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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

If you design a chip with the whole lifecycle of the battery in mind, you can achieve better average performance for the life of the chip.

Pulling numbers out of the air, the argument is the chip was designed for maximum performance with a fresh battery, 100% performance. But later it's throttled to 80%. Or, Apple could have designed the chip for a steady 95% performance throughout the life of the phone.

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I would prefer a phone that lost performance over time than one that was gimped at the start. I think the optics aside, most consumers would prefer that as well.

Depends on the customer. If you're planning on keeping it for five years, you'd like it to last the time. If you're planning on replacing it when the new one comes out next year, you'd rather it got maximal performance during that year. What it comes down to is which customer apple wants to cater to which is fairly obviously the latter.

Keeping a phone for five years isn't something I'd want considering the rate of performance improvement. A five year old iPhone would be an iPhone 5. The improvements in CPU/GPU since then are fairly astounding. Going from an A6 dual-core at 1.3GHz to an A11 six-core at 2.39GHz is just nuts. One is 32nm, the other 10nm.

Smartphones are the one area in computing that seem to still be having huge jumps in performance compared to desktop/laptop computers.

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