I'm not sure whether they were doing this intentionally to sell new phones.
I believe they should have been very transparent with this at the beginning when they reduced the performance of the phone. The fact that this was a mystery to basically all consumers, including me.... I think I'm fairly well positioned to comment on performance of phones, but this result caught me completely by surprise when I discovered it in December. I wish Apple had been very transparent from the beginning.
What their motives were, whether this was to sell more phones, to avoid a recall of existing phones, I unfortunately can't comment to that.