Apple found itself in the thick of it when it quietly released an update, iOS 10.2.1, designed to fix a sudden shutdown problem on some iPhones. This was separate from a warranty repair program in which such an issue was caused by a battery defect on the iPhone 6s in which the battery was replaced free of charge.

But the two are often conflated.

The problem is that Apple didn’t explain the nature of the fix, extended in an iOS 11 update to include the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, and that’s where the trouble began. In order to put a stop to the shutdowns, Apple opted to reduce performance under heavy load to keep the unit running. Some users probably never noticed, but apps would take longer to launch and the ones that made demands on the CPU and graphics wouldn’t run as fast. Benchmarks, designed to test the limits of the hardware, would reveal sharply reduced results.

When the reduced performance wa discovered, the usual Apple conspiracy theories were operative. Apple was throttling performance to convince you to buy a new iPhone. It was an evil plot to sell more product, all about planned obsolescence.

Apple admitted what it was doing, and explained why. But it was a case of too little and too late, and failed to prevent class-action lawsuits. It almost seemed as if the explanation wasn’t noticed.

Since then Apple has done more to explain the problem. Admitting it should have made an effort to fully explain what was going on, Apple instituted a low-cost battery replacement plan. Instead of paying $79 for the official authorized replacement, the price is now $29 until the end of this year. That’s a good $30 less than some independent retailers charge for iPhone battery replacements, and iFixit went along with the program, reducing the price of their own battery kits.

An iOS update will allow you to check on the battery’s health, a feature long offered for Mac notebooks.

There’s also detailed information at Apple’s site about battery technology and the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. I’ve read all of it, and it seems perfectly sensible so far as I can see. Apple does not appear to be faking it to fool you. The reasoning behind throttling performance on some iPhones with deteriorated batteries makes perfect sense. It’s all about the fact that Apple failed to properly communicate this information to its customers, a common problem. The release notes provided with software updates are almost always too brief and lack important details. Some software fixes are never even listed, leaving clever power users to figure out what was changed and the impact.

Is there going to be a lasting impact?

I suspect not. Apple’s stock price remains within a narrow range, so it’s not as if there’s been a sudden loss of confidence in the company. How a corporation manages a crisis is just as important, and often more so, than the crisis itself.

The remaining questions are all about those who replaced their iPhone batteries at full price, or replaced their iPhones. In the first case, customers deserve to receive a $50 refund to cover the price difference. In the second case, if the customer can demonstrate somehow that they replaced a covered iPhone only because it was misbehaving, they should be given more time to return the new device for a full refund.

It’s unfortunate, though, that Apple learned nothing from the Antennagate scandal in 2010. When some users complained, then, that reception quality went down the tubes when the unit was held in a certain way, Steve Jobs suggested sarcastically they just hold it differently.

When that response landed like a lead balloon, he called a media event where he explained what was going on, and why other smartphones would exhibit the same problems. It was about the laws of physics, so in addition to offering free bumper cases for a while — which eliminated the problem — videos were posted for a time that demonstrated how other phones reacted if held in certain ways.

But if Jobs held his tongue and responded to a concerned customer with respect, the bad publicity would have been overcome pretty quickly. I don’t know if it hurt sales, but Consumer Reports jumped into the fray and declined to recommend the iPhone 4 without a bumper case. They didn’t bother to see how other phones reacted when the antennas were similarly covered by one’s fingers.

Seven years later, Apple responded quickly enough, but had there been detailed notes about the changes and why they were made — with proper references to an Apple support document with further information, there wouldn’t have been so much negative publicity.

I won’t suggest that the folks who write Apple’s support documents should be fired. But the company needs to be more forthcoming with customers. You’d think they would have also learned that with the years of silence between the release of the Mac Pro in 2013 and the revelation that Apple knew it was a misfire and was working on a modular replacement that can be upgraded by users.

So there are still lessons to be learned. Corporate secrecy has its place in a highly competitive environment. It doesn’t work when customers just need to know what’s going on with the expensive products they bought.

And one more thing: Apple is not the only company to make gear that suffers from sudden shutdowns when batteries are drained or deteriorated. Consider recent reports about the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, which reportedly may fail to recharge if the battery is drained too low.

Over the years, there has been a growing list of companies that Apple should/must acquire to remain relevant. Or something.

Apple, after all, has $268.9 billion hanging out in overseas accounts and investments. However, if all or most of that money were brought into this country, Apple would have had to pay an income tax of up to 35% on the repatriated funds. So the money sits.

With the new tax law, the rate is reduced to 15.5% on such funds — it’s otherwise 21% — which is meant to provide an incentive for companies to return its foreign cash. The theory is that an estimated $2.6 trillion in repatriated overseas funds would, in part at least, be used for to expand companies, hire more people and/or give them raises.

At least that’s the theory.

In practice, it may not work out that way. Consider the previous attempt to repatriate corporate money. In 2004, Congress approved a measure targeting overseas funds, known as the Homeland Investment Act, in which the tax rate for such money was reduced to 5.25%. This law simply failed deliver anything near the expected benefits. According to a New York Times story from 2009, some $299 billion was returned from foreign sources. Most of it went to share buybacks and higher dividends, despite reported prohibitions of such practices in the law itself.

So why should anything be different with the 2017 tax cut? Right now, corporations are already sitting on hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in unspent domestic money and little has changed.

But Apple is supposedly a different sort of company, so what might it do? Give Apple employees a huge raise, hire more of them maybe? While higher salaries could happen, I suppose, businesses don’t just expand the workforce unless more sales make it necessary. It doesn’t just happen.

So what would Apple do with all that extra cash? Would it consider switching tactics and, on a one-time basis at least, buy up a large company? Over the years, there have been suggestions that Apple buy Netflix to get a leg up on the TV streaming market, Tesla Motors to jump start its autonomous driving project, and even Time Warner.

Well, AT&T is attempting to do the latter, although Apple was mentioned, without any support, as one of the suitors of the large entertainment company. In retrospect, what would you think if Apple ended up in control of such properties as DC Comics? Would Superman bear the Apple logo? Supergirl? CNN?

Now it is true that Apple may buy a couple of dozen companies each year to acquire new technologies. Notable examples include the 2008 purchase of PA Semi, a microprocessor chip designer, which helped move forward the creation of those powerful A-series CPUs, the 2010 purchase of Siri, then a voice-command app,  the 2012 purchase of AuthenTec, forming the basis of the Touch ID fingerprint recognition system, and the 2013 purchase of PrimeSense, which helped jumpstart development of Face ID.

Each of these acquisitions had price tags in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The largest acquisition, so far, was the $3 billion takeover of Beats Electronics in 2014. In addition to assuming control of Beats headphones and speakers, it gave Apple the foundation for Apple Music.

So with the passage of a huge corporate tax cut, two Citi analysts, Jim Suva and Asiya Merchant, claim there is a 40% possibility that Apple will now move to buy Netflix.

So why would Apple want Netflix?

Well, the company’s rumored efforts to set up a TV subscription service reportedly failed, evidently due to the inability to reach agreements with the entertainment companies. Apple has reportedly allocated $1 billion to produce original TV programing, and has hired seasoned TV executives from Sony Entertainment and Amazon to spearhead the project.

According to published reports, the new TV projects include a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s anthology show from the 1980s, “Amazing Stories,” a drama on morning TV featuring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, and a sci-fi drama from Ronald D. Moore, whose accomplishments include the highly acclaimed “Battlestar Galactica” reboot.

Meantime, Netflix has over 100 million subscribers worldwide, more than any individual cable or satellite provider. In addition to huge libraries of movies and TV shows, Netflix has produced dozens of original TV productions. I’m sure most of you have heard of “Orange is the New Black” and “House of Cards.”

So wouldn’t an acquisition of Netflix not only enhance Apple’s service portfolio big time, but put them at the top of the heap in TV streaming?

But is this really the right time to buy up Netflix? While it continues to grow, there appear to be some troubling signs. “House of Cards” is nearing the end of its run, in large part because of the firing of star/executive producer Kevin Spacey over sexual abuse allegations.

In addition, Disney plans to remove all or most of its content from Netflix as the prelude to setting up its own streaming service. This would include Star Wars films, but may also involve the original Marvel Comics programs that include “Daredevil,” “Iron Fist,” “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage,” “The Punisher” and the superhero team up, “The Defenders.”

But with reports that the firm is investing $7 billion on original content in 2018, does that even matter?

On the other hand, if Netflix remains a successful company, why would it even entertain a buy out from any company?

Such an acquisition would surely represent a romantic ideal of how Apple can get a leg up entering the entertainment business. It’s the sort of acquisition that would likely pass muster from the U.S. government, since Apple is technically not buying a full-blown competitor despite making efforts to develop original TV content.

As a practical matter, though, how would it impact the relationships Apple has with other streaming services on Apple TV and other products? Would Amazon want to continue to offer its Prime Video service to a competitor? What about Hulu and other services?

Besides, just what is Apple’s end game producing its own original content? Is it meant to serve as a value-added feature to boost Apple Music? Hence Apple Music and TV?

As with other suggestions about the companies that Apple ought to buy, I cannot take this one seriously, even if it will soon be flush with repatriated cash.

When the original Bondi blue iMac appeared in the summer of 1998, I would not have predicted where the product would go in the next 19 years. Not even close.

At first, the iMac was marketed as a relatively low cost ($1,299) personal computer using repurposed PowerBook parts powering a 15-inch CRT display. At the time, the design got accolades for its translucent look, but not so much for the decision to dump legacy ports and focus on Ethernet and USB. There wasn’t even a floppy drive.

Over the years, the iMac got faster. Beginning with the late 2009 27-inch model, it became a credible mainstream computer that, for many purposes, was near as useful as a Mac Pro. That’s when I made the switch.

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It’s a rare thing for a major company to admit error. Clearly Apple has come to realize it has a growing problem on its hands with the admission about throttling iPhone performance when batteries are deteriorating.

Indeed, with class action lawsuits and, most recently, a crime lawsuit in France over alleged planned obsolescence, which is illegal in that country, it clearly came time for Apple to deal with the core problem. Although the company admitted to making changes in iOS to slow down iPhones with aging batteries, supposedly to prevent sudden shutdowns, they had to do more.

That admission only made matters worse.

Since the condition of the battery is supposedly responsible, Apple will reduce the price of battery replacements for out-of-warranty iPhones from $79 to $29. Come next year, there will be an iOS update that will, at long last, provide information about the battery’s health.

As I mentioned in a previous column on the subject, detailed battery health information is already available to owners of Apple notebooks, so it stands to reason there should have been no problem providing similar information to iPhone and iPad users — not to mention the iPod touch and the Apple Watch. After all, it’s already available in third-party iOS apps.

Now the new battery replacement policy has a time limit. It starts in late January and expires in December of 2018. It appears to me they are throwing us a few bones, to stem the tide of legal filings. At the same time, third-party resellers who offer their own battery replacements are probably going to suffer. Then again, Apple has the power and the resources to replace batteries at a loss forever if they so choose.

Forgetting the silly conspiracies about deliberate efforts to fool people into buying new iPhones, I do think Apple could have avoided the brouhaha if they explained, in advance, what they were doing to iPhone performance and why. A simple information prompt the first few times performance was reduced, along with perhaps a support document, would have left them in the clear.

So make of this what you will. Here’s Apple’s full response to what I’ve come to call Throttlegate:

A Message to Our Customers about iPhone Batteries and Performance

We’ve been hearing feedback from our customers about the way we handle performance for iPhones with older batteries and how we have communicated that process. We know that some of you feel Apple has let you down. We apologize. There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about this issue, so we would like to clarify and let you know about some changes we’re making.

First and foremost, we have never — and would never — do anything to intentionally shorten the life of any Apple product, or degrade the user experience to drive customer upgrades. Our goal has always been to create products that our customers love, and making iPhones last as long as possible is an important part of that.

How batteries age

All rechargeable batteries are consumable components that become less effective as they chemically age and their ability to hold a charge diminishes. Time and the number of times a battery has been charged are not the only factors in this chemical aging process.

Device use also affects the performance of a battery over its lifespan. For example, leaving or charging a battery in a hot environment can cause a battery to age faster. These are characteristics of battery chemistry, common to lithium-ion batteries across the industry.

A chemically aged battery also becomes less capable of delivering peak energy loads, especially in a low state of charge, which may result in a device unexpectedly shutting itself down in some situations.

To help customers learn more about iPhone’s rechargeable battery and the factors affecting its performance, we’ve posted a new support article, iPhone Battery and Performance.

It should go without saying that we think sudden, unexpected shutdowns are unacceptable. We don’t want any of our users to lose a call, miss taking a picture or have any other part of their iPhone experience interrupted if we can avoid it.

Preventing unexpected shutdowns

About a year ago in iOS 10.2.1, we delivered a software update that improves power management during peak workloads to avoid unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, and iPhone SE. With the update, iOS dynamically manages the maximum performance of some system components when needed to prevent a shutdown. While these changes may go unnoticed, in some cases users may experience longer launch times for apps and other reductions in performance.

Customer response to iOS 10.2.1 was positive, as it successfully reduced the occurrence of unexpected shutdowns. We recently extended the same support for iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus in iOS 11.2.

Of course, when a chemically aged battery is replaced with a new one, iPhone performance returns to normal when operated in standard conditions.

Recent user feedback

Over the course of this fall, we began to receive feedback from some users who were seeing slower performance in certain situations. Based on our experience, we initially thought this was due to a combination of two factors: a normal, temporary performance impact when upgrading the operating system as iPhone installs new software and updates apps, and minor bugs in the initial release which have since been fixed.

We now believe that another contributor to these user experiences is the continued chemical aging of the batteries in older iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s devices, many of which are still running on their original batteries.

Addressing customer concerns

We’ve always wanted our customers to be able to use their iPhones as long as possible. We’re proud that Apple products are known for their durability, and for holding their value longer than our competitors’ devices.

To address our customers’ concerns, to recognize their loyalty and to regain the trust of anyone who may have doubted Apple’s intentions, we’ve decided to take the following steps:

• Apple is reducing the price of an out-of-warranty iPhone battery replacement by $50 — from $79 to $29 — for anyone with an iPhone 6 or later whose battery needs to be replaced, starting in late January and available worldwide through December 2018. Details will be provided soon on apple.com.
• Early in 2018, we will issue an iOS software update with new features that give users more visibility into the health of their iPhone’s battery, so they can see for themselves if its condition is affecting performance.
• As always, our team is working on ways to make the user experience even better, including improving how we manage performance and avoid unexpected shutdowns as batteries age.

There’s more to Apple’s statement, but it’s just corporate PR speak, so I’ll stop here.

The long and short of it, however, is that Apple is simply addressing the limit’s of today’s battery technology with various performance optimizations. This is not unusual. Even notebook computers, Macs and PCs, are designed to maximize battery life by, when needed, reducing performance and thus reducing power consumption.