I have seen it mentioned that one of the reason Apple is doing this is to extend the life of faulty batteries just enough so that the phone is out of warranty and so that Apple does not get stuck with the cost of replacing the battery.
What BS. As determined by the Department of Defense and also as specified in Apple’s warranty, the normal battery life of a Lithium Ion battery is 500 or so charge cycles at which point the battery will hold only about 80% nominal power.
The iPhone warranty is one year. If a user recharges their iPhone daily, which is the normal practice, that’s 365 charge cycles. It’s out of warranty already by the time it reaches 500. . . When it the normal battery drops below 80% charge capabilities. The majority of the iPhones that are showing both sudden shutdowns are over 1000 cycles. So, no. Apple was not doing this to extend the life of “faulty batteries”, but to keep iPhones with depleted batteries running with some functionality . . . these are the normal life span of normal batteries which DO and WILL degrade with use.
Except that the battery is only warranted for a year - and these devices seeing throttling are generally older than a year. The Lithium ion batteries generally do pretty well up to 500 full charge cycles (for the vast majority of users - that’s over a year).
Several manufacturers don’t even give that much of a warranty on their batteries -