Heh. I can't blame them for doing this, but not telling people what's happening (and why) was the big mistake.

People generally want their gadgets to be as lightweight as possible, cheap as possible, last as long as possible, and be reliable. There's tradeoffs in balancing those. eg: overbuilding the battery to make the device run longer in the face of degradation adds weight, size, and cost. Somebody has to make a call on where the balance should be.

What nobody really talks about in the context of device longevity is wear levels in the onboard flash. A battery replacement or three doesn't extend that clock. It's pretty good but it doesn't last forever. This is more of an issue on devices with smaller amounts of flash storage with a lot more storage churn.

One nice thing HN has taught me is that I should be wary of anti-Apple claims like this. Inevitably someone comes along to add context or explain what's actually going on, and 9 times out of 10 it turns out that Apple's solution wasn't unreasonable at all.

Which isn't to say that things like the 30% app store cut is entirely defensible, though you can certainly make some halfway plausible claims in that direction (based mostly on how retail works, especially at the time iPhones were invented). Or sideloading. There are legitimate gripes. But a lot of crap spewed regularly on HN turns out to be exactly that, crap.

It has nothing to do with overheating. It is battery ageing. The internal resistance of a battery increases as it ages, leading to brownouts when peak current happens.

The throttling feature still exists in iOS. All that’s changed is that you will be made aware that it’s happening and you can switch it off if you prefer a brownout when your battery is degraded.

Other manufacturers are happy to let your handset reboot, it could lead to another sale for them. Some would call that planned obsolescence.

It's not a fundamental design flaw, this will happen with every device that ships with a modern rechargeable battery.

Android does the exact same thing now, but I don't see people boycotting Google over it.

The problem was that Apple didn't communicate this to the user. People didn't know why their phone was slow.

So that's every device with rechargeable batteries then.

Have you found a new battery technology where that is mid the case?