ClarityToSee

        A lot of the fanboys here feel an uncontrollable urge to jump to Apple’s rescue unconsciously either because they haven’t had the opportunity to experience the slowdown and associated glitchiness themselves OR because they replace their phones too fast to even be bothered by this issue OR because they are willing to overlook this issue because of Apple’s record so far of being the best in being environmentally friendly OR because they feel that they are supporting humanity go in the right direction by supporting a company that operates on a morally high ground in general whether it be by protecting consumer data impartially or protecting the environment. And I am not disputing or invalidating any of the above reasons. They are all valid and genuinely deserve praise. 
       
          However, I will make the critique where it is justifiably due. I was so frustrated with my iPhone one day that I wanted to smash it against the wall and never look back? Why you ask? Because it got so slow that it was like watching paint dry on the wall. And it didn’t shut off at 2% to save the internals like someone here mentioned but rather it shut off 
randomly at anything, even at 90% or 80%. One time I got stuck on the side of the road in a wind storm with power outage in the area with a broken car and I couldn’t make a single phone call to a tow truck or to my spouse to save my life because it got so glitchy and slow. I randomly had to ask for an Android phone who a stranger walking by happened to own to make a phone call. You can imagine why I am so upset at Apple over this battery issue. This was never an issue with my previous iPhones where I noticed the battery draining too fast and I just had the battery replaced. Simple as that. But this time with the IPhone 6, it was a complete disaster. And I didn’t know to expect phone shutting down at 80% or 50% or something else. And from what I hear this is going to be a common practice by Apple for all IPhones starting with iPhone 6. This is going to be a nightmare, God forbid if you ever got stuck with a little older iPhone in your pocket, and the same thing happened to you that happened to me, especially with climate change and colder winters, I will pray for you. 

Thanks for the Engadget article link above Brisance.  It definitely sheds more light on the issues with alternative device options.  I do agree with you that the problem with alternatives like Samsung is two-fold, one lacking proper hardware quality controls and two bloatware. Hence I have stayed firmly in Apple’s camp so far.
But this IPhone slow down and inferior battery deployment is a major issue that I would like to see them address sooner rather than later.  And I don’t mean addressing by offering a temporary program of ten months to pay $29 to replace a battery but rather addressing by a permanent fix to the problem by genuinely using better power retaining batteries like Samsung, but with better hardware quality controls like Apple is known for.

StrangeDays said:

Change the battery when it’s used up. Just like in a car which can’t crank during winter anymore, or your tv remote. Why is this so hard for you to understand?

Comparing car batteries to phone batteries is simply not the same and a lazy way to compare. For one, car companies don't go around throttling and slowing down car engines because they cannot.  Secondly, it wasn't what Apple did, it was how they did it!  Although, I can't agree with reasoning of whatever they did to slow down the phones.  Performance is VERY IMPORTANT to people, especially when their phones are getting OLDER, and they want to squeeze in a little extra time from their investment or maybe replace a battery if need be. You don't go around slowing down people's phones without telling them that you are slowing down their phones and how it might impact them, especially if it can render their whole device obsolete and useless prematurely, whatever reason you might have deemed noble and noteworthy in your mind.  This affected me personally, I couldn't understand at first why my Iphone 6 was dying prematurely and randomly at 90%, 80%, 70% and 44% etc., and then the performance got painfully slow to the point of freezing when not connected to the charger directly. Then it started happening to my friends and family.  It got extremely painful to launch simple everyday apps like Maps, Safari and Mail. And this was only after two years of owning the phone that I couldn't launch apps without extreme pain.
To further expand, Apple wasn’t transparent about what they were doing, me and my friends and relatives have already plunked down thousands of dollars on new Iphones thinking that it was a processor issue, after all I had no reason to believe that replacing the battery would fix my performance issues.  Would you fix your tires if there was a leak in your roof? Of course not, you would fix the roof. Now multiply millions of confused and uninformed customers replacing their iPhones prematurely resulting in billions of dollars in additional revenues for Apple.  Do you still think that it was completely innocent on Apple’s part when they conveniently left out explaining the part about slowing down people's phones when they did it?  
This is the textbook definition of "Planned Obsolescence." I take no joy in berating a company that I love, but if you are too naive to ask the tough questions, then let others do the asking who can be more subjective in the matter than be hostage to blind loyalty with distorted reasoning. 

For me personally and for millions of others, Apple didn’t just break their phones by slowing them down, they broke their trust. In legal parlance, this is called “planned obsolescence.”  If Apple really had their heart in the right place, they would have come out and disclosed immediately about their plans to slow down phones for whatever justified reason there might have been, not three years later after being caught red handed. I have been a life long Apple customer and now I have to watch over my shoulders dealing with Apple like I do with other companies. 
It’s sad to say that many people including Apple insider can’t see pass their blind loyalty and call it what it is. “Planned Obsolescence” which has tarnished the company image and now trying to fix it with a $29 battery replacement. But for me it’s deeper than that! It’s about the trust lost in the one company that I could always trust to do right by the customers even when they were not looking!

SpamSandwich said:

Unless proven otherwise, I have to assume they are continually mocking up and building advanced iPhone/iOS models for at least 4-5 years out in advance of production.

In one way, you can say the advanced iphones
are 10-12 years in the making in the form of an idea like a “bezel-less all glass iphone”.  
In a practical sense, any advanced iphone can only be worked 2 to 3 years in advance. This is because of the fact that anything imagined beyond this mentioned timeframe is banking on yet undeveloped and immature technologies which may not be realized in time or factoring in current technologies that can go outdated by the time of the release. Not to mention the difficulty of running and controlling multiple parallel programs. The longer the development cycle, more parallel programs Apple would have to run, considering it is absolutely normal to release new iPhone models each and every year.