Apple caught red-handed... again.
Let me summarise what happened:
1. Slow down the old model
2. Get suckers to upgrade to a new model because the old phone is too slow
3. Profit
Apple can give whatever excuses they want but the facts are that they were hiding the slowdown of the phones to make money. If they were upfront lots of people would have opted to get a much cheaper new battery instead of a new model phone. The lawsuits probably will not even make a dent in the extra profits they had.
A simple message like this would have been enough:
"Your battery is worn and your phone performance is unreliable. You should replace the battery."
or/and
"Do you want to slow down your phone until you replace the battery".
And while they may argue that with the release of iOS 10.2.1 they published information about the phone slowdowns (as power management), not a single person in the whole world understood what was going on until the recent events unfolded.
The real question now is what the real cost of the "discounted" US$29 battery replacement is. Even at this price they are probably making profit out of the rest of the suckers that refused to upgrade their slowed-down phone in the first place.
And the worst thing is that they will get away with it... again...
And no, the other manufacturers are probably not any better.