Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about be more open and acknowledge problems sooner? While Apple always eventually gets to the right response, they can sometimes take too long to do so. In the case of these iPhone batteries, I think Apple's response was relatively timely. But there have been cases where well known problems took over a year to acknowledge and remedy (like the early 2011 15" Macbook Pro GPU problems).
This story broke less than 2 weeks ago. So 10 business days (minus holidays) to put together a corporate response that affects hundreds of millions of devices seems pretty damn quick.
But even then, my comment is only with respect to the response being timely relative to the problem becoming publicly known.
If you take a cynical view that Apple knew what the side effects were a year ago when they released the software update but chose not to disclose it in the release notes, then the response was not timely.