There are certain things Apple does that are user hostile like pushing people to buy cloud storage by neglecting their local backup and local syncing user experiences, but planned obsolescence is definitely not one of them. If you are accusing that person of being biased for Apple then ai am here to tell you that you are definitely being biased again.
> There are certain things Apple does that are user hostile like pushing people to buy cloud storage by neglecting their local backup and local syncing user experiences, but planned obsolescence is definitely not one of them.
They've had their issues there too with irreplaceable batteries (remember this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idVmnvcQnLg), slowing people's older devices to encourage them to buy new ones (I'm aware that apple's got another more "helpful" sounding excuse for that, just as they're aware their actions would drive more upgrades regardless), and using pentalobe screws to make repairing older devices more difficult. They've earned their reputation.
> slowing people's older devices to encourage them to buy new ones (I'm aware that apple's got another more "helpful" sounding excuse for that, just as they're aware their actions would drive more upgrades regardless)
There’s definitely a basis in truth for that, though. It’s not just an excuse.
Years ago when I was dead broke and trying to get my foot in the door as a dev, I was using an iPhone 4 with a worn out battery running a version of iOS prior to the throttling being implemented, and it would frequently shut down entirely with even mild spikes in power requirements at 35% battery and under. It actually made cut me off in the middle of a couple of interview calls and nearly made me miss a couple of others. Had the phone throttled itself to prevent power spikes that wouldn’t have happened.
It's not a helpful sounding excuse. The media blew up that narrative because people felt their phone become slower over time for various reasons, but the reasons your phone would slow down would be a combination of several other factors:
1) Device might get slower due to having more stuff on it (larger indexes, less space, etc)
2) Battery degradation causing throttling of CPU
3) New OS requiring more computing power to run new features making your old phone feel slower.
Saying Apple intentionally slowed down older devices is disingenuous. Yes they did slow down old devices, but only because old devices were more likely to be devices with degraded batteries. What is a fair criticism is that Apple didn't communicate to customers that simply replacing the batteries could fix the issue, or maybe deleting some stuff from your phone.
> Saying Apple intentionally slowed down older devices is disingenuous.
They admitted to exactly that. They were fined millions in euros for it, and paid over half a billion dollars in fines and settlements in the US alone. Apple clearly wasn't confident their justifications would hold in courts, just as they didn't convince regulators overseas.
I'll agree that if they had been honest with users about what they were doing this wouldn't have been an issue at all, but they kept it a secret and even if it genuinely wasn't the original or entire purpose for slowing the devices the people working at apple were smart enough to have realized that slowing the devices would incentivize more users to upgrade and that not disclosing the truth would prevent users from solving the problem themselves by replacing the battery and removing that same incentive.
