They Slowed Your Phone on Purpose

It's Saturday, August fifteenth. My Apple Watch battery is at 80 percent health. I've had it for about three or four years, and lately it barely makes it through the day without dying. I didn't think much of it until I looked up what "80 percent battery health" actually means, which is that my battery can only hold 80 percent of the charge it could when it was new, and that number is going to keep dropping. A replacement battery from Apple costs about $99. A new Apple Watch costs $400. And I think most people, including me if I'm being honest, would look at those two numbers and just buy the new one, which is convenient for Apple and probably not a coincidence. That thought sent me back to something Apple got caught doing in 2017 that I'd forgotten about, and it changes how you think about every device you own that runs on a battery. In late 2017, a developer ran a benchmarking test on his iPhone 6s before and after replacing the battery and noticed something strange: the phone's processing speed jumped dramatically after the swap. He posted the results online, other people ran the same test and got the same results, and within days a benchmarking tool called Geekbench confirmed a pattern across thousands of devices: Apple's iOS updates were deliberately reducing the processing speed of older iPhones.

Apple admitted it. They said the throttling was intentional and that it was designed to prevent older iPhones with degraded batteries from unexpectedly shutting down. When a lithium-ion battery degrades, it can't deliver the same peak power it could when it was new, and if the processor demands more power than the battery can provide, the phone just turns off without warning. Apple's solution was to quietly limit how much power the processor could draw, which prevented the shutdowns but also made your phone noticeably slower, and they did this without telling anyone.

The problem wasn't the engineering decision. Preventing unexpected shutdowns is a reasonable thing to do. The problem was that they didn't disclose it, which meant millions of people experienced their iPhones getting slower after a software update and drew the obvious conclusion: my phone is old and I need a new one. A $79 battery replacement would have fixed the issue. A new iPhone cost $700 to $1,000. Apple later said the lack of disclosure was a communication failure, not an attempt to drive upgrades, but the effect was the same regardless of the intent: people bought new phones when they could have replaced a battery because nobody told them the battery was the problem. The fallout was significant. Apple paid up to $500 million to settle a class-action lawsuit in the US, which worked out to about $25 per affected iPhone owner. They paid another $113 million to settle investigations by 34 state attorneys general. And France fined them €25 million under a law that the US doesn't have: France specifically banned planned obsolescence, making it illegal for companies to deliberately shorten the lifespan of their products to generate demand for replacements. Companies found guilty can be fined up to 5 percent of their annual revenue, which for Apple would be over $15 billion.

Apple dropped the cost of battery replacements from $79 to $29 during the fallout, added a Battery Health feature to iOS so users could monitor their battery's capacity, and gave people the option to turn off the performance throttling if they preferred the risk of random shutdowns over a slower phone. All of these were good changes, but they only happened because Apple got caught, not because they volunteered the information. If the developer hadn't run that benchmark test, the throttling would probably still be happening silently, and millions of people would still be buying new phones to fix a problem that a $29 battery could solve.

The US has no equivalent to France's planned obsolescence law, which means that outside of specific fraud claims, there's no legal framework preventing a company from designing products that degrade on a predictable timeline and making replacement more attractive than repair. The right-to-repair movement has been pushing for legislation that would require manufacturers to make parts, tools, and repair manuals available to consumers, and the European Union passed a regulation requiring that batteries in consumer electronics be user-replaceable by 2027. But in the US, for now, the decision about whether you repair or replace is shaped almost entirely by how the manufacturer designs the product and prices the repair. My Apple Watch situation is a small version of the same dynamic. The battery has degraded to the point where the product barely functions as intended, and Apple offers two paths: a $99 repair or a $400 replacement. The repair gives me the same watch with a new battery. The replacement gives me a new watch with new features, a better screen, and a fresh battery that will last another three or four years before I'm back in the same position.

Apple isn't doing anything illegal by pricing it this way. But the gap between the repair cost and the replacement cost is narrow enough that most people choose to replace, and the product is designed in a way that makes third-party repair difficult: the battery is glued in, the tools are proprietary, and opening the case yourself voids any remaining warranty. The friction around repair isn't accidental. It's a design choice that nudges you toward the outcome that generates the most revenue for the company, which is buying a new device instead of fixing the one you already own.

This pattern runs through every product category that uses lithium-ion batteries: phones, laptops, tablets, watches, earbuds. The battery will degrade over two to four years. The manufacturer will price the repair at a point where replacement feels like the smarter move. And the cycle will repeat every few years for the rest of your life unless something changes in how these products are designed or how the law requires them to be repaired. My Apple Watch works fine. The screen is fine, the sensors are fine, the software is fine. The only thing wrong with it is a battery that can't hold a charge, and that one component is about to turn a perfectly functional $400 device into something I replace instead of fix. I'm probably going to buy a new Apple Watch. I know the battery is the only problem, I know the repair costs $99, and I'm still probably going to spend $400 because the new one is nicer and the old one feels broken even though only one component is degraded. That's the whole game, and it works because the math just barely tips toward replacement every time.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you Monday.