Gosh, that narrative is one of the most pea-brained things that I’ve seen circulating on the internet in my lifetime.

As the link you provided clearly states, apple was fined for not disclosing to users that iOS was underclicking the CPUs on phones that had batteries that were too degraded to provide the required power consistently under heavy load.

Anyone who used an Android phone from that era can tell you about how a >12 month old phone would start randomly powering off between 10% and 30% remaining charge. When a lithium ion battery degrades, it’s no longer able to output its original nominal voltage in a sustained way. Instead, I’ll output the requested voltage, then suddenly the voltage will drop. When the CPU in an older phone was under heavy load, it would put heavy load on the battery, and the battery would fail to provide consistent voltage, which would cause the phone to power off.

On the Android side of things, we could try to replace the battery if we knew that was the issue, but most people would just feel pressured to buy a new phone.

The obvious solution to that problem is just to undervolt the phone’s CPU if the battery isn’t capable of providing consistent peak voltage. Doing this is objectively the opposite of planned obsolescence, it lets people use older phones reliably for longer.

Ironically, a small minority of weirdos are so desperate to hate Apple that they spun a feature that’s obviously intended to increase the longevity of an iPhone into an entire narrative about apple slowing your phone down to get you to buy another one. Which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, because not undervolting the CPU in a phone where the battery can’t provide consistent peak voltage is way more likely to push people to want to replace it.

I hate consumerism and mega corporations way more than most, and I’m definitely not suggesting that Apple is any kind of moral or ethical company. They’re a company that exists to maximize profits at the expense of anything else, on the backs of exploited workers.

But when the most widespread complaints about a company are things that make the complainers look like idiots who are desperately searching for something to complain about regardless of how disconnected from reality it is, it makes it seem like there aren’t any legitimate complaints about the company. If I were wearing my tinfoil hat, I’d be inclined to speculate about whether that’s actually intentional. The ‘Apple is slowing down my phone to make me buy a new battery’ narrative is so ridiculous that I can almost believe that Apple’s behind it to draw attention away from valid criticisms.