales down to protect the battery. If they were the only one in the industry that did it, or it didn't make longevity and safety sense, then maybe not mentioning "we prevent your device from randomly dying or catching on fire as much as the next device" is normal.

I don't see many devices using lipo that sell the feature "we prevent your device from catching on fire by killing it"; though they hopefully all have thermal shutoffs.

I'm not arguing semantics. I'm arguing that they weren't lying. They never stated that they weren't lowering the clock speed when the batteries started to degrade. This may be poor communication on their part but it's not like they ever denied that they were actively doing something to prevent phones from shutting off when they couldn't maintain the power levels needed. Nearly every other manufacturer also does this and those that don't suffer from batteries that shut off randomly or catch fire. It's an issue that's just a physical limitation of battery technology right now.

The word "lying" to me (whether by omission or not) insinuates that the intent was malicious and used to cover up or misstate something with the purpose of misleading consumers. That's not what happened here. The intent wasn't malicious but, rather, to extend the lifetime of batteries that, because of the laws of thermodynamics and physics, were getting to the point where they couldn't sustain performance. They absolutely should have communicated somehow that this was the reason they were doing this but they never denied that this is what was happening because it was assumed that this was common knowledge for LiPo batteries.

I’m not disagreeing one could argue “lying by omission”, but

> they did this by slowing the phones below the specs they advertised

What specs are you referring to here? Apple doesn’t publish processor speed “specs”.