What I want, is to be able to find a repair shop locally that would repair the glass on my Oneplus 8 Pro that I smashed in the first week of owning it. It fell all of 4 inches from the arm of the sofa onto the side table, and smashed because of shitty design wrapping the glass round the edge which was totally unnecessary.

Oneplus will repair it for £200 for the part PLUS tax PLUS shipping PLUS labour and I'll have to ship it out of the country somewhere and wait a number of weeks they won't disclose to have my phone back. Heck, they won't even tell me how much the labour cost _might_ be.

If they'd sell the parts and allow one of the many phone repair shops in the UK to fix it, I could have it within an hour or two for little more than the cost of the screen itself.

This isn't about making your devices shitty, fat and not-waterproof, it's about enabling people with the wills and the skills to buy the tools and the parts to do the job.

Heck, under a good right-to-repair, I could buy the screen myself and fit it if I wanted.

So many people miss the point of right-to-repair. It's not about making things less this or less that, it's simply about giving you the RIGHT to buy the parts you need and the tools you need to repair the thing you own.

If you're in the UK and an expensive phone really did break just from falling 4 inches after one week, I'd be tempted to try returning it to the seller. There must be a credible argument that it's unfit for purpose if it can be broken that easily due to a design flaw. It's not as if you carelessly dropped it from a pocket at waist height onto a concrete floor or something.

I tried, it was from Amazon and neither they nor Oneplus cared how or why it happened, I tried arguing that it was ridiculous that it happened but again, deaf ears, so I just let it be.

For that kind of money, you might want to get a bit of advice on the right words to use before giving up. The thing about "Your statutory rights are not affected" is that your statutory rights are not affected, whether they care or not.

Even if you decide not to fight this one, please consider informing one of the major consumer rights organisations so if there is a design flaw and others are experiencing the same problem the manufacturer can't bury their head in the sand and try to avoid responsibility. Other big tech firms have allegedly done this in the past and bad publicity is often what brings them round in the end.

Although I understand, and I have done so in the past and won, after speaking with both OnePlus and Amazon I came away feeling that it was my fault.

I had a case on the phone which I removed just an hour earlier because it was dirty underneath, and wit lockdown and working from home I wasn't leaving the house, I saw no need to put it back on, felt like Karma.

Yes I believe the design contributed significantly to it breaking, it just wasn't the time for me to add more stress trying to fight it.

I'm a strange way, it was a good thing, I'm a perfectionist, and having a broken screen put me off wanting to use my phone, that's a good thing in a weird way.

That's totally fair enough. You have to pick the fights you think are worth taking, and if it's just going to cause you stress then maybe this one simply isn't. I hope you manage to sort your phone out one way or another.

Thank you.

Next time, perhaps try a reputable seller?

It seems to me that it is a purely propaganda that these things are mutually exclusive. Like how all smartphone manufacturers had phones that were fine with removable batteries, but then suddenly that was gone from literally every brand in the world because it is so powerful for planned obsolescence

People want thin phones. A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise.

And while you can argue about whether thin laptops are necessary, for people who carry their phones in their pants pockets, an extra couple millimeters gone is genuinely a meaningful difference.

There's no propaganda there.

Yes, they made thinner phones but they made more huge and heavy. Nowadays it's nearly impossible to find a phone that has a screen smaller than 6". I mean, to me it's too much, it can even fit in some of my pockets!

Give me back the old phones, removable battery, more thick, but more compact in the end, and more easy to carry around. The bigger screen it's in the end useless to me.

Smaller screen size is what the iPhone SE is for! It's what I use, precisely because pockets :)

>A non-removable battery allows for thinness you simply cannot get otherwise.

I doubted this so I looked up dimensions. Samsung Galaxy S6 from 2015 is 6.8mm thick, with removable battery. S10 from 2019 is 7.8mm thick. So your theory doesn't seem to match reality.

Wikipedia says the S6 did not have a user-replaceable battery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery

In any case, it's apples-to-oranges and doesn't mean anything. Cell phones can have functionality added that takes up the difference in thickness -- e.g. keeping the phone the same thickness instead of it getting even thicker.

But main point is, they're thinner basically by definition. There are necessarily more layers of materials.

Oh yeah seems I saw an incorrect site, S5 was the last one with removable battery.

Of course there are some tradeoffs but it just doesn't seem so significant that EVERY brand refuses to offer even one model with a removable battery. There are definitely some people that want it despite the tradeoffs. As other commenters said, people have huge phones now and use cases. So I think manufacturers have a special interest in maintaining the situation for planned obsolescence.

I don't think it has anything to do with planned obsolescence.

I've had an iPhone battery replaced 3 times now. It's not a big deal to have the store do it for me, nor is it that expensive.

The bigger use case for swappable batteries is to have a spare, but these days people just carry an external battery pack with them that's the capacity they need, which is far more flexible (hold 10 full charges if you need, not just 1!) as well as not tied to any particular model.

So I just don't see any special interest -- it's just giving people the thinness they want.

> People want thin phones

[Citation needed]

My "thin" phone double in volume with the require case, so "thinness" is really a joke...

Funny how I was replacing my old phones with replaceable batteries every year, yet I am replacing the newer ones with non replaceable ones only every 3, 4 years.

Hint: it's not the non-replacable battery why people upgrade phones.

Opposite for me, I still hold onto my old phone with replaceable battery for when my new phone dies and i cant swap in a fresh one. Still works after 7+ years

You will still have a removable backplate on your hermetically sealed phone. All Right to Repair means is that companies will be unable to enter part exclusivity deals with manufacturers.

Hard to repair =/= impossible to repair.

Also I've had my S8 fixed twice (motherboard change).

we can have both. iPhones are quite easy to repair everything, but iPads aren't. They're glued together, and they really don't need to be. Lot of design decisions that have nothing to do with making the product better but just making it hard to repair.