> A product like this would not be popular because it would be thicker, heavier, and have worse specs.

This is not a statement you can just make with no evidence and expect people to take at face value.

At least for laptops this is a myth. The Framework laptop has the same dimensions and weight as a Macbook air (give or take a few tenths of an inch on width/height but same thickness - I believe they kinda did this intentionally to call out Apple) and is fully repairable with individually replaceable parts.

Many (most?) of the decisions that Apple make that make their systems less repairable are not things that meaningfully impact weight or size, it's just an excuse that they've been very successful in seeding in the minds of consumers.

I think it's a tall order to argue that worse performance is a necessary requirement of repairability and height and weight are constantly obsessed over but very few people I've met actually care about it (and a fair number like the Mac interface but would be happy to trade height for keyboard improvements).

The products we have today are the result not of what people say they want but what people actually buy.

Id claim it’s the products bought without clear alternative choices or understanding in the disposability of the designs. When I bought a MacBook Air around 2012, I didn’t expect the battery to be so remarkably difficult to replace as every laptop I had owned prior had removable batteries. Given the choice of a bigger computer with a replaceable battery/ram and probably better cooling, I’d choose that instantly.

> I didn’t expect the battery to be so remarkably difficult to replace

Having seen a MacBook air, I’d be shocked if the battery weren’t remarkably difficult to replace. What was it about the almost paper thin form factor back than that lead you to believe you could just pop the battery out?

Although the laptops are thin, I think it’d be possible to use less glue when setting the internal parts and to use screws that have heads that provide more grip to screwdrivers.

Apple could also provide affordable batteries for sale in the event that a person wants a 3rd party professional to replace them.

Id claim that this was somewhat of a turning point when computers started becoming more disposable and that competing companies followed suit. At the time I owned a flat phone with replaceable battery.

The amount of glue is a balancing act.

Too little glue and a perfectly working battery might start to jiggle around.

Too much glue and it's a bit harder to replace a non-working battery.

I'm guessing that a good 99% of laptops never have their battery replaced. Thus they've optimised for the first case.

> Given the choice of a bigger computer with a replaceable battery/ram and probably better cooling, I’d choose that instantly.

So I take it that you immediately returned the MacBook Air and bought something which did have removable batteries?

This is really not the gotcha you seem to think it is. One is unlikely to learn how difficult repairs on a given device are until deep into the ownership cycle and well past any return window.

The poster claimed to prefer thicker laptops with replaceable batteries. There were lots of thicker laptops out there with obviously replaceable batteries. If it was such a priority, there were plenty of options.

People are acting like they didn't have a choice but to choose a laptop with a battery glued in. No, the poster chose that machine at the time. There were laptops on the market with replaceable batteries, it just wasn't really their priority as they claim. If it was their priority, you'd think they would have bothered checking.

If I claim having a lot of RAM is important for my machine, and then I buy a laptop with 2GB, I can't really go about arguing I didn't have a choice but to buy the 2GB machine. I just didn't bother investigating the specs and figure out there are machines much more suited for my demands.

There were teardown reviews of the MBA almost instantly when it came out. The knowledge was there, if it was a priority they could have easily known. I'm arguing it wasn't really a priority, I'm sure they were plenty satisfied with that device the day they bought it. They went and choose a machine without bothering to consider if the battery was user serviceable. They might say now it's a priority, but when they paid for the machine it clearly wasn't.

Let me FTFY: The products we have today are the result of what people actually buy from what is available, with the knowledge on hand.

"knowledge", more like "marketing propaganda".

Apple's popularity is largely due to its marketing power.

Dozens of crappy computers sitting in my storage disagree. Lenovo Thinkpads (even back in the IBM days), Dell, HP, Acer, and on and on.

I've used perhaps hundreds of computers in my life and possible evaluated thousands. Many were OK. Some were pretty good. A few were great.

Apple's products aren't perfect, but they were "better" enough.

Mind you, I don't worry about repairability as much as "Is this computer functional and useful to me?"

And yet every Apple product I've ever used was pretty below average and absolutely normal things like nice keyboards, and mice with useful buttons. Their laptops, for example, often lack absolutely fundamentally basic things like common ports. And there are no replaceable batteries! As far as I'm concerned, their stuff is half baked at best.

Since we've seen it done elsewhere, you'd need to probably show or at least explain where/how it can't be done for Apple.

That sounds like a picture perfect argument for industry-wide regulation. People don't want thicker phones, but if it must be done, then the market should compete to do it at the lowest overall cost.

Have you looked inside an iPhone? There’s barely any extra space at all for anything. Adding slots for people to take things apart, put in new commodity parts, and then seal the device up so it’s waterproof again are not zero-cost.

Sure, but mind you Apple's phones have gotten thicker over the past 5 years (as have their laptops), and that certainly hasn't impacted sales in any meaningful capacity. People don't really care, and I don't buy the arguement that it's impossible for Apple to design things to be more repair-friendly. Simple changes like socketing the battery or limiting OEM component DRM would make all the difference, but Apple actively fights against any changes that would threaten their authority over the iPhone and it's aftermarket profitability. Maybe there is a technical limitation here, but I'm not convinced the world's largest engineering team can't fix it with their 100 billion dollars in liquid R&D funding.

Can you provide a source for "gotten thicker"? I'm looking at https://www.knowyourmobile.com/user-guides/iphone-size-compa... and the iphone x (2017) was 7.7mm and the iphones 12 and 13 were both 7.3-7.4mm. Only the iPhone 11 increased thickness and even then only by a fraction of a millimeter.

Yes exactly. So Apple can't just do it, otherwise it puts them at a disadvantage. That's why it needs to be industry wide.

I think people will survive the terrifying hardship of phones with slightly less sex appeal...

This seems like the worst kind of regulation. Not only is the goal not one worth pursuing (subsidizing the handful of people who want to repair their own phone, among whom I'm included), but it also approaches it in the worst way--forcing everyone to accept awful tradeoffs in the form of a bulky phone. If you insist on subsidizing the few at the expense of the many, a more intelligent approach would be to buy fewer public tool sets that can be checked out from a public library or similar. Of course, the market already solves this kind of problem all the time (and very well) in the forms of tool shares, rentals, and maker spaces--this is a solution in search of a problem.

No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time. It would also be great if they were more robust in general. Even with the correct tools, and decent skills, repairing a lot of common issues on modern phones is really expensive and complex. After a couple years of value depreciation, it is often questionable whether it's even worth it.

The problem is that today, the incentives are all fucked up. Everyone's just trying to make phones with increasingly greater sex appeal every year so that they can convince consumers to throw out their perfectly working phones. Granted, there was obviously rapid progress for quite a while, but it has slowed down a considerable amount; it's hard to argue that this year's phone line ups offers something significantly game changing versus last year's. People have been saying this for a while, but it just gets truer every year. At best, real meaningful differences occur around every three years or so now.

I really don't think corporations will magically decide to all agree to stop this completely unsustainable and pointless madness. It seems like the perfect place for regulation, because it puts everyone on a level playing field.

I also think people are imagining that the result will be phones that all look and feel like the PinePhone (which, BTW, feels pretty nice in my opinion) but honestly, I seriously doubt that's the case. The degree of corner cutting going on today to get the smallest possible footprint is insane (and yes, I've opened up a reasonably modern phone; the latest being an iPhone XS.) We were perfectly happy with significantly more repairable phones that were not much bulkier...

In my opinion, the concerns are much ado about nothing.

> No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time.

I'm strongly biased in favor of fixing stuff versus replacing stuff--I don't like our consumerist, disposability culture. But "making phones repairable" has virtually nothing to do with this, because "my phone broke" is not a major driver behind replacing phones. Rather, people replace phones because new models offer compelling features, because new software runs slowly on their older phone, or because their old phone is no longer supported by the software they want/need.

Making phones repairable isn't going to fix this problem.

It's not just about making it easier to repair for end-users, it's about making it repairable at all.

A easy to repair phone isn't just repairable by end-users, but also by your neighbourhood repair shop.

And repairable devices aren't necessarily bulkier. Look at the Framework laptop vs a MacBook, for example.

You're deluding yourself if you think there aren't significant tradeoffs in making a device serviceable without specialty tools. "Bulkier" is a common one, but you could keep the size down by sacrificing performance (in order to keep the heat down and/or to make do with a smaller battery). I'm not sure exactly what kinds of tradeoffs are being made, but (for example) according to Tom's Hardware, the Framework laptop has half the battery life of the MacBook Air.

Edit: Unwelcome comment deleted.

Ideally we don't debate/decide public policy based on one person's preferences, and clearly a solid majority of people want a thinner phone, or else companies wouldn't waste the effort competing on thinness.

A 2021 Macbook is barely thinner or lighter than a Frame.work laptop. The difference is negligible. And the latter is made to be super easy to open and self service.