I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by kick on Monday January 27, 2020 @02:20PM (#22162765)

'tptacek, your Twitter is (or was, I guess, I don't think he's talking about that problem much right now) full of retweets of Pinboard saying things along the lines of "Companies throwing money and lobbying to influence legislation is bad and should be stopped."

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by tptacek on Monday January 27, 2020 @02:32PM (#22162868)

What a weird response. The premise of my comment is that the Apple-style soldered-in integrated battery design is better than "plug and play" batteries you can install with just a screwdriver. If you don't agree with that premise, that's fine; maybe say why? Otherwise: what's your point? I'm saying the products are better for how they're designed.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by kick on Monday January 27, 2020 @04:01PM (#22163737)

I don't really care about Right to Repair, either, but the the criticism of the Apple battery situation in this post is explicitly about a private company bribing legislators into making a decision that benefits no one other than Apple itself and said legislators, and in the post it's quoting, none of your criticism of his criticism applies, because it was way before Apple had any time to collect evidence that making batteries harder to replace helped the consumer in any way.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by tptacek on Monday January 27, 2020 @04:45PM (#22164151)

Nobody had to bribe anyone to make products with integrated batteries.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by filoleg on Monday January 27, 2020 @03:41PM (#22163553)

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

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:I won’t buy an iPad: ten years later by cwalv on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @01:20AM (#22166918)

Are iPhone batteries really soldered-in? I've replaced a couple cracked screens, and vaguely remember replacing a battery on older iPhones, and I'm pretty sure I didn't need a soldering iron

[ Parent | on HN ]