They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
This is all sound and well and well-known, which is why you design in a safety factor so that you have plenty of margin even at end of life.
Why didn't they? Since no internal Apple discussions surface, I can just speculate it's either,
* incompetence, they didn't anticipate this
* cost-driven decision, despite Apple products being top-dollar devices and even low-range devices work better in this aspect
* design-driven decision, larger battery would mean a larger device
I think they just got a bad batch of batteries or were too aggressive cost optimizing and this was the fix. 5&6 era iPhones never had this problem and their batteries degraded just the same.
Just missing out on such a basic thing is a bit boggling to me. My iphone 4 was working pretty good though, but I was also mostly in the inner city where connectivity is good to begin with.
Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges.
The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.
It's a really good question. Let's think about it.
As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product.
Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more unshaken is my confidence in the product.
So I guess it comes down to this: when a product fails, would you prefer to react with "wow, how unexpected" or "figures"?