It is ridiculous, consumer hostile, and wasteful.
Batteries are consumable, they should not be a reason to throw the phone away once they stopped working.
You don’t throw your house away when the garbage bag is full or when the tap starts leaking. These are things you’re expected to replace and it can easily be done with simple tools.
Phones shouldn’t be any different when it comes to their parts, especially consumable ones.
The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery.
But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.
That is not a constant of the universe, and is entirely dependent on the design. A long time ago, I had a Palm Treo 650. The removable back cover didn't require any tools to remove, after which the battery could be popped out. I could carry spare batteries with me and swap them out as needed.
Does this change the design constraints? Yes. But pretending that it's outright impossible ignores the decisions that were made during design.
A bike pump and a tire shop aren't provided with the car. Hell, most don't come with jacks or a wrench either. Some won't even include a spare tire/wheel nowadays.
In my case, replacing my iPhone battery required no tools at all after I paid the Apple shop to mount the new battery in the phone.
Tires have obvious engineering constraints that presumably led to the current approach. Maybe a bit of path dependence as well. It's completely incomparable.
The metaphorical tires are DRM'd on by a company that has been actively trying to prevent third party repair shops from being able to work on your car.
The doubt of Apple's intentions here is not happening in a vacuum, but against their consistent and ongoing efforts to make self-repair unnecessarily difficult.
a) the use of DRM to prevent repairs
b) the physical challenge of working on complex things
c) planned obsolescence via consumables
The big problem with Apple and many companies is a), and I support efforts to make that illegal.
Problem b) is unavoidable for complex things. And there are design trade-offs that deliver benefits for costs, for example thin waterproof smartphones have hard-to-replace batteries. I’m not a fan of trying to use the law to force one set of design decisions on everyone.
Problem c) is an issue for some Apple products like EarPods. But not for iPhones, as I point out above.
Now, you can't always legally separate which tradeoffs are which, but I do think there is real value to finding ways to incentivize companies that make durable, repairable products. Those products produce a lot of value for society but manufactures can have a hard time recouping much of that value in the sale price, leading to bad incentives.
"Unnecessarily" difficult? Whatever. What you really mean is that Apple has been optimizing for durability, water-resistance, and smaller size, and people like you don't like those choices, so you are having a tantrum. Those choices, of necessity, mean that repairs are going to be a bit of a pain.
This is what happened with cell phones.
Also Apple is not "consumer hostile", come on. That's a ridiculous accusation.
Actually replacing the tire on a wheel has practical engineering constraints that leave it best suited for shops. Even changing bicycle tires is non trivial and the performance and durability demands there are negligible in comparison.
All your complaints are addressed in the light of that simple and well-known fact.
But saying that, we do tend to build houses with materials like bricks which are designed to last hundreds of years, and this is not necessarily how it's done elsewhere. We tend to renovate rather that demolish and rebuild. Our home for example is 110 years old, and is in a street of similar age houses. There are some missing ones down a neighbouring street, but I believe these were destroyed by bombing in WW2.
Apple is no saint. Right to repair became popular and it's getting law.
If it's at a loss, it's a consequence because they made repair hard.
In this case, let the law prevent a certain outcome.
Let the market figure out how to cope.
You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek.
This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
I believe Apple didn't set out to make it difficult to repair, it was just a side effect of not caring one way or the other and optimizing for the other aspects.
Personally I buy products that are more repairable even when they're slightly less waterproof or sleek than what Apple offers. But I recognize that the vast majority of consumers do not share my preferences and Apple's products seem to do a fine job of catering to that market segment.
(That's not to say that there aren't valid reasons we might want to force companies to make products repairable just like we already force them to make products safe, just that if we do there will be design tradeoffs involved.)
Apple's efforts with DRM and using IP law to restrict parts supply seem to clearly indicaye a desire and intent to limit the ability to self-repair. While there are legitimate trade-offs to make, it seems obvious to that Apple has made choices that unnecessarily reduced repairability.
So, yes, Apple should absolutely allow repair shops to source genuine components for products they no longer support. Blocking this is uncontrovertably anti-consumer behavior that boosts Apple's profits while hurting their users and creating more e-waste.
I pointed out that the conundrum of repairability vs. quality is made up, or at least dramatically overstated.
There is currently only one company that I know of that focused on repairability in their phones (Fairphone) and they have a hard time competing on other factors due to the fact that they are tiny.
Now your are going to say that them being tiny means nobody wants repairability. Then I'm going to say that people do, but it's just one aspect and that the phone is lacking in others. Then you are going say that this means you can't build good repairable phones. To which I will say that you can but nobody but one small company is trying. At which point we will be stick in an endless loop.
Truth is, if Apple really wanted the could design their phones in such a way that you could open the back with a couple of screws go replace the battery, but they have no motivation to do so and instead prioritize other aspects. 99% of the industry does the same.
I don’t really buy that apple’s engineers are incompetent, rather they are making a bunch of design decisions and trade offs that make their phones more appealing for consumers to want to buy. Yes, they could make other trade offs.
These trade offs are far sampler than what they want people to believe. Apple has the budget and the talent to do it. They don't because they don't want to. //edit: also screws are not the only option, see Pixel 6 which doesn't have screws but still makes it easier to open up the phone.
That's fine and that's their right, but we should call it what it is, and not act like a screw is something impossible to design.
> This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
It seems like your first comment was claiming that Apple could easily solve these issues without trade off.
If Apple wanted to they could make an iPhone that people love and has all the features they want and be much easier to repair then the current version.
Literally the choice of glue can make a huge difference for ease of repair with no impact on the design.
It sounds straightforward but actually isn't. In a perfect world with unlimited resources and no dangers of pollution etc it would undoubtedly be a clear yes, but in reality the consequences of all sides have to be evaluated to decide this.
If you believe calls to conscience and market forces alone are insufficient for issues like eWaste then regulation like right to repair is a tool to consider as a society.
[citation needed]
Why has fucking nobody ever built this fantasy product, then? Because NOBODY has. We've had to listen to 15 years of this whining and NOBODY to date seems to be able to do this supposedly-trivially-easy thing you are talking about.
Also e.g. the Pixel 6 has an element in the display assembly that makes the repair easier + a glue that melts well.
Older iPhones were also easier to open, but their glue gets seems to get more aggressive each year.
The whole access via glued display construction can be fairly easy to work with when the display assembly is done right and they use a glue that melts well.
And sure, the even easier access design around screws is harder to do, but also possible. See the iPhone 6, which used screws and a much weaker glue.
A lot of us ignore these people and happy produce websites that use jQuery and have 10MB of JavaScript and have iPhones that are hard to self repair, and live very happy and fulfilling lives.
Before the appearance of the iPhone, regular cellphones had always been consumer-friendly enough so that no maker would ever consider not having an instantly user-replacable battery.
Any further migration toward the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach so strongly embraced in digital tech by companies like Microsoft would have been immediately rejected.
A battery without user access would be recognized as disposable electronics by design.
People knew that something like that would be a stupid phone, certainly not a smart one.
What made a smart phone smart at the time was its PC-compatibiliy, with regular removable user storage like memory sticks which you can pull out of the phone and plug into your PC to read & write directly. So there was functionally no limit to the internal storage to begin with. And advanced free PC software to owners so they could interface to the phone through its often-unique USB cable or alternatively by Bluetooth, or even earlier IR.
The phone couldn't actually be used as a hotspot itself, but it would get one PC on the internet and the PC could do the rest.
And that was everywhere you could get a simple cell signal, before data plans existed and for years while less-smart phones dependent on data plans were still waiting for the data roll-out nationwide to reach their neck of the woods.
Every small mall I can think of had a kiosk that would do it in an hour while you shopped. (Eastern MA, US.)
I’m just a consumer and have replaced 3 iPhone batteries myself and am doing a 4th later today.
The Fairphone 2 is a lot smaller and lighter than the FP3, though. My boss has a FP2 and my FP3 is really quite a monster compared to his.
Regarding buying one: Only us Europeans can actually do that since it's not available anywhere else.
Ah, yes. That's the way it's always been done, let's not rock the boat, shall we?
>And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?
Wouldn't it be nice if the official mfg'er was a bit more helpful for some subsets of it's customers, though?
>Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves.
Praise Apple, how generous of them! Their profits have really been struggling and they didn't have to take this loss, but they did. Stellar folk.
You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?
Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. The fact that people are rushing to criticize the move suggests more that people like to find reasons to complain about everything.
It’s surreal to read HN threads where people are floating ideas about making laws to prevent companies from designing better hardware products just because they want to replace batteries with a screwdriver. I guarantee if you put a screwdriver-repairable phone and a modern iPhone in front of average consumers, 99% or more would choose the modern iPhone without a second question. The obsession with easy battery replacement seems limited to a very narrow set of people while the rest of the population has moved on to appreciate the benefits of modern sealed phones such as impressive resistance to water damage.