Note a year ago they settled a lawsuit about throttling CPUs with updates on older iphones for the same purpose. The environmental footprint of an iphone is significant no matter what offset fake math they employ....
Why do people spread this sort of stuff? Apple have never settled anything related to a “play” to intentionally shorten the lifetime of a phone.
Batterygate extended the life of individual handsets with degraded batteries that were out of warranty. These handsets were rebooting due to the battery until Apple brought out an update that throttled them after the next brownout, and replacing the battery brought the handset back to full speed. Why go to all that trouble if you wanted to sell another phone?
And theoretically, if this was the case, why isn’t there an option to throttle? It is the user’s device. And why wasn’t it used to help lengthen the battery life of the new phones? I certainly would prefer throttling my CPU to lengthen battery life.