Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling.
They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
The throttling was a reaction to poor battery performance at the technical endish-of-life part of the product. After X cycles the battery recharge ability was limited, couldn't be fully charged. It also had increased internal resistance, meaning an increased power draw (eg CPU/GPU load increase) can't be sustained. If too much current is drawn, the voltage drops, and the result may be a brown-out event (voltage too low -> shutdown/reboot). Since the battery couldn't deliver, Apple limited use of the battery so it doesn't run into those brown-outs.
This is all sound and well and well-known, which is why you design in a safety factor so that you have plenty of margin even at end of life.
Why didn't they? Since no internal Apple discussions surface, I can just speculate it's either,
* incompetence, they didn't anticipate this
* cost-driven decision, despite Apple products being top-dollar devices and even low-range devices work better in this aspect
* design-driven decision, larger battery would mean a larger device
I'm betting the last point. Someone (Jobs? Ive?) had a fixed upper size limit on the device, and at the same time a fixed minimum CPU/GPU performance limit to not feel sluggish.
Around that time there were a ton of battery recalls for phones nowhere near the end of their life - mine was one.
I think they just got a bad batch of batteries or were too aggressive cost optimizing and this was the fix. 5&6 era iPhones never had this problem and their batteries degraded just the same.
Not just that they went for that - but that they ended up in that situation to begin with. IIUC, the outer rim was two (or more) metal pieces, whereof one acted as antenna. The signal degradation occurs when the user holds the phone and bridges the antenna-piece with a non-antenna piece. This affects the antenna tuning and attenuates the signal.
Just missing out on such a basic thing is a bit boggling to me. My iphone 4 was working pretty good though, but I was also mostly in the inner city where connectivity is good to begin with.
