>Better is worse? I'd say "transparency is better". They should've done years ago what they're now doing, especially given the rumors that have swirled about p

>Better is worse? I'd say "transparency is better". They should've done years ago what they're now doing, especially given the rumors that have swirled about phone slow-downs for so long. By not addressing them when they knew them to be true, they were tacitly denying them or--and this is a very generous read--at least denying even their concerned customers the right to know. >people would still complain that Apple is pushing users to replace their batteries You seem to be suggesting that purposely deceiving customers is better than being honest with them and having them think they are being deceived. I don't see a moral universe where that's the right choice. At the end of the day, that argument essentially says that a company is right no matter what it does, as long as it can get away with it. From a technical perspective, their scheme was certainly explicable, as evidenced by the fact that so many people are willing to accept it now. So, they could've just as well been forthright years ago and taken precisely the same approach they are taking now, without having to be "caught" first. But, in the meantime, they enjoyed years of upgrades, many of which can reasonably be assumed to have been at least partially incentivized by performance issues. I don't think you have to be a conspiracy theorist to find this a little too coincidental.