> In 2017, Apple admitted to intentionally slowing down older iPhones. The claim was this would increase your phone’s lifespan. But really, it made your once snappy phone feel much more sluggish, leading some to upgrade their phones to a newer model with marginally better specs

I doubt any of their marketing people are reading this but outright lying like that is not how you build trust in your products. They’re referring to the phone throttling its power draw when a degraded battery could no longer provide full output, and the alternative would be shutting down suddenly at a time when the phone was doing something demanding like playing a game. Other devices do this as well for the same reason, and anyone selling battery powered devices has no excuse for not knowing this. A company which shipped a phone in 2020 with 5 hours of battery life when new must be painfully aware of the challenges.

Similarly, anyone buying another phone rather than a much cheaper battery replacement is probably doing so because they want the additional performance, camera quality, etc. or simply normal wear and tear has added up over time and the repair costs are closer to replacement.

A company delivering a phone with performance slower than competing devices made a decade earlier similarly has no business claiming that the gains for most users are marginal just because their hardware has lagged far behind. There’s a great example of deceptive marketing here:

> The Librem 5 utilizes a quad-core arm based CPU, where Purism is the first company to include this CPU in a mobile phone

https://puri.sm/pages/iphone-vs-librem-5/

Someone who doesn’t know that quad core ARM CPUs started shipping in phones around 2011 would not understand that to mean “nobody else uses this specific CPU for phones” rather than what they’re hoping the reader will think: “this thing isn’t slower than an iPhone 4S” The security claims are similarly broad and designed to be read as more persuasive than is actually warranted.

This is disappointing because I like the idea of more open hardware, and it’s certainly the case that a lot of phones are thrown out because they stop getting support, but the more I read their copy the less I trust this company. They’re trying to make an argument for why you shouldn’t hold slower hardware against them, but they way they do it makes me less inclined to trust anything they say without carefully validating it.