>This was not a secret and support people recommended it if you actually contacted them.

False. The retail and support staff were not informed of the throttling. See my other comment.

True, as personally witnessed.

Besides your singular anecdote, do you have any evidence that frontline staff were notified of throttling? Everything that's come out so far says otherwise. It's a key part of the class action lawsuit to which Apple agreed to settle.

It's possible that some staff deduced that replacing the battery would help, based on personal observations, but they were never advised by corporate to do this as policy. As such, the vast majority of them were not recommending battery replacements.

You must have got lucky.

But they did, though? I got an email telling me my battery was part of a replacement program before this throttling "scandal" broke. I had it replaced for free in Vienna (phone was bought in Australia) in 45 minutes. I had noticed the throttling taking place but it wasn't until the email that I knew about the fault.