Greentext

Yes and no. There are two reasons this half truth refuses to die.

1. IOS does this obnoxious thing after updates where it no longer trusts its index. It changed something about how the index works so rather than update the existing data to the new slightly different format, they say fuck it and reindex the entire phones data. This background process consumes battery and can last up to a week. So people notice the battery life get worse, but they never notice it getting better after the indexing stops and goes back to only noticing changes.
2. Apple had a big problem a while back where their phones could draw too much power from the batteries. It was fine when new, but as the battery aged, it wasn’t able to deliver stable power to the SoC under heavy loads, making the phone unstable and crashy. So apple just limited the max power the SoC could draw on phones where the otherwise perfectly functional battery could be pushed hard enough to cause problems. It’s annoying, and they could have been more clear, but the rationale was sound. Few will notice a slightly slower phone. Many will notice a phone that suddenly powers off when playing a game.

Apple does a lot of things wrong but they also do a lot of things right. We really need to pick more rational reasons to hate on apple if we ever expect them to give a shit about our opinions.

They admitted they intentionally slowed down old phones with iOS updates.

The thing with smartphones is that they're already good enough. Almost every app is designed to work on a 5yo phone that cost 100 bucks when it was new, so having 16 times the processing power isn't really useful unless it results in better battery life.