I can see where the author is coming from — the line between throttling and planned obsolescence seems thin (especially when devices with worn-out batteries are

I can see where the author is coming from — the line between throttling and planned obsolescence seems thin (especially when devices with worn-out batteries are subject to increased throttling). However, throttling serves a very important purpose and is much more prevalent than the author seems to realize. Every processor will throttle itself when it gets hot (and I can even remember Apple talking about this in a keynote where they were comparing different models of iPhone by “minutes before throttling at 100% sustained CPU load”). I don’t think users need a setting would allow their device to melt rather than throttle. Similarly, the “Batterygate” throttling was arguably in the best interests of the customer because a phone that performs poorly is more useful than a phone that doesn’t work at all. I don’t really care if OnePlus or whoever decides to slow down Facebook a little bit, as long as they don’t pull a Volkswagen and send un-throttled hardware to reviewers or anything like that. The engineers decided the phone was faster than necessary but was lacking in battery life, so they decided to make a tradeoff just as if they had decided to switch out the physical hardware for a more efficient processor. The reviews will say “Facebook is a little sluggish but battery life is great”, and whether that’s because of hardware capabilities or throttling is one of many implementation details that I don’t need to be concerned about. While a “performance” vs “efficiently” toggle would be cool and potentially useful for, I would consider that an extra feature and not a hard requirement. In fact, Apple has this feature already with the “low-power-mode” toggle that applies additional throttling and reduces background activity and network traffic.