No apologies on this for them as I do feel they should have disclosed this. It's a feature that's been in place since the iPhone 6 and was meant to prolong battery life as the lithium ion battery aged. It's triggered once the battery reaches a certain point and the phone will no longer last as long between charges.

Essentially, they made the choice for you to make the battery in the phone last longer versus leaving it up to you to decide between your regular speed phone and maintaining your expected talk time. For the majority of users, better battery is what they'd want.

Honestly, I think that no matter what they did, people would be angry. If this wasn't in place, we'd have already had lawsuits over "battery gate" because the batteries in the phones wouldn't have lasted as long. Also, think of the environmental impact of millions of phones and their batteries discarded because they only had 80% of their battery life left versus the 95% or better that this option provided.