> Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story.

I can vouch for this. My iPhone 6 was under 2 years old and had 82% battery health according to the Apple diagnostics when I experienced the unexpected shutdowns.

The shutdowns were frequent (at least once per day) and, because the phone had to be plugged in before it could be restarted, were incredibly frustrating.

I took it to an Apple Store. The Genius refused to acknowledge any fault. They ran the diagnostics which showed 82% and refused to replace the battery, even if I paid, as it was above their 80% threshold for replacement.

I spoke to the manager, and they stood firm. No replacement, even if I paid. I was extremely persistent and they simply would not budge.

The throttling resolved my shutdown problem.

That's very strange, I had an opposite experience twice with my original SE (Apple store in NYC).

It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty.

Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced.

I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log the shutdowns at the time. But I find it extremely confusing why different Apple stores would have such different policies or manager discretion.

The experience I described was in Oct 2016.

I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe there was any battery charge history (at least not accessible to users) in iOS at the time?

In any event, I am not sure the unexpected shutdowns would have manifested themselves as sudden reductions in charge. Once restarted, the iPhone reported a similar charge to before the shutdown.

All of these anecdotes are hard because people tend to leave out or forget key details.

I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.

The experience I described was in Oct 2016, before the iOS update in Feb 2017 which introduced the throttling, and fixed the unexpected shutdowns for me.

At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc.

I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.

They are correct in a sense that it was doing it "without notice". But they had a good reason to do the slowdowns, no malice needed, their one and only big mistake here was doing it without a notice.

The reason they did it was to prevent battery degradation and bad battery life by throttling the CPU. Except back then, iPhone CPUs weren't overperforming monsters they are today, so the slowdown was fairly noticeable. And when done without a notice or reason, you get a perfect publicity shitstorm.

In fact, this feature actually still exists for iPhones, except it now officially exists in settings and can be disabled. It throws a notification on yours screen and auto-activates if your battery degrades below certain level, but it can be disabled (so you can choose whether to prioritize performance or preventing battery from further degradation) by a simple click in a settings menu. And it also explains exactly and in very simple language what this feature does. It isn't hidden behind a million menus either, it is right there in settings => battery => battery health.

EDIT: to clarify, Apple throttling was not only done to prevent it from holding less charge due to battery degradation. Battery degradation to a certain level also led to iPhones rebooting randomly. And apparently it was not that rare of an issue, because the reason I posted this edit in the first place was due to seeing more than a few comments in this thread mentioning that it had happened to them.

Karunamon made a very specific claim in this thread that I quoted. Your response doesn't discuss this claim. I'm interested in what data we have backing that claim.

Nothing you'll be interested in, only very many stories of people taking their phones in once the throttling news dropped (IIRC, with accompanying geekbench scores showing the effect quantifiably), and being told to pound sand. A couple are downthread.

Besides, it's not as if this is a strange policy. Apple never has arbitrarily replaced phone parts by user request, even with cash in hand, unless the techs could point to a specific problem. Try walking into an Apple store today and ask for a new screen without an obvious problem.. you will not get one.

Your quote mentioned "without notice", which was responded to. I would also like to see a response to this part of the quote:

> and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).

I’ve described my experience of this elsewhere in the comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25144761