It’s not like a battery is soldered there, you can still replace it and it’ll cost you much less than getting a new phone. AFAIK I can still get a new battery on my iPhone 7 which is 4.5 years old.

Replacing iPhone battery feels like reassembling a mechanical watch. It isn’t soldered, but it’s glued in weird way requiring applying heat. To change battery, you have to disconnect 4-5 tiniest connectors, looking like LPT for fleas, extremely fragile.

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+12+Battery+Replacement/1...

And you just can’t buy original battery, they’re available only to selected service centres.

Changing the battery is an operation that you likely only do once in the phone's lifetime. It doesn't make sense to have design constraints just to make that operation super-quick.

Currently it takes an hour at most to do at any repair shop. It's good enough. What matters is that it's possible for a reasonable price.

€100 for labour, €50-80 for parts, now it suddenly only makes sense for high end phones

In practice it already costs about half that price.

That’s considerably more expensive than Apple’s $50/$70 flat rate pricing.

Just pay a mobile repair shop to do it. Not very expensive and much cheaper than buying a new phone.

Well yeah, I've replaced the battery and the button on my iPhone 4s myself back in the day. Handling those tiny connectors feels like you're performing an open heart surgery if you're not doing it for a living. But let's be honest, personal computing devices are going to get smaller and more intricate in the next decades. The days of replacing the battery yourself are long gone.

Maybe, but I haven't seen this issue with ~3 year old, Lumia, Xiaomi, Oneplus and Samsung phones in my family. Battery life may have gone down a bit but not as a practical deterrent. We aren't heavy users so that may be the reason.

Phones that do fast charging properly (e.g. heat generating components in the charger not in the phone) like Oneplus phones, will experience fat less battery degredation than an iphone or samsung phone.

Not as important these days.

My phone is from May 2019, so just under 2 years and I am still seeing basically the same battery performance from when it was new - something I didn't get with my earlier devices that had a removable battery.

Besides, getting a battery replacement for an iPhone costs sub 80 bucks, which is probably about the same as we would have had to pay for batteries for the older models - and they were more likely to break because you can't get waterproof phones with replaceable batteries.

The part of the audience that drives the market certainly don't have a problem doing that it seems.

That used to be a top reason I bought android phones. Then I found myself throwing them out every two to three years because they stopped receiving software updates.

They lose software updates by then anyways

Seems a bit dramatic considering that you can simply replace the battery once every three years.

I like having a waterproof phone.