Right-to-repair in no way prevents or hampers Apple's ability to offer that service. If people want the current state, they can continue to pay for it. Right to repair offers strictly more options and choice, it doesn't remove anything

It removes the ability of the manufacturer to make a phone that is the size and weight people prefer and has the features they want. Billions of people want a waterproof phone and I doubt you could even fill a bus with people who really give a damn whether or not the battery is replaceable in the field.

No it doesn't. Requiring Apple to sell or allow 3rd party replacement parts as well as providing repair documentation does not in any way prevent them from making the phone they currently are.

You're confusing (perhaps intentionally) right to repair with the EU's proposal to mandate easily swappable batteries. They are not the same thing.

You can sell the parts and manual, sure. But making it easy for a layman with non specialized tools? That is a tall order against cost, weight and waterproofing.

Being easy isn't a primary goal. Simply being possible at all is the goal: https://www.repair.org/policy

The goal is to make sure things are possible

When they are, there will be plenty of people capable of making it easy. There always are.

I hate how we have collectively forgotten that there were waterproof phones long before this nonsense from Apple(and others, to be fair). Bah, we even had waterproof phones with removable battery doors. But of course, now somehow humanity forgot how to make those and the only way is gluing everything together.

For buyers of new devices that may be true. Yet I've sold plenty of phones I had bought second hand (after years of my own use), and those with user swappable batteries are far more likely to be reused without great expense. More so if they also have an SDcard slot to minimize wear on the soldered storage.

As phone features plateau we should strive to make them last longer and avoid unnecessarily consuming tons of new material every year. (IIRC a single iphone consumes like 0.5 tons of materials to go from the ground to the pocket.)

The facts aren't really on your side of the argument. The glued-together Apple phones are the ones least likely to be in the trash. They are still shipping the latest software on phones from 2015. By contrast, removable-battery phones are all garbage practically as soon as you open the box. The Samsung XCover is only 2 years old, might not even get Android 12, and definitely will never get anything after Android 12.

> By contrast, removable-battery phones are all garbage practically as soon as you open the box. The Samsung XCover is only 2 years old, might not even get Android 12, and definitely will never get anything after Android 12.

That isn't a property intrinsic to removable-battery phones; An Apple phone with a removable battery would be the best in terms of software and battery longevity, both of which are factors which serve to prolong the life of the phone.

Imagine a world in which iphones still had user swappable batteries. They would almost certainly retain their appeal and fewer would end up in landfills.

The fact that they've become a luxury brand is a compounding factor you cannot dismiss. You're comparing apples to oranges.

I have had batteries replaced by random repair shops for 40 euros before. If I could have done it for 20 in parts how does that change the calculus compared to a new phone?

Phones are more likely to end up in landfills when batteries and basic repairs aren't user serviceable. The calculus should include externalities like the cost in resources for new phone vs only a new battery.

Ars technical has a story running on the topic of "lost" limited natural resources.

It speaks right to how landfill mining is likely to be a thing in a less distant future than many of us are likely to expect.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-...

Waterproof or governmental pressure?

Hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but tracking devices dont work so well if the person being tracked can completely disable them when they wish.

You can fill that bus any time, any day.

In the US, roughly half the population works for less money than it costs them to exist and show up for work! How they view the world is very different than the roughly quarter of the population doing well enough to see these discussions lack relevance to them and how they live and work.

There are shared responsibilities. Nothing gets designed, used and fixed in a vacuum. Ignoring how we fix things insures our design and manufacturing work raises the cost and difficulty of repair and repurpose.

If by replaceable you include easily-changeable so one doesnt have to be tethered to a wall or portable charger, you could fill stadiums with business users easily.

>You pay $50 and wait a few minutes.

I would have no problem if this was true. But it is not. $49 only for non-Face ID Model. $69 for FaceID, or pretty much all current iPhone lineup except iPhone SE. You also have to wait 30 min to hours depending on store. Not few minutes unless you are the only one doing Battery Swap which is highly unlikely given how they are always fully booked.

Depending on which part of the world you are in, your prospective on the Battery swap pricing differ greatly on a $10 Battery part.

iFixit is charging $39 for an iPhone mini battery, or $25 for an iPhone SE battery. Paying $25-30 for half an hour of labor—on a $400-1200 device—every two years sounds… totally fine to me?

>iFixit is charging $39 for an iPhone mini battery

It is absolutely fine in US. When iPhone Battery Replacement parts isn't even a listed item on Amazon but only Replacement Kits. ( Likely due to whatever agreement they had with Apple ) And Labour cost are high. One may even borderline call Apple's pricing cheap in the US. And why Apple could claim in court they made no profits in their after sales repairing services .

If you live within the Valeriepieris circle, have retail access to slightly higher than BOM of battery. Things might look a little different.

Hopefully we will have Battery improvements in the next 10 years so most of these discussions will become non-issues.

Not when that labour is only required because of Apple's (and other manufacturers', but Apple was the first and worst to do this) malicious design in the first place.

Apple used to have removable batteries. Even when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, batteries were removable. Once Lithium-Ion batteries that can hold 70% of a charge after 1000 cycles appeared, Apple got rid of the user-swappable batteries. It’s not malicious, it’s a disagreement on what is acceptable.

> It’s not malicious, it’s a disagreement on what is acceptable.

They figured they could get away with removing it, so they did. In exchange the user got… what exactly? Absolutely nothing.

> Once Lithium-Ion batteries that can hold 70% of a charge after 1000 cycles appeared, Apple got rid of the user-swappable batteries.

That's still an absolutely pathetic lifetime compared to the rest of the device.

And that also bears out in practice, anecdotally battery life is by far the #1 reason that people buy new phones, especially in the last few years.

Anecdotally speaking I've never known anyone to get rid of an iPhone because of battery life. Ever. I've known people to replace iPhones because of cracked screens, no longer getting iOS updates, running out of storage, or simply wanting some new feature but I've never known anyone to replace an iPhone because of the battery. They're simply too cheap and easy to replace. Honestly, call and make your appointment at iFixIt or the Apple Store, drop your phone off, come back an hour later and the battery is replaced - for under $50.

Remember when you could just buy a battery off the shelf, pop out the old battery, and pop in the new one? Without waiting for service or finding a brand store that's at best hours away? And without having to worry about whether the manufacturer has deemed your phone too legacy to allow you to replace the battery anymore?

Not to mention a battery swap means having basically immediate power replenishment on demand.

I work around this with battery cases. Everytime I do that when there are onlookers, at least one of them want to know all about it.

Demand for this is pretty high, given my experiences doing an equivalent thing where people see it happen.

And there is also the important matter of making sure the device is off and not doing something a user might not want to have done.

Sure, an ad-hoc Faraday Cage is not that much trouble, but many do not understand how or even it being possible.

No they haven't!

The experience is great from what I understand.

But there are other ways, and this is not at all about taking options away from people.

Nothing about this is exclusive. That great experience can compete with many others and should.

And it is a big world of repair out there. It all goes well beyond Apple and a few others making things painful.

They have not. You're being disingenuous. After all, battery replacements became a big deal after Apple started OTA updating and throttling performance to hide the battery degradation instead of being up front about the need for eventual replacement.

The nearest Apple Store is hours away, this is definitely not convenient and how I want things to work.