> 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.