EV owners are conscious about range. Tesla would have said that they were limiting range until vehicles are repaired.

Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges.

The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.

Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.