> No one ever proved Apple set out to do that.
Yes, they did in fact prove that. That's why Apple had to pay $500 million dollars to settle, because they got caught doing shady shit.
They settled without admitting any wrongdoing of course, but what they "got caught doing" was simply not disclosing what was happening -- and that's the only thing they changed afterward.
It was still the correct course of action, and obviously not done maliciously -- a phone that was so slow it was annoying to use, and a phone that reboots 10x a day are equally 'incentive' to buy a new phone, so I fail to see how the throttling benefited Apple one bit.
In fact, I'd say the unreliable rebooting one would have provided stronger incentive to replace it vs. a slow one.
It seems like A would have been whistleblown by now, and B would be idiotic for them to do on purpose since it would make their new devices unnecessarily slow too.
My opinion is basically B but without malice, it's just that they're obsessed with tons of animation and other eye candy, and added a lot of bloat in those years in general, rushing code out the door out of a desire to hit iOS release dates and the synchronized iPhone release dates they used to have.