That's not remotely how waterproofing works. Getting any meaningful degree of ingress protection is hard. It requires entirely different assembly techniques and is generally contrary to user serviceability.

Proprietary batteries are the reason thin electronics exist. You can't use 18650s to make a MacBook.

I think the problem here is that you vastly underestimate how hard manufacturing is. The things you're proposing are like me trying to sue Facebook because it crashes all the time. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it because they're actively trying to subvert me for nefarious reasons? No, it's just because they don't know how to do it better in a reasonable price range.

No one thinks its free of any effort. But $10 wrist watches claim 100m waterproof (whatever 100m means in watch land). All I want is my phone's screen not to mess up when if my buddy pushes me into the pool. 2 ft of water for 10 seconds. That's it.

Behold the $75 claimed waterproof phone: https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_602673.html

You can get several phones that offer that.

Minor nitpick: Speakers and microphones are moving parts. The speaker has even been used to expel water.

Not a minor nitpick at all. Physical buttons are also moving parts.

Please, these things are not mechanical watches, which have been able accompany divers for literally centuries.

Speakers are trivially sealed, as are buttons. They are just a fancy electromagnet, or piezoelectric crystal.

Also both can work through induction potentially keeping them outside a "pressure chamber" and forgoing sealing altogether. Although I just want the steam of my shower not to mess up with my phone, not dive 100 m with it.

Not to mention headphone ports, usb ports, and charging ports. Also most phones have a vibrate function which uses an electric motor.

Wait, ports are considered moving parts?

Yes. Connectors like USB and headphones consist of metal "fingers" in a plastic insulating shell, perhaps with an outer metal shell. The contacts are sprung and need to move. So the simplest, most natural implementation has gaps around the contacts. There's also usually a thin gap between the connector on the PCB and the outer casing of the phone. If you want it sealed you have to add gaskets everywhere during assembly.

Not to mention sockets for SIM and SD cards. If you can take the back off the whole phone to change the battery, that makes it a lot harder.

Quite a few phones are waterproof or splashproof : http://www.techradar.com/news/best-waterproof-phone

Exact meaning of ingress protection "IP" ratings: http://www.dsmt.com/resources/ip-rating-chart/

Or if you want something cheaper: https://www.gearbest.com/cell-phones/pp_602673.html

Many ports, and notably headphone jacks, have springy pieces of metal inside to clamp onto the plug. This is what causes scratchy audio when you wiggle the plug in old devices, the clamping force has weakened.

Don't things move inside them? They are pretty hard to make water tight.

> Find the planned-obsolescence parts in things like car doors that were engineered too thin or out of plastic so that door and window handles fail after a certain number of uses.

There’s no way in hell car companies are purposely under-engineering things to cause them to break. That damages the brand reputation, and will drive the next sale to a competitor.

Yes, they make engineering tradeoffs. No, they don’t design a part with the specific intention that it will fail earlier than a comparable (cost-wise) design would.

I present to you - Mercedes-Benz - http://thegarage.jalopnik.com/for-the-love-of-god-dont-ever-...

There are a lot of examples like this. That timing gear in your linked article is one example. The rear emblem (and trunk key cover) on a 90’s Nissan Altima is another one. They have all fallen off by now. Crappy pot metal?

Either way, it wasn’t intentionally designed to do that. There was no engineer that said, “Hey, let’s juice our parts revenue in 5 years by making this hinge really weak.”

EDIT: Thanks for that article, though. I could see myself getting suckered into a good deal on a Benz. Now I know why the price is so low.

That's just rubbish engineering, not planned-obsolescence.

Watertight is a hard engineering problem to solve. If it isn't a vacuum or loaded with some other gas then you will get water coming in because of temperature cycles causing the device to act like a pump, which in a phone are a problem because you will have temperature fluctuations caused by charging, usage and environment.

And even if that argument wasn't true, it doesn't have to be - it just has to convince the court that it is.

Reminds me of an idea from the novel "Makers", by the very same Cory Doctorow, in which there's a mass VC-funded lawsuit against a particular known media megacorp.

Devil's advocate here... I would have hoped the opportunities were so lucrative that whistleblowers would have already, eh, blown the whistle. That's exactly the point of the whistleblower's protection laws.

So maybe these things aren't as widespread as you'd think... at least not in a legal sense. I'd also like to think that maybe people aren't "designing" flaws into things rather than finding the maximum economic benefit, or just are "naive" to what they design.

It's probably standard practice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

> Form a company that explores new markets in legal liabilities. It could bring lawsuits with little risk where the payoff could be billions of dollars.

Sort of like a patent troll, but for good? I do like it.

I believe that patent trolls do this for IP.

I think there's always a danger of having this type of litigation be abused (in this case I'm also thinking of drive-by litigation around the Disabilities Act etc.)

edit aww spitfire beat me to the patent troll punch.