All they needed to do was to display a "battery degraded" message (or, like on this very Mac I'm using - "Service Recommended". The behavior they implemented w

All they needed to do was to display a "battery degraded" message (or, like on this very Mac I'm using - "Service Recommended". The behavior they implemented was definitely the right call. And it's still there in other situations - if I have disregarded the "10% battery warning" I'll often notice my device being sluggish at 1%, at which point I'll plug in if I can. The alternative would be for the device to have less runtime, and I'm ok with the implementation. Had they warned they were doing this, then customers would replace the battery in most cases. By and large, Apple does NOT do what you are suggesting. As far back as my old iPod touch they released an iOS version that supported wallpapers. It didn't support my device. I thought they were trying to force me to upgrade, so I jailbroke it and enabled the feature anyway. Guess what, the GPU was not enough to display wallpapers, and the home screen had a bad framerate. Rather than giving the subpar experience, they disabled the feature. They could have also simply marked the device as unsupported. iOS (and OSX) updates work on a surprising number of old devices. For many releases, every new OSX release would bring performance enhancements. There's plenty to complain about Apple - their profit margins are huge, the devices are difficult (in some cases, borderline impossible) to repair, the App Store situation, etc. But making devices obsolete with updates is not what they do.