Maybe they're better, but Apple updates are not all sunshine and rainbows.
Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones - BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
Apple fined for slowing down old iPhones - BBC News – https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
What they should have done is include the toggle from day one, clearly explained why the feature was built, and then presented users with a prompt to enable it if the phone detected it may be necessary. Shoving it down peoples throats just made for terrible optics and "planned obsolescence" was a very well fitting and easy explanation in the absence of the real one that few understood.
Like, people still talk about it like it was a bad thing, see this thread for evidence, and this is one of the places where I would expect to find one of the largest concentrations of people that do understand what that patch did and why it was necessary.
Personally I think it's pretty great to know that I can use my iPhone even with a degraded battery and not have it shut down unexpectedly.
I've had both iPhones and Androids do that in the past, often in cold weather and during bursts of high load (like on a chairlift at a ski resort, which my example here is based on).
The idea was good, but it was implemented in a way that created issues for some users (eg: my iPhone 5 being sluggish all the time) and benefited Apple as most users would simply buy a new iPhone because no one knew what was going on.
Apple messed up the explanations and messaging on that incident big-time, but I'm convinced that they made the correct engineering tradeoff, and I feel like not enough people (even techies) really understood and appreciated that.
As this thread illustrates, a phone is a life-saving device. The priority must be to function when you absolutely need it. You will literally die if you can't call for help when you're stuck in a blizzard and need to call for a rescue.
Apple slowing down phones with weak batteries so that the CPU always has enough juice and doesn't crash is 100% the right engineering tradeoff for a life-saving device.
The last thing you need when you're bleeding out on the kitchen floor and dialing 911 is for your battery to not supply enough power and then force a phone restart or worse when seconds are counting down.
That's 8 years of support if it's the last. It was the first 64-bit ARM phone, and the first to have a Secure Enclave, so it might be a bit of a favourite child.