That said, I'm totally unconvinced by this video. There's zero details of how Apple allegedly slows down old phones. Lowered clock rate? Artificially increased system call times? Nothing actually explained in the video.
Of course they could give the user options but then they could also let the user swap batteries. Those are just not things Apple does.
Yes, and yes. Batteries are consumable goods and throttling can make aging, borderline batteries work when otherwise they would cut out and cause unexpected power-offs. It’s the opposite of planned obsolescence because it makes older devices operational for longer.
You can also look at this empirically: Apple support old devices far longer than most of their competitors, and iPhones retain resale value far better than other phones. If Apple actively sabotage older devices, why put in the effort to explicitly support them, and why does the market treat supposedly sabotaged older devices as more valuable than the competition?
Well... old hardware is slow, and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows.
I wouldn't be surprised older phones get slower with updates, in fact, that feels like the most likely scenario for me, based on my experience as a software developer.
But IMO, Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies. Most likely, the teams just need to ship features, make fixes, and they mostly test on higher end, recent devices. Sure, at some point, someone tests on a lower end device that everything still works, but they probably either do not notice the issues, or shrug it off, or rationalize it (it might make x worse, but users get y in exchange, so it's fine).
> Hanlon's (maybe Occam's, too?) Razor applies
peak "Leave the multi-trillion corporation alone"
In my own experience, newer products get more love automatically, because the testers, the devs, the team are on newer devices. Perf regressions are also harder to catch than simpler bugs and sometimes require extended usage to notice smaller perf degradation, and devs and QA do not really test like that (often enough).
The way I see it, older products will naturally decline with updates, as they are less of a focus while validating a new release. Sure, they get some "freebie" improvements, but I'm guessing the accidental "decay" outweighs any improvements.
I'm not saying they couldn't make it on purpose. I'm saying that (IMO) it's more likely that it gets worse with every update even without malicious, conniving people trying to get you to upgrade by worsening your OS.