But that was to stop them restarting because the battery wasn't powerful enough after being so old. Android phone makers barely remember they made a phone 3 days after they stop selling it
They mucked up the delivery, but the feature that patch provided to the iPhone 6 and up is really great. It's just most people don't know enough about how electronics behave under unstable voltages that they only see the top layer of "Apple made my phone slow!", and ignore the fact that what Apple did was to ensure that the phone could continue working (albeit a little slower) even though its battery had degraded.
What they should have done is include the toggle from day one, clearly explained why the feature was built, and then presented users with a prompt to enable it if the phone detected it may be necessary. Shoving it down peoples throats just made for terrible optics and "planned obsolescence" was a very well fitting and easy explanation in the absence of the real one that few understood.
Like, people still talk about it like it was a bad thing, see this thread for evidence, and this is one of the places where I would expect to find one of the largest concentrations of people that do understand what that patch did and why it was necessary.
No, Apple got sued because they deserved to get sued. At no point did they do what courts determined would have been the right thing, which was to tell the user to get a new battery. And make 50% margins or what have you, that kind of profit, like what they get for their chargers, that would have been fine. They did not want to do that.
I mean I'm just voicing my own opinion here, and I respect yours and even agree with you on some level. Apple has been charging through the nose for battery replacement for a long time, though at the time all this happened (or shortly after at least) they did have a very good battery replacement program, and they recently announced a new replacement parts program which hopefully ends up doing some good on that front, but we'll see.
Personally I think it's pretty great to know that I can use my iPhone even with a degraded battery and not have it shut down unexpectedly.
I've had both iPhones and Androids do that in the past, often in cold weather and during bursts of high load (like on a chairlift at a ski resort, which my example here is based on).
Cheap battery replacements, the option to disable the "feature", etc, only happened after they were sued.
The idea was good, but it was implemented in a way that created issues for some users (eg: my iPhone 5 being sluggish all the time) and benefited Apple as most users would simply buy a new iPhone because no one knew what was going on.
Yeah plus their geniuses, lol like every one of their entry level employees won a Nobel prize in order to become a sales clerk, were scripted into shunting customers to buying new iPhones. Oh oh the gadget is fucky? Hmm what could possibly motivate such a malfunction? Oh I did just so happen to witness one customer, very peculiar, the device was clearly rotten. Happens after one year. I'm afraid a new battery, which MAY SEEM AT FIRST GLANCE like the OBVIOUS SOLUTION, but COUNTERINTUITIVELY is not, will not work. You need a new battery, but as a part of a comprehensive unit, complete with a new CPU, a new screen, a new chassis, in short, a new thing of every part of this device. You need a new device.
It's not just battery decay. It's also MORE software forced into the phone via updates, requiring more resources. You can't opt out of new features while getting the security fixes.
Apple messed up the explanations and messaging on that incident big-time, but I'm convinced that they made the correct engineering tradeoff, and I feel like not enough people (even techies) really understood and appreciated that.
As this thread illustrates, a phone is a life-saving device. The priority must be to function when you absolutely need it. You will literally die if you can't call for help when you're stuck in a blizzard and need to call for a rescue.
Apple slowing down phones with weak batteries so that the CPU always has enough juice and doesn't crash is 100% the right engineering tradeoff for a life-saving device.
The last thing you need when you're bleeding out on the kitchen floor and dialing 911 is for your battery to not supply enough power and then force a phone restart or worse when seconds are counting down.
The idea was good, but the implementation was terrible. It slowed down some phones a lot (my iPhone 5 was always lagging), there was no information about the feature, no setting to disable it, etc.
I actually started to hit this problem on my iPhone 5S. Not the slow down but the original issue that caused Apple to slow down phones. Old batteries that were really degraded would cause the phones to just die and shut off when the CPU had a spike in usage. I'm sure thats not great for the file system when that keeps happening. However it must be noted that it only started to occur after the phone was 5 years old and the battery had dropped to about 50% of its original design capacity. In fact this was one the reasons I eventually upgraded the phone...that plus I got a new job so it was time to finally upgrade the iPhone 5S to something better (a 1st gen iPhone SE ha ha). I could have just replaced the battery and continued using the 5S for another 1-2 years (as it had 1-2 more years of software updates from what I recall).
The 5s has been given security patches for iOS 12, the last being September 23rd.
That's 8 years of support if it's the last. It was the first 64-bit ARM phone, and the first to have a Secure Enclave, so it might be a bit of a favourite child.
Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones - BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724