People are happy to throw their rubbish (trash) on the ground wherever they are, but that's not a sustainable system. Mandating a tiny degree of greater sustainability seems reasonable to me.

Second, you should have a real think about where you want regulation to have ability to dictate what people can do. Energy efficiency is an area where people both 1) don't have clear info from manufacturers, and 2) it leaves a mess for others to clean up.

Owning something that is designed in a way that causes it to have a lower resale price later is not such an area.

Isn't that very similar to repairability? Certainly the second point, and I've never seen a display in a shop give information on how phone batteries might be replaced.

In theory in a competitive market you would then expect someone to defect and gain that business, but that doesn't work in highly concentrated markets. Apple and Samsung together have more than 70% of the US market. So you can either have right to repair, or you can do some trust busting. Or both.

Seriously - you can go in and just pay them to do it. It's something like $99 for parts and labor all included for ipads.

What other tablet provider even offers this as a service? I'm serious - can you provide some names and examples with this level of convience?

I ask because my parents used an ipad for something like 7 years, and it got updates FAR longer than ANY competitor out there, and they got the battery updated. One of the reasons apple gets to charge a premium is BECAUSE their items hold value for so long relative to the competition.

Look at used prices for tablets (or phones). Some android phones ship with a 2 year old OS and NEVER get an update. The value of these phones after 2 years is basically zero.

That Apple repair probably costs them a tenner, and they're presumably primarily bringing you in to market new products to you.

Apple offer battery repair as part of their anti-competitive practices - they legally hassle other companies who offer repairs, because they want to make it hard and costly to drive the idea of disposability and sell more new products.

> just pay them...$99...to do it [for you].

That's not doing the replacement, that's paying a significant amount of money to have a specialist do it for you. Having the specialist available does not remove the original problem, it solves it with the side effect of cost and inconvenience.

Just because the side effects don't bother you doesn't mean everyone should be subjected to them. Replacing a battery should not require a specialist in the first place. Most people consider $99 a very expensive repair.

OS updates are orthogonal. We are talking about hardware.

They look at their products as a whole. So in the apple model, hardware and software run together. Seeing this with my parents and when I resell stuff you see the payoff. The apple products are usable FAR longer then competitors and sell for more even after a year or two.

You are not "subject" to buying an apple product. Apple has obviously chosen to optimize for a different user group than you are in. The market seems to appreciate that, their margins are nuts (they sell $100 worth of stuff for $200).

I say this has someone who used to by batteries for my laptop and other devices online, who did the ifixit stuff. The problem, the quality is wildly variable when you order online - so I at least can see that for the VAST majority of folks, apple's approach results in a pretty reliable / high quality result. And they charge and get paid a remarkable premium for the trust users have in them as a result of this.

If Apple Store is located nearly.

Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house.

Your claim is that Apple offers its products at a lower price? Than who?

I never made such a claim. Please read.

> Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house.

And yet people still "voluntarily" subscribe to them rather than some slower services like DSL or Satellite.

You could make a LiPoly battery with a hard user serviceable hard shell but it would have far less capacity than a glued in battery. Not only would the volume of the hard case take away from electrical storage volume but there needs to be free space for the electrolyte material to expand when it heats up. Batteries heat up when charging and discharging in addition to heat absorbed from components like a phone's internal circuitry. Without expansion space the battery is just a small bomb.

Older cell phones and smartphones had far less power draw than modern smartphones. The old Nokia BL-4 batteries were around 800 mAh. The original iPhone's battery was almost twice the capacity and a modern iPhone is 3-4 times that capacity. Smartphones would weigh twice as much and easily be twice as thick if they had replaceable batteries with the same capacity as their non-replaceable ones. While you might be fine with phones being thicker most buyers would rather have the thinner and lighter phone if the extra weight and bulk didn't offer any extra run time. They definitely wouldn't go for phones that had a quarter of the run time because they could replace the battery themselves.

It's not a conspiracy, it's just battery technology and physics. Also concerns about safety by way of insurance liability.

Edit0: specs: https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/mobile/phones/g... - 4000+mAh battery.

Non-replaceable batteries are a net benefit for consumers most of the time. They get the lighter thinner phones with all the features they want. If you want to keep the same phone for a decade, even with a replaceable battery, I wish you the best of luck. In the US I don't think there's any active 2G service and 3G services will be turned off in the near future. It'll make a decent media player or WiFi browser but it won't act as a phone.

Edit0: I've often found much better (repairable, long lasting) products for myself by looking in the enterprise/ fleet catalog. My oft-mentioned HP Elite X360 is another example of a device targeted to the corporate market and as a result, enables easy replacement of the SSD and battery.

I also didn't claim to know what is good for consumers. It should be obvious that given the choice between thick and heavy or thin and light consumer sales have favored thin and light for the past decade. That's not me dictating what is good, it's just me paying attention to the smartphone market for more than ten minutes.

I am happy for you that you find phones and laptops that last you a long time. Bully for you. But you are not the bulk of the smartphone or laptop market. You represent a tiny portion of both markets. I know this because you have to hunt down phones and laptops with replaceable batteries while pretty much everything on sale at BestBuy is all glued together. Buy the shit that you want but don't pretend that you represent some silent majority quietly yearning to replace batteries in their phones and swap hard drives in their laptops.

https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/mobile/phones/g...

And since it is a Samsung device, by the time you get ready to change the battery, Samsung more than likely won’t be updating the operating system.

The $399 iPhone SE has a better processor, camera, finger print sensor and given Apple’s history, will probably get operating system updates for five years.

You could get the battery replaced, and have an updated operating system for years and still be at slightly less than $499.

And you don’t save any money. The $399 iPhone SE with a battery replacement will be cheaper, smaller, lighter, supported, and faster.

you don't know the support cycle of this commercial device

Has any Samsung device ever had six years of upgrades like the original SE/6S?

often options such as LineageOS become available for such devices.

Yeah that’s something most consumers are going to do. As opposed to just going to settings and click upgrade.

So tell me again what is the advantage of the phone again? It’s not price, longevity, weight, size, or performance.

The phone you linked to is worse in every objective measure.

The fact is that even the best Android phones also don’t have a replaceable battery. Are all the manufacturers under the same delusion that consumers don’t care about replaceable batteries?

For once, just once, I'd like to hear you say something even slightly bad about Apple. Come on, just once?

The argument is that the market doesn’t care.

If the market cared about replaceable batteries why are all phone manufacturers creating high end phones with none replaceable batteries? It’s not just Apple it’s the entire industry.

Engineering is about tradeoffs. The phone you linked to proves exactly that - the phone is bulkier and heavier than the state of the art phones from Samsung

Isn't that kind of facial detection done in software? How can it be `heavier' or `thicker' if it's software?

> heavier, thicker, face detection that is not secure,

Is it maybe a way of saying more computationally intense or more layers in a neural network? It could be a non-native speaker, but to me those adjectives only really apply to physical things. I'm not sure.

BTW iPhones are really heavier.

https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/

It was my Plex server until earlier this year. It’s thick, it weighs over six pounds, it runs hot and even with a new battery it wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.

What’s the point?

That it was still useful to you until it was ten years old, and it should be the same for phones.

Apple just released a bug fix update for the 2011 iPhone 4s, June of last year. How many Android phones got security patch/bug fix releases for a 9 year old phone? Yes you can still get the battery replaced for it.

Have you tried using a ten year old Android phone?

You've got to generate a full supply chain, from design, mfg, qualification, qc, parts, diagnoses / repair / maint etc.

Just sell version with normal sim cards (old complaint). Then it was I'll never buy an apple product if it doesn't have a headphone jack. Then it was I think the move in progress to get away from nano sims to things like esims.

I know galaxy and others have been making fun of apple for not having a headphone jack (I'm one of the folks who really misses it because it worked great for making music / audio pass thru stuff with low latency). But do I think there is enough demand to justify the headphone jack vs pushing forward with things like airpods?

I don't think so - proof should be in the pudding. Either airpods are making apple big bucks or without headphone jacks apple should be crushed by samsung galaxy phones.

I've seen a lot of airpods in ears.

So they have done something to dial up the experience? Does my old jabra work as well - no - the audio quality was terrible (and doing bluetooth to my car speakers - also terrible).

I can do a facetime audio call with airpods - they sound great.

I do a facetime audio call on my cars speaker - it sounds horrible (and the car costs 30K+!)

The post I was replying to acts as if removal of the headphone jack forces people to buy AirPods. As if I would want to use wired headphones on my watch or AppleTV.

Ironically, Apple products pioneered the "glue everything, fix nothing" mantra AND costed the $100 more that you're talking about.

AFAIK, before the iphone all phones had a swappable battery.

they also had wildly lower power demands.