Apple Announces New CEO, Deliberately Slows Down Old One

Level 1: The Old Toy Gets Slower

Imagine a toy company that announces a shiny new robot, and then — instead of just letting kids enjoy their old robot — sneaks in at night and loosens its batteries so it walks slower and slower until everyone begs for the new one. This joke pretends the company did the same thing to its own boss: the new boss is announced, and the old boss suddenly starts moving in slow motion with a "please wait" wheel spinning on his face. It's funny because everyone who's owned an old phone has secretly suspected exactly this was happening to them.

Level 2: What Batterygate Actually Was

Some context for the references. A CEO succession is just a company replacing its chief executive — Tim Cook, pictured, has run Apple since 2011. Throttling means deliberately limiting performance: capping a processor's clock speed so it draws less power. Apple did this on older iPhones because worn batteries couldn't deliver peak current, causing phones to shut off abruptly; the fix prevented crashes but made phones feel sluggish. The scandal wasn't the engineering — it was the secrecy, revealed when benchmark users noticed scores jumped after battery replacements. The fallout: Apple apologized, discounted battery swaps, and added a Battery Health setting letting users disable the throttle. The loading spinner over Cook's face is iOS's activity indicator — the spinning grey wheel you see when an app stalls — which is why putting it on a person reads instantly as "old model, no longer performing." The format itself, a real-looking news card with serif headline, is satire's oldest trick: borrowed credibility.

Level 3: Throttling the Legacy Executive

The satirical engine of this card from The Chaser (Australia's house of fake headlines, byline Tom Basso, red drink-glass badge in the corner) is a single, precise substitution: take Apple's most infamous device-lifecycle policy and apply it to CEO succession. The headline — "Apple announces new CEO, deliberately slows down old one" — works only because of Batterygate: the 2017 revelation that iOS updates had been silently throttling CPU peak performance on iPhones with degraded batteries. Apple's stated rationale was sound engineering (an aging lithium-ion cell can't sustain voltage under peak load, so capping clock speed prevents sudden shutdowns), but the silent part is what turned a defensible power-management decision into a global scandal, class-action settlements, regulatory fines, and the permanent folk belief that Apple slows your old phone to sell you a new one. The visual gag executes the policy on Tim Cook himself: he stands frowning against a green background with a grey iOS loading spinner superimposed on his face — the universal glyph of "this device is no longer responsive," now applied to an outgoing executive.

What gives the joke staying power among engineers is that it compresses a real pattern in how organizations sunset anything — phones, services, or people. The migration playbook is identical: announce the replacement, quietly degrade investment in the incumbent, and let "voluntary" attrition do the rest. Anyone who has watched a deprecated internal platform get starved of headcount until its last users flee recognizes the shape immediately. The meme also lands on the trust asymmetry at the heart of planned obsolescence debates: users can't audit the code making lifecycle decisions about their hardware, so every slowdown — even a legitimate thermal or battery mitigation — gets read as malice. Once a company is caught optimizing silently against user expectations a single time, every subsequent "performance management" change inherits the suspicion. That reputational debt compounds like the technical kind, and this headline is the interest payment, still accruing years later.