What design defect? Batteries deteriorate as they age and the found a way to extend the life of old devices by detecting and Preventing spikes caused by those old batteries that would end the device life altogether. You just have to love how the are forced to apologize for allowing customers to keep their devices longer. Instead of letting the die naturally. People are getting weird these days. It’s like the reason Mcdonalds doesn’t allow managers to feed the homeless with food they are throwing away at the end of the night. They would be legally responsible if the choked on a French Fry the gave them.
This is nonsense.
And it also sounds like you don't actually know what caused the issue which led to throttling.
The batteries themselves didn't cause "spikes". what happened is that when the CPU would spike it's performance requirements, it would draw more current from the battery than the battery was capable of. Leading to random shut downs of the device.
When a manufacturer specs a battery, they must take into account these maximum performance spikes that can draw out high sudden "jolts" of current from the battery. Apple attempted to provide insufficient overhead to the current available in their batteries, so that within 6 months to a single year, device batteries would have deteriorated to the point where there was not enough current. While battery wear does occur, for many, 1-2 years of owning a device before this happening is generally considered unacceptable.
Apples response was to institute a cap on the CPU performance based on maximum available current, so that as the battery continued to age, the phone would continue to slow down.
While I think it's agreeable that a slow phone is better than a phone that completely shuts down, Apple was not forthcoming initially on telling people this. They outright lied when asked initially if they throttle old devices. Then when irrefutable proof came out showing the throttled devices, They claimed "but we told everyone in patch notes!". The patch notes never mentioned throttling of the CPU, only "battery management"
it's considered a flaw because any phone designer who is trying to make a device that lasts overspeccs the batteries so that the need to throttle due to current overdraw doesn't occur till much later in the phones life.
it became even a bigger kerfuffle when not only did Apple initially lie, But they also didn't inform genius's or the stores what was going on. The battery tests they provided the stores did not test for maximum battery draw, only how much "gas" was in the tank. This lead to many people having batteries that passed the Apple tests, but were being throttled due to the untested component. These users were often told that they needed to replace their phone. Battery replacements were also routinely rejected by apple (even if customer was willing to pay) because it 'passed' those tests.
I can honestly accept the design flaw. it happens. it's not like they were exploding or catching fire
😛. But it's how Apple tried to bury, lie and refused to accept responsibility while behaving unethically that pissed off a lot of people. It's that position that is incredibly disingenuous to defend. And defending Apple's behaviour in this is extremely anti-consumer.
