This is the latest example and they have had previous lawsuits before about intentionally throttling devices which leads to people buying the latest devices.
Their earnings reports depend on volume of iPhone sales, so the incentive exists to push for more.
> I've never seen them as a revenue growth chasing business
Apple is always chasing revenue growth. They're notorious for it. Most businesses are..
This just links to a manifest.json
As the battery ages, internal resistance goes up, leading to voltage sags under high CPU usage, which is called "brownout." By lowering the maximum CPU frequency when they detect voltage sagging, Apple prevents the device from crashing or randomly rebooting. The iPhone gets slower, but it keeps working, and replacing the battery restores it to full speed.
It allows you to use an iPhone without replacing the battery significantly longer than you would be able to otherwise. It was customer and environmentally friendly.
Chasing revenue growth, indeed.
Oh, and by the way, this is what I'm typing this reply to you on: https://i.imgur.com/ShDwshe.png
At the time I bought this computer - now eight years ago - one of the reasons I bought it was because the battery was a new type that was rated to have 80% or better capacity after 1500 cycles. It exceeded that, by the way, handily.
About the only laptop that could manage similar battery durability would be a Thinkpad, with its min/max battery charging controls.
If this was done out of nefarious reasons, don't you think doing nothing (devices switching off when the battery degrades) would have driven more sales of new devices?