The demand for smartphones is hundreds of millions per year. Manufacturing a hundred million of a complex thing is orders of magnitude more difficult than manufacturing ones of millions of a complex thing. A small complex thing with tight tolerances is harder yet.

Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts.

Apple and Samsung pump out tens of millions of phones a quarter. The more effort required for each stage of assembly ends up the difference of millions of phones manufactured in the same period of time.

> Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts.

In my imagining of this, a robot is doing it. Which makes me think the opposite is true: the tightness can be controlled and errors can be managed better with a screw, than with glue.

Robots do not in fact do most assembly on smartphones. There's a reason Foxconn's factories are the size of towns. It's thousands of meat robots doing a majority of the work.

Assuming you've already researched the time and material costs - Why does it matter if more effort is required?

We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies.

We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what not.

> We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies.

It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much.

The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and expensive) undertaking to mass produce something like an iPhone in the volumes Apple does. There's a lot of orchestration between component suppliers, component transport, assembly, packaging, and channel distribution. Contracts covering all of those things are signed years in advance to reserve capacity.

If final product assembly volume drops because a worker has to spend five seconds screwing parts rather than two seconds gluing that back pressure affects everything. Supply chains are such that there's literally no warehouse space available to store backed up components or finished products.

That doesn't affect profitability but just economic feasibility of whole lines of products. There's massive demand for smartphones and there's only so many ways to get the production volume to meet that demand.

Consider PC shipments in terms of production. The global demand is tens of millions of units a year vs hundreds of millions of phones per quarter. Like I said, there's challenges to making a hundred million complex widgets that simply don't exist at smaller scales. Screws might be fine in laptops but they're a volume killer for phones.

I don't agree with your assessment, so we have a disagreement, no biggie :)

Car assembly lines were changed to include adding the seat-belt and the catalytic converter, etc, etc due to regulatory mandates. Heck they had to redesign their entire car to include crumple zones for safety! I don't think a screw is all that much.

And so, electronics companies will figure out how to optimize their assembly lines to comply with the regulations and they will figure out how to manage the supply chain and everything else. Apple employs tons of smart people, and there are many smart people in the world who can help as well.

Cars are big items. Phones are small.

Worldwide car sales are tens of millions per year. Smartphone sales are hundreds of millions per quarter.

So not only are phones orders of magnitude smaller than cars there's two orders of magnitude more manufactured every year.

You can disagree with me all you want but it doesn't change the fact of those scales. Phones don't just pop out of a mold or an extruder. Manufacturing billions of them is a big deal and anything making them more difficult to manufacture affects volumes.

>Manufacturing billions of them is a big deal and anything making them more difficult to manufacture affects volumes.

Sorry, but the environment comes first. They'll will just have to deal with it. This problem is imminently solvable, and tractable. We put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to automate putting on a few screws and a gasket as is done with watches and other commonplace items. Or they can come up with another modular design that is still repairable. We shouldn't put an artificial limit or human creativity and ingenuity.