Underhanded? As a response to the incident they have made it so you can explicitly turn it off, sure. But people trust the phone to make a thousand other decisions on a moment-to-moment basis about the tradeoff between CPU and battery, is it reasonable to call it being "underhanded" when singling out a specific one of them retrospectively? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I know a single person who would choose to trade an hour or two's battery for a 5% CPU bump.

Much like the iPhone 4 reception fiasco. Nothing actually changed reception-wise, except they changed the way they calculated and displayed the signal. But people were now seeing _different_ signal profiles than they expected, and apparently Apple decided (eventually) that changing it back and giving everyone a free case was better marketing that continuing to try and persuade people of that.

It wasn't even trading an hour or two battery for a 5% bump, it was "when you open the camera, the phone rebooted" - or when you did anything else which demanded a short burst of high power the ageing battery could no longer supply. Imagine arguing that you would prefer 'broken phone' instead of 'working slower phone'.

How did we find out about the battery thing?

Haha, you reminded me of the days when some of my friends arguing iPhone's signal wasn't that bad but just could not make the call when everyone else could.