A lot of people replace their phones on a 2-3 year cycle. If you could get a new battery for $30 and install it yourself in 30 seconds, would people be throwing less phones out?

You'll note that Apple's warranty language (and probably everyone else's) specifically defines batteries as a "consumable part." Given that, it's a bit of a dick move to make them so difficult to replace.

Having had cell phones starting in 1994, when replaceable batteries were just how it was done, I can say people did replace their phones just as often as now.

My memory is that people replaced them every year back then, in part, because the batteries were so awful and new phones kept coming out with better battery life.

Today, many (most?) people keep their cell phones for at least two years, and on HN it seems to be even longer. I have an iPhone 5 from 2013 that I use for traveling, and it just keeps going. Using a seven-year-old phone would have been unheard of back in the days of replaceable batteries.

Frankly it is ecological cancer to operate the way Apple does.

At least it's easy to drop by an Apple store to take advantage of the trade-in/recycle program.

There are no “complex cases” of battery repair. They are referring to cases where there is other damage they have to fix first (which they stated).

Thankfully Apple has recently made genuine iPhone batteries more available to repair shops, but that was just 4 months ago. They spent 13 years not doing that first.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20838307/apple-iphone-rep...

For apple products specifically this isn’t a big issue. I got my iPhone battery replaced for $29 a few years ago. I’ll probably get it replaced again at the end of this year if there’s still no SE-sized phone released to replace it (I think it’s $49 now).

For anything that’s not an apple product, finding a store to replace the battery is going to be a lot harder or impossible. I definitely prefer the choice to use removable batteries or rechargeable AAs on stuff like game controllers.

In the end it's still nothing very challenging to replace an iPhone or iPad battery.

A decade later, the [iPad] is ten years old and Apple has killed 20 state Right to Repair bills, in part to lock out third parties who might change you batteries for you.

How can you not understand that? Not allowing "plug'n'play" batteries that anyone with a screwdriver could do is at least hypothetically justifiable as a design decision, but Apple's batteries are replaceable and they go to great steps to prevent indie shops from doing so.

They demonstrate it pretty repeatedly by selling it as an extremely marked-up service in Apple's stores.

I'm pretty sure Apple isn't making gigantic bank off battery upgrades.

To be candid: I don't much care about "Right To Repair". I'm not animated by most nerd policy priorities, like "Net Neutrality" or "Copyright Reform" or whatever. Those aren't my political priorities and they're not the concerns Pinboard is surfacing when he talks about Microsoft and Google donations.

While I don't mind the battery situation outside of the legislative issue, I do disagree on your claim that they're "better" in some way (but again, irrelevant to the original criticism).

Here's an anecdote to elaborate on why, since you asked:

I've had a few iPhones, varying degrees of battery quality, fairly well taken care of. I've also had a few other phones of various manufacturers and operating systems, mostly with replaceable batteries.

The ones with replaceable batteries had equivalent-to-better battery life than the iPhones I've had, including before replacing the battery, and especially after the battery on the iPhones had worn down a bit. Without iOS's battery management that throttles performance to save battery life, I've had iPhones that at 87% of max capacity (I just checked the one I'm currently using; it was probably higher when I tested this a few weeks ago) that can't outlast an HTC phone from eleven years ago that I've replaced the battery on a single time, when doing comparable tasks, and that's not even getting into the modern devices I have that beat both of them by a decent margin. This includes both with the screen on and the screen off.

Apple's battery life comes from software band-aids, not some magical benefit of soldering on batteries. Soldering just serves to make the device thinner, which is of dubious benefit.

Agreed. Considering that getting an iPhone battery replaced directly by Apple costs about $49-$69 overall (as others have mentioned in the thread already), they almost definitely are not making bank off it.

Devices exist on a repairability spectrum, from the industrial appliance which is delivered with full electric schematics and every part stamped with a replacement order number, to the black-box NUSPI ["no user serviceable parts inside"]. The enmity is not really about batteries, but having that one question stand in as a measurement to ensure the device meets a minimal standard for allowing third-party repair.

I have a tablet from 2013. It works very well but the battery has worn out. I now have to throw it away because I can't replace the battery.