Try making the volume really loud, had some devices not working until sound was above a threshold, like an offset, for no apparent reason

How good/bad was it compared to the HDD?

They’ve been caught in the past slowing down old iPhones claiming it was to preserve battery health. I think claiming they definitely will do it is a bit much, but it seems plausible enough.

Do you have a proprietary requirement that you can’t handle on Linux? It works fine for me but also I’m not dependent on local proprietary tools to do my work so we may have a very different experience