Marketers do not just passively give users what they already want. They also manipulate what users want. This isn’t some conspiracy theory, the marketing discipline is quite open about this. When something is in the interest of the company making more profit, they convince users that it is in their own interest. This is just capitalism being capitalism. Not being able to easily replace your battery is as clear an example of such a thing as you could ask for.

Sealed phones consistently sell waaay more than non-sealed phones

OEMs make sealed phones instead of easily disassemblable phones because consumers buy sealed phones instead of disassemblable ones when given the choice.

Give some examples of the phones you’re referring to here because I’d bet you’re referring to recent phones like the XCover Pro which use ancient hardware that appeals to nobody.

For 30 years, manufacturers sold phones with replaceable batteries and consumers gobbled them all up with nobody demanding that they instead glue phones together.

You claim phones are thinner when glued yet my Note 4 from 2014 is thinner than my current Galaxy S21 Ultra even though the former had a removable back and replacable battery.

The reason why they’ve all gone to sealed phones is because they ran out of innovative ideas years ago with the yearly release cycle and have now resorted to raising revenue by making phones harder to repair yourself, removing accessories, locking down firmware, and building them with more fragile materials. It’s the same enshittification that we’re now seeing in social media and streaming services. Don’t fall for the marketing propaganda that these companies are pushing because it’s all bullshit.

Gosh, that narrative is one of the most pea-brained things that I’ve seen circulating on the internet in my lifetime.

As the link you provided clearly states, apple was fined for not disclosing to users that iOS was underclicking the CPUs on phones that had batteries that were too degraded to provide the required power consistently under heavy load.

Anyone who used an Android phone from that era can tell you about how a >12 month old phone would start randomly powering off between 10% and 30% remaining charge. When a lithium ion battery degrades, it’s no longer able to output its original nominal voltage in a sustained way. Instead, I’ll output the requested voltage, then suddenly the voltage will drop. When the CPU in an older phone was under heavy load, it would put heavy load on the battery, and the battery would fail to provide consistent voltage, which would cause the phone to power off.

On the Android side of things, we could try to replace the battery if we knew that was the issue, but most people would just feel pressured to buy a new phone.

The obvious solution to that problem is just to undervolt the phone’s CPU if the battery isn’t capable of providing consistent peak voltage. Doing this is objectively the opposite of planned obsolescence, it lets people use older phones reliably for longer.

Ironically, a small minority of weirdos are so desperate to hate Apple that they spun a feature that’s obviously intended to increase the longevity of an iPhone into an entire narrative about apple slowing your phone down to get you to buy another one. Which doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, because not undervolting the CPU in a phone where the battery can’t provide consistent peak voltage is way more likely to push people to want to replace it.

I hate consumerism and mega corporations way more than most, and I’m definitely not suggesting that Apple is any kind of moral or ethical company. They’re a company that exists to maximize profits at the expense of anything else, on the backs of exploited workers.

But when the most widespread complaints about a company are things that make the complainers look like idiots who are desperately searching for something to complain about regardless of how disconnected from reality it is, it makes it seem like there aren’t any legitimate complaints about the company. If I were wearing my tinfoil hat, I’d be inclined to speculate about whether that’s actually intentional. The ‘Apple is slowing down my phone to make me buy a new battery’ narrative is so ridiculous that I can almost believe that Apple’s behind it to draw attention away from valid criticisms.