Do you have a source for that? This would change my opinion on this story.
Reminds me of hot coffee where it sounded a bit ridiculous until you got the full story.
I can vouch for this. My iPhone 6 was under 2 years old and had 82% battery health according to the Apple diagnostics when I experienced the unexpected shutdowns.
The shutdowns were frequent (at least once per day) and, because the phone had to be plugged in before it could be restarted, were incredibly frustrating.
I took it to an Apple Store. The Genius refused to acknowledge any fault. They ran the diagnostics which showed 82% and refused to replace the battery, even if I paid, as it was above their 80% threshold for replacement.
I spoke to the manager, and they stood firm. No replacement, even if I paid. I was extremely persistent and they simply would not budge.
The throttling resolved my shutdown problem.
It similarly showed 80+% battery health, but I showed them the battery charge history in Settings (dropped from 40% to 0% instantly) and they replaced it under warranty.
Happened a year and a half later, exact same scenario, and paid the ~$30 to get it replaced.
I suspect they didn't have any monitoring to detect or log the shutdowns at the time. But I find it extremely confusing why different Apple stores would have such different policies or manager discretion.
I'd guess the date is a key factor, as I'm sure thousands of people showed up at the Apple store because they heard on CNN that their battery was broken.
At the time they just refused to even consider the possibility it was a genuine hardware issue. I got the lecture about batteries being consumable items, mine was somewhat degraded (82% health), etc. They suggested I do a software reset, etc.
I like to think maybe in hindsight someone at Apple HQ looked at the diagnostics from my Genius Bar visit as part of the decision to introduce throttling, and realised they were wrong.
I may be mistaken, but I don’t believe there was any battery charge history (at least not accessible to users) in iOS at the time?
In any event, I am not sure the unexpected shutdowns would have manifested themselves as sudden reductions in charge. Once restarted, the iPhone reported a similar charge to before the shutdown.
The reason they did it was to prevent battery degradation and bad battery life by throttling the CPU. Except back then, iPhone CPUs weren't overperforming monsters they are today, so the slowdown was fairly noticeable. And when done without a notice or reason, you get a perfect publicity shitstorm.
In fact, this feature actually still exists for iPhones, except it now officially exists in settings and can be disabled. It throws a notification on yours screen and auto-activates if your battery degrades below certain level, but it can be disabled (so you can choose whether to prioritize performance or preventing battery from further degradation) by a simple click in a settings menu. And it also explains exactly and in very simple language what this feature does. It isn't hidden behind a million menus either, it is right there in settings => battery => battery health.
EDIT: to clarify, Apple throttling was not only done to prevent it from holding less charge due to battery degradation. Battery degradation to a certain level also led to iPhones rebooting randomly. And apparently it was not that rare of an issue, because the reason I posted this edit in the first place was due to seeing more than a few comments in this thread mentioning that it had happened to them.
> and having internal tooling that would deny a replacement (even at full retail price) if the battery was above an arbitrary health threshold (but still low enough to cause throttling).
Besides, it's not as if this is a strange policy. Apple never has arbitrarily replaced phone parts by user request, even with cash in hand, unless the techs could point to a specific problem. Try walking into an Apple store today and ask for a new screen without an obvious problem.. you will not get one.