Oh my, the inside of the iMac Pro is pretty.

I was in my Apple Store over the weekend, and every other person through the door had an iPhone 6 or 6S in hand, inquiring about getting a new battery installed. I had assumed Apple would be testing these phones and only replacing batteries that were operating below a certain threshold, but it seems like anyone who wants one can have a new battery installed at the discounted price.

This is going to cost Apple a pile of cash, but it’s the right call. Apple needs consumers to trust them, and that relationship has been damaged for many people. Turning someone away because their battery hasn’t failed would only make it worse. It’s better for the company to eat some battery swaps that it doesn’t need to do to start rebuilding trust.

I have a recurring task every December 31 to log in to this page at Apple.com and make sure my Apple ID is all up to date. This page make it easy to dissociate your ID from any hardware you may have replaced, check your payment options and Apple Pay Cash balance, adjust your email subscription options and more.

I had a couple of MacBook Pros to clear out, haha.

Today, Apple published an open letter over the fact that as of iOS 10.2.1, some iPhones are effectively throttled to keep them from shutting down under high CPU load thanks to worn batteries. While this allows a customer to use their iPhone for longer without crashes, it’s clear that public was unhappy.

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.

Apple taking three steps forward concerning the issue:

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.

As noted on support.apple.com, the company will replace an iPhone battery at no charge if it retains less than 80 percent of its original capacity and its under AppleCare+. This program is not new, but is a feature of AppleCare+ I had missed.

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.

Good. This could have avoided a lot of pain.

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.

Clearly this is a problem when you pair desktop-class silicon with mobile-class batteries. The fact that iOS 11.2 looped the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus into the CPU smoothing program shows Apple is still concerned about this. I hope they can improve it in the future.

In addition to its letter and revised repair costs, Apple has published a new support document explaining how batteries age over time. It walks the line of appropriate nerdiness pretty well.

All in all, I think this is a pretty good response.

However, I’d like to see the $29 battery repair be available for a set amount of time after purchase. Someone who just unwrapped an iPhone 7 may run into this problem sometime in 2019, after the repair discount window has closed.

Matthew Panzarino has details:

As that battery ages, iOS will check its responsiveness and effectiveness actively. At a point when it becomes unable to give the processor all of the power it needs to hit a peak of power, the requests will be spread out over a few cycles.

Remember, benchmarks, which are artificial tests of a system’s performance levels, will look like peaks and valleys to the system, which will then trigger this effect. In other words, you’re always going to be triggering this when you run a benchmark, but you definitely will not always trigger this effect when you’re using your iPhone like normal.

Apple will continue to add this smoothing to more devices over time to avoid shutdown issues, freezing and other problems.

I can see why Apple limits peak performance on devices with degraded batteries, but most people will just hear “Apple slows down older phones.”

I’m not sure there’s a way around that, but Apple should alert a user when their iPhone crosses the battery threshold and the phone begins to operates in this mode, giving them information about replacing their battery.

Mark Gurman has posted a huge story to wind down a year of massive Apple leaks:

Starting as early as next year, software developers will be able to design a single application that works with a touchscreen or mouse and trackpad depending on whether it’s running on the iPhone and iPad operating system or on Mac hardware, according to people familiar with the matter.

Developers currently must design two different apps — one for iOS, the operating system of Apple’s mobile devices, and one for macOS, the system that runs Macs. That’s a lot more work. What’s more, Apple customers have long complained that some Mac apps get short shrift. For example, while the iPhone and iPad Twitter app is regularly updated with the social network’s latest features, the Mac version hasn’t been refreshed recently and is widely considered substandard. With a single app for all machines, Mac, iPad and iPhone users will get new features and updates at the same time.

There is a lot to digest here, and a lot to think about. In a move this big, everything comes down to details:

• How will iOS-first apps behave on the non-touch interface of the Mac?
• Will developers work to make apps feel native regardless of platform, or will the Mac be overrun with sorta-janky ports of iOS apps?
• Assuming this requires the Mac App Store, will Apple continue to adjust its stance to make it a more palatable solution for indie developers?
• Will iPhone-only apps be approved for the Mac, or will supporting the iPad be a prerequisite for making the jump to the Mac?
• Is Apple’s platform support wide and deep enough to overcome the issues Windows and Google have come up against with similar changes?
• What work will developers have to do to prep their code bases to run on the Intel-CPUS that power Macs?
• Is this the first step toward ARM-powered Macs? Or those with touchscreens?
• Will these universal apps be a single purchase? Will developers lose their separate Mac and iOS revenue streams?

The biggest question is a simple one: Will this usher in a new era of great Mac apps, or is it the beginning of the end for the platform as we know it? Until we know more, everything seems up in the air.