I'll give you a personal story. I'm not saying anything about apple but this is my personal experience with a tech hardware company I use to be an engineer at in Silicon Valley.
We had a product we sold to other companies. Something not consumer grade at all. Think major data center products. This product we'll call it, Product X, was sold in different levels of speed. So you had the baseline product at speed 1x and another at speed 2x.
Now, due to hardware delays and hardware issues the 1x (which was meant to rollout first) actually got its production schedule pushed back to the point that the hardware testing had been fully verified on the 2x model as well as the 1x. So mass production had not started yet but both models were verified through beta testing and development.
So, it actually ended up being cheaper for manufacturing to only produce all 2x hardware and have me (the software engineer) just reduce the throughput on the same hardware. They would simply just stick a different 1x sticker on the models running the purposely speed limiting software.
The company released 1x the next quarter. Again, with hardware identical to the 2x. And then waited two quarters to release the 2x. Now technically the 1x models could literally be upgraded by a software update. But that would expose this scam. So companies we sold 1x models to that wanted to upgrade would literally throw away the same exact hardware to buy the 2x model.
This is just my personal story. You don't even have to believe it. But, having worked in the industry now for 10 years, this is not uncommon practice. I would not put it past Apple to do what the above post suggests.
Just gonna leave this guys rendition of the Chemical Workers Song here. Feels like it compliments this post.
https://youtu.be/XPZwRF7yRAQ