Apple had a call to make: Inform the users of the battery issue, or deny the issue and reap extra sales from iPhone replacements. That's not an 'engineering trade-off' but a ripoff.

The throttling here was so bad, the phones were completely unusable during the throttling. Sure, the operating system was running but doing basic tasks like using Apple maps or even sending a message would be effectively impossible. Imagine trying to play a video game at 2 frame per second. Unusable.

The real decision was that Apple didn't want to pay for millions of battery replacements, so Apple came up with a "software" fix for a hardware problem... Except that the software fix made the phone unusable.

They should have communicated the change, in case that qualification is needed.

I don't appreciate being called a liar, especially about an issue that personally effected me to the point I left the Apple ecosystem for years. (I gave up my iPhone before the revelations, but I am 100% sure in retrospect I was being throttled)

I think you'd have to be knowingly looking the other way to take this so positively. Telling someone that what they said "isn't true" is analogous to calling them a liar.

I did not mean to call you a liar. I'm sorry about that. However, you were wrong that anyone with experience would agree with you.

Apple chose #2, which is best for customers, and got forced to pay $113M from it. It's ridiculous.

edit: and I'm reading that this would happen within the warranty period. It's best for customers to keep them from getting their device fixed during the warranty period.

You're missing out the part where they did not inform the user why their device was being throttled and nor did their internal tooling inform the genius that a simple battery change can fix the issue.

This is what they did in the end, and is the state of affairs today. It's transparent, fair and honest.