Geez, people expect their iPhones to be Perpetual Motion Machines. For those unaware of the term, you can find it filed under "Hoax." There are no infinite sources of energy, no way to eliminate friction or molecular break-down - even a spaceship coasting in a vacuum will encounter forces that will eventually slow it down.
It must be those Energizer Bunny commercials; they just keep going, and going, and going.... Here's a clue; battery commercials last no more than 60 seconds. I should hope that a fresh Energizer lasts at least that long.
Is this due to Apple using "crap batteries?" Where's the proof Apple uses lower-quality batteries than anyone else? No, this is just the "logical" conclusion some people have reached once they accept Apple's explanation of the power management system. If the software makes logical sense, then the only remaining way to blame Apple is "crap batteries."
People are somehow amazed that battery performance degrades with age, yet every kind of rechargeable battery ever made has degraded with age (and paint fades, skin sags, spices and drugs lose potency...). Clearly, some people are too young to remember NiCads, or never owned an older car. I'll toss another term out there; entropy. (Maybe it's my engineering background, but to me, "Perpetual Motion Machine" means "joke," and "entropy" means, "fact of life.")
So yes, Apple throttles to prevent unexpected shutdowns. The use of that term should be self-explanatory. If you were driving down the highway with the gas gauge near Empty, would you floor the accelerator to get to the exit faster (and maybe never get there), or would you ease off the gas so that you can go farther on what remains? And if you've never had a car hesitate or stall because you floored it while low on gas...
"But," you say, "I have control over that, Apple has denied me control." Well, if you were fully aware of just what processes would demand a burst of processor activity (which, naturally, requires more energy than slow-and-steady), on a system that may be running hundreds of concurrent processes; if you were fully aware of what background tasks were running and what they will require next... then by all means, take manual control of your computing device. Tell it what to do and what not to do, for every tick of a one billion-plus ticks-per-second system clock.
Since that's grossly impractical, maybe someone should write software that is capable of doing that automatically... maybe they could call it an "operating system."
In the end, this really all comes down to the need for control and lack of trust. They're really two sides of the same coin - control freaks step in and try to assert control anytime they distrust the persons/systems to whom they've delegated authority.
As someone who's worked for a fair number of micro-managers over the years (and has been guilty of it himself from time to time)... in the long run, it's always counterproductive. Relax, surrender a bit of control, take a risk on trust. Maybe things won't be done exactly the way you prefer, but there's little chance that you'd be right 100% of the time, and there's a pretty good chance that most of the people to whom you delegate authority are as skilled, or even more skilled in their particular task, than you are (even if your name is Sheldon Cooper).
