> they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone!

You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.

To replace the battery you need to know there's a problem with the battery. But the iPhone didn't tell me the issue was the battery. It happened after a software update if I remember correctly, so I did everything from formatting it to reducing the graphics load by using the accessibility settings... nothing worked. When I went to the nearest Apple store, the guy told me that I should probably get a new one.

I don't blame the guy for recommending a new phone, after all apparently Apple didn't inform all their stores about the change, so they probably had no idea that the fix was a cheap battery replacement.

I think it's equally possible Apple actually didn't know how many phones would be hit by the feature when they launched it.

They knew that old devices (especially common with the well-selling iPhone 6) would fail at peak demand, and wanted to address that, but they probably didn't have an accurate figure of exactly how many devices would be covered by the feature as initially configured.

That it took them as long as it did to react to the resulting situation is unfortunate, but could probably be explained by corporate culture at Apple, they don't generally like to admit mistakes (see the Trash Can Mac Pro press meeting a few years back).

In the end it was just a huge PR fuckup, if they had properly considered how many devices would be affected they would have realised they needed to communicate more clearly, they could have avoided lawsuits and honestly if they had played their cards right from the get go they would probably have received praise instead of backlash, but instead here we are 7 years later still explaining how battery chemistry affects integrated circuits on technical forums.

There was a communication problem, but the main problem was the slow iPhones. I bought the phone and Apple then made it slow and laggy. I wouldn't be here complaining if they added a setting to disable the throttling (which I probably didn't yet need at the time as the phone had never shutdown before the update).