Repairable devices create a market for third-party device repair.

When something on my car breaks, I take it to a person that has no direct affiliation with the company that built my car, and it is always cheaper than taking it to the local repair shop that the manufacturer runs. Always.

I can also replace the parts in it with parts manufactured by yet another third party. Again, the parts of equivalent quality are nearly always cheaper than the original manufacturer's replacement parts. You can also spend more on premium aftermarket parts, if you like.

I don't even want to change the oil in my car. But I can pay someone who wants to service and repair cars all day, as their job, to do it for me, rather than sending the car back to the factory to have its engine replaced every time the oil gets dirty.

If I like tinkering with electronics, I could swap my own iPhone battery, and then I could also do that for other people. The problem is that Apple, Samsung, et al do not wish to share the repairs market, or allow repairs to eat into new sales, and therefore do not sell repair parts at reasonable prices or release part specifications so that third parties may produce repair parts of equivalent quality.

So the only way to get cheaper than an official first-party repair is to get crappy grey-market parts. Proprietary and patented connectors that don't get licensed on reasonable terms make things worse. This stuff doesn't need to be repaired by everyone, but it needs to be repairable by someone that isn't beholden to the original manufacturer. Repairability is the consumer check on planned obsolescence.

You don't necessarily have to fix it yourself, though. You could get it serviced by a professional, just like people do with a washing machine or a fridge.

And that happens today every day with the iPhone? There are plenty of professionals, both authorized and unauthorized by Apple, that can do nearly any repair necessary on an iPhone.

No, it does not happen with the iPhone or most other Apple products. They are incredibly hostile to 3rd party repairers.

Apple is notoriously draconian about ensuring that 3rd parties are blocked from accessing schematics and repair manuals. I'm talking, they threaten lawsuits to anyone publishing schematics, and there is no legal way to obtain those schematics unless you're an Apple authorized repairer - in which case you'll never need them because your job is just to replace entire logic boards after minimal diagnostics. This creates enormous waste and costs a lot more than an actual repair would. In some cases they don't even do that and just tell the user tough shit, get a new device.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-NU7yOSElE

>No, it does not happen with the iPhone or most other Apple products. They are incredibly hostile to 3rd party repairers.

Clearly you have not been to Asia. Plenty of 3rd party iPhone repair shops. Very easy to get batteries and cracked screens replaced.

I wager dollars to donuts that those "3rd party iPhone repair shops" are not authorized by Apple

That video was fun, thank you.

I agree with Cameron here, people, for whatever reason, just don't use the repairmen. They're out there. They're everywhere, but the repair shops are nowhere even close to being as busy as the Apple store. (Or even the AT&T store for that matter.)

I think people have been successfully conditioned to view phones as disposable/replaceable. It would take an almost Sisyphean marketing and conditioning effort to change that thinking.

I'm not sure it's possible. But, hey, I suppose Apple's free to try. No harm there I suppose.

Maybe there are regional effects at play, but in almost every country I’ve lived or worked in there are a substantial number of independent iPhone repair stores, usually with cliched names like iRepair or similar, and many of them seem to be doing a roaring trade. If people weren’t using them I can’t imagine these stores would be continuing to exist in such numbers either.

Outside many European Apple stores they even often pay someone to stand and hold a sign advertising cheaper iPhone repairs available around the corner etc.

Anecdotally, a large number of my friends and family have all used these, usually for cracked screens or batteries, and often in preference to an Apple store on the (sometimes incorrect) assumption it will be cheaper than “taking it to Apple” to get fixed.

> people, for whatever reason, just don't use the repairmen. They're out there. They're everywhere,

The reason they're everwhere is that people do take their phones in for repair. Mostly battery replacement and cracked screens. The town I live in manages to support three repair shops that I know of.

I don't know how big the adoption is in the US for nokia "dumb phones", but in Europe they sell really good.

The first thing you do when you take them out of the box is to put the battery in.

Even if the person at the store does this for you, just by watching you can easly do it yourself.

And since iphones are a huge role model, if they implement it others will follow along.

All of the physical mechanisms required to allow a user replaceable battery are fragile and take up valuable space. It’s not a simple matter of just allowing it. It could actually lead to more repairs due to failure of those parts, and you certainly could no longer make the backs out of glass or other exotic materials. They would all have to be plastic.

I don't know where all these wrong facts are coming from. Nokia phones were not fragile. I have dropped them many times. The battery gets out and I can insert it back and it works again. Nothing breaks. And they work year after year. I also have a cheap Chinese android phone that behaves like that. I believe mobile companies (and tech reviewers) have spread lies in this regard.

Nah, we have decades of experience of doing this. And it doesn't really affect size or price either, that was evident back when you had a choice in the matter. It's just that manufacturers would rather sell you a new phone than a new battery.

Shocking, I know...

Taking more space, yes. Being fragile, really not.

If Apple wants to make resilient devices they'd start by using materials not as fragile as glass or thin aluminium. Say, differentially hardened steel (incl. plated) or advanced composites. Just like watches.

Then, the only problem is extra space for the battery connector. They could even sell users a prismatic pouch with no plastic shell as the battery.

The actual tricky part is that integrated battery allows better cooling by use of messy thermal compound. You could have a foam thermal pad instead below the battery cover.

Even though I hate things made out of plastic, plastic IS the right material for building a phone. Plastic is hard to scratch, has grip, is lightweight, and is hard to break.

Remember iPhone 5c? People absolutely hated it because it was plastic (well, that, and some other reasons–but mainly because it seemed "cheap").

I'm not a materials scientist, but something has happened to consumer plastics in the last 40-60 years-- it's changed for the worse (I'm assuming in an effort to be "green", which happily coincides with undermining durability).

We used to be able to buy Fisher-Price toys that were tough enough to bear the weight of a car, or withstand multiple generations of abuse by children. I've got plastic toolboxes inherited from my grandfather that still hold up.

Take a look at the ratings and user photos for plastic vehicle ramps on Amazon and consider whether you think you could even get the jack stands in before the ramps collapse. Kids' toys are flimsier than ever, yet despite the "cheaper" construction they're also more expensive than ever. I bought my kids the Barbie Dreamhouse (a $100+ marvel of plastic and cardboard) that collapsed under its own weight. The original Nintendo equipment was light-years more rugged than the endless RMA experience that is the Switch.

We have the technology to make plastics that don't feel "cheap" and the products reusable, but for whatever reasons we've clearly steered away from these goals.

Plastics have actually gotten better in the intervening years, but the advances in machining have allowed far more complicated molds than was once economical. This allows designers to use less plastic, and make it "strong enough". I was recently shopping for a gift for my nephew, and was horrendously disappointed in the Fischer price products- for the money, they didn't seem anywhere near the quality I remembered. However, one only needs to examine something like cordless tools or Lego to realize quality products can be made using plastic.

To be fair, Nokia's Windows Phones used plastic which felt rather valuable and high quality. It was an excellent finish that doesn't feel out of a place in a premium device at all.

You're going to have to do better than "...but in Europe they sell really good."

Do those people that do not want to change their battery of their Iphone also throw away their TV remote control when the battery is empty?

You raise a good point about tradeoffs: it probably is true that most people really neither want nor need a replaceable battery.

But here’s another tradeoff: if one is producing phones for the great portion of the market which needs or wants disposable devices, then one doesn’t get to claim that one is designing durable devices.

Durable and disposable are not mutually exclusive attributes.