It shows a lack of respect for their users, and for their users money.
They are charging the same for almost two years old hardware than they would if It had been updated, but the user gets a worst product, and in the long run, experience.
Apple has a ~40% profit margin, and you think them not updating their HW specs in a timely fashion is what shows they don't have respect for their users money?
the solution to the problem was the correct one, they just forgot one important detail.
TELL THE USER!
As a result, plenty of people, (including myself) noticing their two year phone starting to slow down quite a bit, decided to upgrade to the new and shiny model, instead of just replacing the battery, because who would have known that was the problem?!
Yes, there should've been a "your battery has degraded" alert with information on implications and how to fix it. Apple was wrong to do it silently and without warning.
They did issue a mea culpa and free replacement coverage in response to that criticism, but it took a while.
Well, they did, in the software update notes for the version that introduced this change. I do agree that they could (and should) have been quite a bit more prominent though.
If you were still a runner, or did any type of sport with decent training, you would still be using Garmin or equivalent.
Apple watch just doesn't cut it. I own both (AW2 and Garmin 735xt) and I gave up trying to use the AW for any of the sports that I do. (Running, swimming, biking, gym, Triathlon)
I'm not an outdoor runner anymore, I have a home gym. But the only thing the Garmin did for me was measure my pace and distance. It wasn't any more or less accurate than my iPhone at the time (around 2010), it was more convenient.
If you train any sport with any kind of seriousness you usually end up needing more advanced training features, like HR pacing, zones training, intervals for speed workouts, cadence..
There is no way to do all that properly with an Apple Watch as of today.
Not to mention the pain that is to wait for the screen to turn on to see if you are running at the proper pace/HR vs a Garmin watch.
Because it was found out that they were doing the battery thing. If not, he and everyone else would have continued suffering a poor experience without knowing that it was a battery problem, or bought a new iPhone.
I know that’s what happened to me with my 6s at least.
My beef with the popular narrative on this isn't that Apple shouldn't be criticized for the way they handled it -- it's that what they did that was wrong seems to me to be terrible communication, not some kind of nefarious plan to make everyone buy new phones.
People seem to be tacitly dismissing the problem the CPU throttling ostensibly fixes -- iPhones with worn batteries just shutting down instantly without warning when an application asks for more power than the battery's now capable of delivering -- but I've experienced it. It's a real problem. And while it's a subjective call as to whether that's more infuriating than CPU throttling is, I can tell you, it's really infuriating. And it's not some kind of crazy only-Apple thing; it's a problem with battery technology. It happens with Android phones, too, and their "solution" is what Apple's was until they rolled out the throttling: nothing. Eventually you figure out you have a battery problem because your phone keeps spontaneously shutting down! Yay.
If we're going to criticize Apple for this, maybe it should be for making this change without notifying users. The iPhone can presumably determine when its battery is sufficiently worn that it's facing the choice between CPU throttling and spontaneous shutdowns, and it should let the user know when it crosses that line.
But the notion that Apple is deliberately crippling phones to get you to buy new ones faster has always been...odd. They do want you to buy new phones, to be sure, but they want you to buy new phones from them. If you stop trusting them, you're less likely to going to do that, unless you're very heavily "into" the Apple ecosystem -- which most consumers arguably aren't. (At least half my friends with iPhones rarely install applications other than Spotify, Telegram, and the occasional game -- and I live in Silicon Valley. These folks aren't Mac users, either, and so I suspect they don't feel very much lock-in pressure at all.)
They are charging the same for almost two years old hardware than they would if It had been updated, but the user gets a worst product, and in the long run, experience.