No, but Apple always uses older generation parts from their suppliers (modems, displays, glass, NAND, etc), not to sabotage their products, but to cut down on BOM costs and increase margins, as suppliers always ask a premium for their latest and greatest, especially since their customers never cared about the spec sheet so using the most expensive parts would be profits wasted.

Sure. Using older, cheaper parts that get the job done is just sensible engineering. That’s not at all the claim I was replying to.

I think there is another dimension there - volume. Apple volume is on another level and it takes time to scale up factories to build latest and greatest things.

Good point, do you know the breakdown of Samsung device sales by generation and what chipsets they use? My layman expectation is that most of the android headset sales are lower end models. However, Samsung might be a different beast.

when you operate at the scale of apple a defect can become very costly. using well tested, older tech lowers this counterparty risk.

They've done it before: https://hothardware.com/news/apple-throttles-iphone-7-models...

If that's even true, that's still not even close to the same thing.