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> - slowing down customer-purchased devices before pushing new devices to the market. Not every Apple user wants, needs or can afford new phone every year or two

Making this point throws the rest of your comment into question. This isn't at all a fair telling of what happened, it was done to prevent phones from shutting off as the battery got older, not some machiavellian plot to get users to upgrade.

> - forcing users into SaaS model via secretive security updates. One can't have secure device (well, secured up-to-date, not saying that fully updated iPhone is secure) without Apple gutting existing software, changing UI/UX and doing whatever they please on the device customer has paid for, against the customer

What are you even talking about here? Please give an example

> - blocking the possibility to upgrade the OS to previous version. IMO many versions of macOS and iOS were downgrades in comparison to previous ones. We couldn't rollback iPhones and now we can't even install macOS that came with the computer. Just the newest one (at least that's my experience: every installer but the newest one crashes at the very end)

I'm fairly certain you can install back to the version a mac was released with, your issues with downgrading sound like a problem on your end, not apple's. As for the phone I'm conflicted. Honestly I think Apple made the right choice is making the updates one-way for security reasons. Maybe now with the secure enclave there is a safe way to allow for "user-approved" downgrades but I don't know enough to say one way or the other. The goal, of course, is to prevent the ability to downgrade a confiscated/stolen device to a version that has a known-exploit to bypass the lockscreen. With how much sensitive data people have on their phones I have a hard time seeing one-way upgrades as anything but a good thing.

> - pushing their agendas by forcing EVERY Apple device to download a shitty U2 album because Tim Cook says so. That's what I will remember Tim Cook for the most.

It was a failed marketing stunt and people get so worked up about it. Did it really impact your life so negatively? This is what you will remember most about Tim Cook? Ok...

>> forcing users into SaaS model via secretive security updates.

> What are you even talking about here? Please give an example

There's been news in the recent week that users will be able to patch security holes in their Apple devices without full update. That's a step forward but I'm yet to see this in action.

But until this very recent announcement, Apple was always hiding the details of security updates and when user got scared into updating due to security bugs, they got auto-shuffling in iTunes, "upgraded" Notes.app, idiotic UI changes and no longer the possibility to turn off tracking. Remember when there were privacy opt-outs in iOS and macOS installers? I do.

> I'm fairly certain you can install back to the version a mac was released with, your issues with downgrading sound like a problem on your end, not apple's.

First of all, please don't call installing faster and less problematic software "downgrading". Update and upgrade are completely different things. With Apple, updates are often downgrades.

Installing older system was possible until recently but now erasing the disk and putting installation USB stick (that worked previously and wasn't erased/reused for something else) ends up showing random errors at the end of installation.

How do you imagine I made this problem on my end by myself? Do you think I somehow broken my MacBook during parts replacement? The only updates that were made, were software updates made by Apple. They renamed and changed OS installers hanging in /Applications/ dir so why wouldn't they screw up USB installer as soon as it's plugged in, too?

> The goal, of course, is to prevent the ability to downgrade a confiscated/stolen device to a version that has a known-exploit to bypass the lockscreen.

Of course!

> It was a failed marketing stunt

And the most Cook thing Apple did since Jobs' death.

> This is what you will remember most about Tim Cook? Ok...

Yup. The man has no taste nor imagination and makes poor choices.

> Apple was always hiding the details of security updates

This is untrue , here for instance is iOS 15.5 Security Update release notes: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213258

Every update has a learn more button with a link to what security concerns have been addressed.

> For our customers' protection, Apple doesn't disclose, discuss, or confirm security issues until an investigation has occurred and patches or releases are available. Recent releases are listed on the Apple security updates page.

The one you pasted is fairly new. I haven't been using their computers for some time now but I remembered that there were no details (or something extremely vague) any time soon after user was suggested to update.

That's a good thing and I'm glad to be wrong on this one.

Maybe it’s the soon after part but Apple has been doing it since 2003: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

> slowing down customer-purchased devices before pushing new devices to the market.

This is wrong. Apple pushed out a fix that when the phone detects it has crashed due to the soc getting undervolted, they would limit the maximum cpu frequency to avoid the phone having future power failures. This is absolutely what the user wants. There is no point getting full cpu speed if it means the phone just reboots when you use it.

Where they failed was in communication. They should have signalled to the user that this has happened and that they should replace the battery. They now do this and have a whole battery health page.

Communication is a massive problem for megacorps because everything (usually rightfully) becomes a huge deal. But id not be so quick to jump to malice as an explanation.

The CPU frequency situation was a one-time thing when they got caught throttling. Up-to-date iPhones getting slower around the time of new model release is an ongoing problem.

I have a 3 years old iPhone with no 3rd party apps (recently removed Uber.app), unused Safari and few email accounts. Apart from emails, I'm using it as a phone. I'm not a heavy smartphone user and never was.

As far as I'm aware the CPU is not throttled but the phone is so slow (even after factory reset and update to current iOS) that waking screen up takes 4-6 seconds. Buying new device with Apple logo is the last thing on my mind when my "perfectly good" 3yo iPhone is getting artificially aged.

But most users are paying those fuckers just because their "old" iPhone got slow.

I have iPhone XS. Full of 3rd party apps. My wife and my daughter have iPhone XR. Also full of 3rd party apps. Other daughter have iPhone 11. 3rd party apps? Yes.

Nobody in our home noticed any slowdowns, especially 4-6 seconds to unlock the phone. That's just ridiculous. I just checked with wife's other phone (iPhone SE), it works as always.

You can blame Apple for many things, but iPhone longevity isn't one of them.

I wonder if we're moving past slowdowns the same way PC upgrades around 2010 didn't matter much. Once you have enough RAM and enough cores, it takes specialized applications to notice much of a difference.

No, it takes a large, dedicated OS performance and quality team to keep things running fast on older supported hardware. Apple has one (as does Microsoft).

I'm sure they do. It just seems like a quad-core 2 Ghz machine with an SSD and 8GB of RAM has been pretty usable for a decade. I don't remember Pentium 4's being as usable in 2002 as in 2012.

Jobs was a fucking monster, but people got brainwashed to love him.

Or as James Gosling put it: "He was a jerk."

https://youtu.be/IT__Nrr3PNI?t=3115

You really need to get some perspective if you think Steve Jobs was the biggest asshole of the last 40 years.

He was a brilliant asshole. He's like Elon Musk, but with focus and maturity.