Posted by Michael Gilligan on 04/01/2019 19:07:28:
To be fair … it's simply a statement of fact, to say that the performance of rechargeable batteries diminishes over time.
If you can supply a rechargeable battery that lasts forever … The world will beat a path to your door !!
MichaelG.
Yes, it would certainly be very unfair to castigate a company purely on the strength of its rechargeable batteries having undergone a reduction in performance over time.
In Apple's case, however, the crux of the complaint was not that their batteries underwent a scarcely avoidable reduction in performance over time but that the company incorporated in their phones an automatic CPU slowdown in response to reduced battery performance yet did not communicate the fact that they had done this to users. The deliberate and unexplained slowing down by Apple of CPUs will inevitably have led some users to think, “my phone is slow so I should replace it” not, “my phone is slow so I should replace its battery”.
Not a few critics, including myself, feel that Apple could have been a lot more transparent* about the "fix" they built into phones to compensate for reduced battery performance, and feel additionally that their lack of transparency on this issue casts a shadow over their business ethics.
*e.g. programmed a message to appear on the screen telling the user that the phone had gone into "low-power mode" or such like.