The sad reality with phones is whatever Apple doss most if not all other manufacturers follow one way or another.

Samsung used to allow you to remove your battery easily but they also stopped at least in their flagship phone, last time I looked at one anyway. I know they also offer phones that do allow for this but the flagship phones really set the tone I feel for the downstream expectations over time.

Rather unfortunately I don’t think Apple sees value in removable batteries, which while I understand the trade offs I think is a net negative in this case

Apple doesn't want you to easily extend the life of older models; they want you to buy the new one.

And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin. Plus they offer consumers the ability to replace the battery for a fee.

> And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin.

No, that would be the various libre phones that have in-tree kernel drivers and correspondingly support updates to the latest system indefinitely.

The default in the industry prior to Apple was for software to be independent from hardware. You can install the latest Windows on hardware going back to the earliest x64 processors and Linux or BSD on hardware going back more than 20 years.

If random community-supported Linux distributions can support hardware from the previous millennium, Apple could support all the iPhone hardware ever made, but they don't. So that's just another instance of them doing something user-hostile so you have to buy a newer iPhone and Samsung et al following them.

Offering battery replacements in that context is just another way for them to stick it to you -- you have a four year old iPhone with a flat battery, they take your money to put in a new one and then stop issuing it software updates a year later so you have to buy a new one regardless.

In the formative years of PCs the support life was really low because of the fast pace of hardware improvement. Now support times are much longer because hardware performance grows much slower.

The same is true for smartphones. The original iPhone didn't have a very long support life but the iPhone 6S from 2015 is supported in iOS 14 giving it at least a 6 year lifespan.

Did this work for Windows Mobile?

This doesn’t ring true at all. The 5+ years of support you get for an iPhone model dwarfs the direct competitors.

If an android manufacturer guaranteed 5 years support and stock android available on the same day as google releases it then it be willing to give android another try.

Not even google themselves guarantee that. Some manufacturers are charging the same price as an iPhone with sometime less than 2 years with of OS upgrades.

On my Dell XPS replacing the battery also only involves unscrewing a few screws and unplugging one connector, then putting that back together with the new battery. It couldn't be simpler, and that's in the space constraints of an ultrabook.

On phones there's a better case for fixed batteries, but at least I don't mind another millimeter thickness if that means I can replace the battery.

I miss the good ol days when my T410 just simply unclipped. Completely modular, no screwdriver required, almost like battery replacement was a feature!

For a while, up until the T480, you had both an external and the internal battery. So if you had a few batteries it was pretty trivial to swap them while on the go--and sometimes you really do need 18 hours of battery life on a laptop, even if you aren't pleased about it.

Maybe Apple could be given a choice here: user-replaceable battery with a refundable core charge, or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase.

The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it.

The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.

> or they have to build a battery recycling program with the same sort of core charge applied at purchase

They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them.

Seems pretty reasonable to me?

I think the missing piece here is the core charge, which makes the average user think of the battery as something of value that shouldn’t just be thrown in the trash. Currently, I think a lot of users with an obsolete phone with a smashed screen would just throw it in the garbage.

It's not the core charge that makes you return a battery -- it's the core refund.

Agreed. The point of the core charge is to make the program more palatable to manufacturers. They’d rather the customer see the charge as a line item than rise their prices to fund it. I think the line item also helps educate the customer at purchase time that the refund exists.

All Apple would have to do is to have the back cover use screws instead of adhesives, using up about one tenth of a cc more volume, and use a more malleable adhesive for the battery (or none at all). It would take at most two more tenths of a cubic centimeter more volume.

> It would take at most two more tenths of a cubic centimeter more volume

I wonder how much empty space is in current gen iPhones, the 7 had so much that a YouTuber was able to squeeze the adapter Apple shipped with it convert analog audio to Lightning externally entirely into the phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LORsgF-fhgQ).

> All Apple would have to do...

This is hardware engineering, and high quality engineering at that. When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.

It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.

So yeah, it is an "All Apple would have to do", but evidence is Apple is much better at deciding what it should and shouldn't do than back-seat designers. Sorry if that sounds a bit brusque, a nerve might have been hit here. But hardware isn't easy.

> It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.

This fallacy seems to be common in discussions of Apple. Apple is very profitable, therefore everything they do is infallible and impossible to improve.

Look at a picture of an Openmoko device. Just look at it. Here:

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

Compare this to various modern phones with a replaceable battery:

https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removab...

There are obvious reasons to expect the former to fail in the market but not the latter, even though they all have a replaceable battery.

Meanwhile the Apple devices further run iOS and are compatible with iMessage and the complete set of third party iOS apps, which are a large component of their success, but none of which would be any less true if they had a replaceable battery.

Doing a lot of things right can't prove that they're not doing a specific thing wrong.

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that Apple is infallible.

Rather, they are iterating upon the same few products with a zillion engineers in eensy weensy form factors where space is at a premium, so they probably think about why they do things a certain way.

And yet, their phones still have more than enough space for 4 screws, as you would see if you opened an iPhone. Actually, just reusing existing screw holes could do it.

There is a good reason, and the reason is that Apple doesn't want people to easily repair their phones.

Apple built excellent phones that used screws and had easily replaceable batteries, and were smaller than their current phones. I'm writing "All Apple has to do", because they actually did it already.

There is an esthetic consideration in that they won't be able to use a glass back, but that's seriously minor. They can put paint and gloss on top of ceramic or tons of other solutions for just a bit more cost.

Actually, thinking about it, if the glass wasn't completely flat, using the sides as clamps like in the iPhone 5 could work too.

> When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.

I'd bet a lot that the primary reason they did this was to make the device a fraction of a millimetre thinner; Apple seems to obsessed with thinness at the cost of everything else.

Personally, I'd much prefer an ever-so-slightly thicker phone with a removable battery, and I rather doubt I'm alone in that.

There's the story of Jobs throwing a prototype iphone in an aquarium, for bubbles to reveal excess space. They'd be nervous wasting 0.2 cm^3.

Well, there is certainly is around 0.2cm^3 of dead space in say an iPhone 11. The iPhone 7 had enough dead space in it to install an entire dongle inside.

You've never been inside an iPhone.

I absolutely have, multiple times. It is not difficult for Apple to find a way to get four screw holes in there.

Sure. It just necessitates making the phone thicker and longer and wider and heavier, and massively complicating the moisture seals, and making it even more fragile so it's more likely to break when it's dropped, and entirely rearranging the internals to make space for the screws to fit - which probably means making the battery smaller, because that's the only thing in there whose volume is really fungible. All so end users can take their iPhones apart, which is something that end users have been clamoring for years to be able to do.

I don't expect most people to refurbish their own iPhones, the way I do mine. That seems like it would be a weird thing to expect most people to do. And what's wrong with the million small shops that do battery replacements, or with Apple stores' own such service, that requires the "not difficult" total redesign you're so anxious to see happen?

It doesn't complicate moisture seals. A gasket is very simple. You can double gaskets as shock-reduction, too, which is impossible with adhesives. There are already about 30 screws in an iPhone 11, I don't think 4 more will make too much a difference, but if you were really trying to save space having two components use the same screw is possible.

This really isn't a total redesign, by the way, and it doesn't just apply to the battery, but helps repairing everything else. In any case, it absolutely isn't a total redesign, and FWIW the iPhones don't even have that much battery compared to more repairable phones of the same size.

Probably similar story to them slowing down old iPhones: there's a legimate and an illegimate motivation. But honesty had to to be forced out of them.