From the BBC:
Apple has apologised after facing criticism for admitting it deliberately slows down some aging iPhone models.
The company now says it will replace batteries for less and will issue software in 2018 so customers can monitor their phone's battery health. Some customers had long suspected the company slowed older iPhones to encourage customers to upgrade.
I know very little about this stuff, but that is their whole business model and I always suspected that they did it.
The clincher for me was after I bought my second Mac Mini in 2013 (or thereabouts), the bloody thing didn't have a CD/DVD drive, the 'genius' in the shop told me that Apple didn't make external CD/DVD reader/writers but I could just buy any generic one and plug it in.
So I bought a Samsung device for £40 which worked absolutely fine... until it stopped working a year or two later. I went back to the shop and the 'genius' told me that Apple now made external CD/DVD reader writers and Mac Minis were no longer compatible with the generic ones, so I had to buy an Apple one for about £80.
That's the clever bit about Apple - it doesn't just sell software (market largely cornered by Microsoft) or hardware (highly competitive with slim profit margins), it does both and they are interlinked in such a way that once you set off down the Apple road you are pretty much stuck on it for ever.
So much so, that there aren't any rival MP3 players any more. Well, there are of course, but they are all crap. Believe me, I tried to wean myself off IPods a year ago and I tried about three others which all went back to the shop after a couple of days and I ended up buying another IPod (good old Currys, with their "don't ask, don't tell" returns policy!). "
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