If some or all of these lawsuits move forward, I dearly hope that the prosecuting attorneys use significantly better arguments than those in this thread, otherwise they are going to have their clocks cleaned. In particular amongst those of the "planned obsolescence" faction. If I could sum up the same few dozen people's arguments in these threads it'd go like this:
(1) I buy a new phone every year
(2) I wouldn't decide that on my own because I'm "different" than the hundreds of millions of people who buy them because they want one
(3) My phone slows down every year as I upgrade iOS
(4) Apple "got caught" managing batteries in such a way that may slow down my phone in certain situations
(5) Since my phone is slow, and battery management might slow it down, that's the reason it's slow.
(6) Since Apple didn't tell me that Power Management (which usually means throttling something back in certain situations) can equal Throttling Something Back In Certain Situations, and since no one writes poor iOS applications (wink, wink, nudge, nudge Facebook), and because the only reason a newer version of iOS would perform slowly on any phone is because Apple wants me to buy a new phone, Apple is clearly coercing me to buy a new one.
(7) So I bought a new iPhone
(8) Repeat 1-7 every year
(9) I'm a victim and I deserve something, like a new phone, or at least to slap Apple.
You know, anything's possible, and it could be true that Tim, Eddie & crew are cackling to themselves in an evil laugh at how pathetically easy it is to get people to do stupid things, but planned obsolescence is going to be remarkably difficult to prove (and no, this isn't the same as the iBooks case). And the above (admittedly tongue-n-cheek) logic flow won't work.
I feel for people who have slow phones or who's batteries drain quickly or have other performance related issues. I've had some of those same issues on my 6S+ over the last couple of years. It's not fun. In my case, it wasn't evil Apple trying to get me to buy a new phone, just poorly written code (Facebook, Skype for Business, etc). My 6S+ also shows this throttling when I run Geekbench at different charge levels. Fortunately, because my phone experience seems to be the same (watch movies, edit photos, movies, music, airplay, etc) regardless of my charge level, I haven't needed to get my pitchfork and torch and go running out of my village hut. Others' day-to-day experience may be different and if it can be shown that it is because of the power management changes, maybe a simpler and cheaper solution is to have the company tweak the algorithms.
Just a thought. Creating a big payday for the prosecuting lawyers seems such a waste of money.
