This week, we learned that the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating whether Apple took actions that violated securities laws when it throttled certain iPhones' performance without informing investors or users. This follows previous reports of class action lawsuits on behalf of consumers as well as public officials from both the United States and France calling for answers.

Consumers and many members of the press have been outraged. Some have gone so far as to accuse Apple of throttling the phones to make them obsolete more quickly so consumers would have to upgrade, and they insist that users should have been able to choose whether their phones did this or not. Other critics have simply said Apple should have at least been more transparent about the throttling.

It’s easy to poke holes in the theory that Apple implemented throttling to drive quicker adoption of new phones (which we'll get into shortly). Whether most users should have been given the choice is debatable. But Apple definitely should have been more transparent.

All that said, Apple's decision to throttle performance was the right one. But while many of the conspiracy theories are baseless, the controversy nevertheless exposed some of the deepest weaknesses endemic in Apple's design philosophy and in its public relations and marketing strategy.

How it happened

Let's start with the short explanation. The lithium-ion batteries used in Apple's iPhones (and in most other phones) have serious limitations. Each charge cycle contributes to their degradation, and after a couple of years of normal use, they are no longer always able to provide the needed voltage when peak current demands from the phone's various systems have been reached.

To protect its components and ensure its longevity in these situations, the iPhone automatically shuts itself off when it detects the battery can't provide the current it needs for a given set of tasks. Many iPhone 6 owners, including myself, began experiencing what seemed like random shutdowns.

Apple released software updates to prevent those unexpected shutdowns. The updates successfully accomplished that goal. This was Apple's public statement when the first update to prevent shutdowns was released:

With iOS 10.2.1, Apple made improvements to reduce occurrences of unexpected shutdowns that a small number of users were experiencing with their iPhone. iOS 10.2.1 already has over 50 percent of active iOS devices upgraded, and the diagnostic data we've received from upgraders shows that, for this small percentage of users experiencing the issue, we're seeing a more than 80-percent reduction in iPhone 6s and over 70-percent reduction on iPhone 6 of devices unexpectedly shutting down.

Consumers are right to be frustrated that Apple did not explain how it achieved this result—by throttling performance—in this statement or in the release notes for the software update. Apple only did this after the community had conclusively proved it to be the case. In late December, Reddit users, Geekbench founder John Poole, and various other community actors pieced together part of the reason why certain iPhone models (the iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone SE, and iPhone 7) seem to perform functions like loading apps and responding to inputs more slowly over time.

The first suspicion of throttling came when a Reddit user noticed that benchmarks showed a big improvement to CPU performance on his iPhone 6S after replacing an old battery:

The developer of that benchmark app then posted a detailed blog post with benchmarks that confirmed that the performance hit on the iPhone 6S only became detectable starting with iOS 10.2.1:

His evidence was conclusive. These software updates caused performance throttling. After this information became widespread, Apple finally made a statement about throttling, saying:

Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge, or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components. Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We've now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2 and plan to add support for other products in the future.

Coming clean doesn't mean much after you've already been exposed. But it is actually possible that, in its hubris, Apple did not anticipate that consumers would have this concern when it first made the decision.

The company took several measures to address consumers' concerns. First, it issued an uncharacteristically strong apology. It released several support documents to help users understand the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. It promised to add more detailed battery health tracking in a future software update. And most surprisingly, it said that an upcoming software update will allow users to toggle this feature on and off at will.

Several things about Apple's response were highly unusual for the company, and that might have been because those working there were aware that this particular controversy cut to the very heart of what Apple and its products are about—making tough decisions about features and functionality on users' behalf. A lot of people don't like that approach, so the scandal played into the company's deepest weaknesses.

But that doesn't mean Apple made the wrong choice with these software updates. Let's get into why.