> Within months of use, customer phones would either “explode” from excessive battery drain, “lightly smoke,” or just become inoperable from dead flash storage.

Seems more like bad software exposing lightly defective hardware. These are issues that could be prevented by the manufacturer on either hardware or software level in many different ways.

If you have to trust userspace applications to not trash your hardware, you (Apple) are doing something wrong.

They're not even hard problems. You can prevent any of these with a post-release over-the-air update.

There would be a cost to your benchmarking scores, obviously.

But what good is top-tier performance when you can observe your phone self-destructing at a greatly accelerated rate as opposed to the expected amount of wear.