There was actually no winning in this situation. There were threatened class action lawsuits in the unexpected shutdown situation as well which Apple was trying to prevent.
Sued if you did, sued if you didn't. That's our litigious society these days.
There's a guy on Seeking Alpha who has been writing a series of articles maintaining that the iPhones have a inherent design flaw in that the BATTERIES are insufficiently powerful enough to last the lifetime of the iPhone.
He's an idiot. No Lithium-Ion battery will last more than 500 to 700 charge cycles. It's the technology of the beast. The chemistry depletes after that many charge cycles. If a user recharges their device every day, that's the equivalent of 17 to 23 months of life before the battery is considered chemically depleted. When you reach that many charge cycles, the battery will charge to full voltage, but the depth of charge is no longer the same as new and the length it will hold that charge and how long it can provide a full flow of energy on demand is shortened.
There is no way with current technology to change that. . . but this Seeking Alpha idiot thinks that if the iPhone will last five years, the battery should be able to last five years at full charge capability without replacement as well, and since it doesn't, that's a "design flaw" on Apple's part. He maintains that Apple could have solved the problem by just putting a lot bigger battery in the iPhone, not understanding at all that bigger doesn't solve the charge cycle issue no matter how many times technical people tell him differently. . . and that Apple should be forced by the courts to refund the entire purchase price to all buyers of these "Flawed iPhones." He's written at least ten articles with that thesis.
That’s why this whole thing will end in a grumble: once presented with the “slowdown” as an option, vanishingly few users will actually turn it off once they realize how short the battery will last without the previously-automatic management - and how little beneficial performance they will receive by disabling it.
The battery really does have a finite lifespan, with aggressively diminishing usability once certain performance characteristics are reached. Sure, we could leave that “speed or runtime” option to the user, and news media & naysayers are compelling the option, but I expect users will find that their choice will be “full power when you don’t need it, battery lasts minutes” vs “negligible decrease in speed, battery lasts hours”, and those who turn the switch off will either sheepishly turn it back on (not really telling anyone), or will leave it off and b!tch loudly about the crummy performance (having forgotten they _chose_ to turn it off).
Naysayers are accusing Apple of not trusting users to manage the issue. Apple has succeeded in no small part because they _don’t_ trust users to manage many issues, because millions of users _can’t_ manage such issues.
The term “lifetime of the phone” is user subjective, cannot be a universal measurement.
Except Apple could have made it easy for people to replace batteries, knowing the batteries won last past certain number of charges, they nevertheless insisted on a design that makes replacing them a huge hassle.