Do you know what people did when the batteries died? They overwhelmingly bought a new phone.
Just because something is technically modular doesn't mean that:
1. other people know how to diagnose the problem
2. other people want to spend time or effort repairing the phone
3. other people don't just want a new phone anyway
While people on this forum are often power users or technically minded people who like spending mental cycles on their devices, this is not what other people are like. People who are purely users delegate the fixing of their devices to others.
Back in the day, phones were improving so fast that upgrading often was naturally incentivized. These days, the tech has plateaued and phones are a commodity. How often does the average person replace their fridge? How often does the average person replace their hot water boiler? That's how often I want to replace my phone; closer to every ten years than every two years.
My brother in law just called his 3 year old washer’s extended warranty line, and they didn’t even want to verify the issue. Immediately told him they were sending him a check for the amount he purchased the washer for, and all that was left was for him to buy a new one.
I imagine the labor itself costs $100 per hour, and including travel time, you are looking at $300 just to diagnose the issue. Then a couple hundred for the part, and if they have to wait for it, come back, that’s another $300. And you are already losing money.
I imagine that is why Citibank got rid of their 4 year Costco appliance warranty.
My circa 1990s freezer broke a couple years ago. First guy quoted us "not worth repairing". Second guy did the job for two hours of $100/hr labor and a $60 part. Told us that if it were a modern device it wouldn't have been worth it because of the labor, but the freezer was old enough that everything that can break was designed to be easily and quickly repaired.
That being said, I'm fully in favour of repairable phones, the energy cost is not such an issue for such low power device.
I also think that todays dishwashers, washing machines, cooking plates, which are typically thrashed witin 10 years would benefit a lot from repairability if they are built to last.
Additionally I happen to live in an area with a very heavy use of renewables, so the carbon cost is even lower.
And the parts are only hundreds of dollars because the appliances aren't repairable. Obviously if you have to replace a third of the appliance instead of just the bearing because that isn't sold as a separate part, repairs will be much less cost effective.
> the same is true even if you then choose to buy a new one, because an old appliance that can be repaired and resold has a higher trade in value. The lack of repairability costs you money whether you do the repairs yourself or not.
TCO is a complicated subject. A more repairable device does not necessarily have a cheaper TCO. Some of the costs of building and/or repairing a device scale linearly, and some scale exponentially. And they tend to depreciate logarithmically. Based solely on TCO, there is an optimum expected lifetime, and it mathematically isn't "as long as possible"
Doing this raises the labor cost to the point of making it uneconomical in many cases that it wouldn't be otherwise.
It also raises the parts cost (and the amount of waste), because a failed logic board that has every chip in the device soldered to it is going to cost more to replace than a card with only the bit that failed on it.
> Some of the costs of building and/or repairing a device scale linearly, and some scale exponentially.
Which ones scale exponentially? How come a Fairphone isn't dramatically more expensive than an iPhone?
> And they tend to depreciate logarithmically.
Depreciation on existing devices is precisely because they can't be upgraded or repaired. If your phone has a 3G cellular modem in it, it stops being useful as a phone when they shut down the 3G towers -- unless you can replace the modem.
Compare this to PC components that don't depreciate quickly, like a standard ATX chassis or power supply or monitor. Or an AM4 system board that could have been purchased in 2016 yet supports 2022 CPUs that could viably still be in use for five or ten more years.
And a decline in value of a component only makes the repairs more affordable. A Ryzen 7 2700X has lost half its value over 5 years, which only means that if you should need to replace one it costs half as much -- or can be replaced with a faster model in the same system.
> Which ones scale exponentially? How come a Fairphone isn't dramatically more expensive than an iPhone?
Nothing that they've chosen. The Fairphone isn't dramatically more expensive than other phones because it really isn't dramatically different. They don't have any modular parts that aren't already available on other phones in various combinations. They are just offering a slightly different box of COTS parts with a promise to support it. This is relatively cheap to do. It still suffers from some of the problems you mention and more: the logic board is all soldered, the modem is not modular, the software support promises are reliant on third parties, etc.
Meanwhile many PC laptops do make the upgradeable parts modular. Laptops with modular memory, CPU, wireless etc. are available for less than a Macbook or iPhone. So where is the exponential cost?
> the software support promises are reliant on third parties
This is a "current vendors are crap" problem rather than any kind of technological barrier.
And that can't be the reason that Apple can't do it.
It's a few cents, and it makes packaging more difficult. If Samsung shaves a single penny off of each phone they sell, they are more a million dollars more profitable per year.
But most mid-to-high end phones do have a significant number of modular parts. Battery, camera, speakers, displays, and sometimes IO are modular on many phones, and repair shops will fix these for customers.
> Meanwhile many PC laptops do make the upgradeable parts modular. Laptops with modular memory, CPU, wireless etc. are available for less than a Macbook or iPhone.
Modular CPUs are generally not available on laptops anymore, that's a thing of the past anymore. Modular memory and wireless are starting to disappear, in part due to latency requirements for the later memory standards, and packaging and power requirements for popular thin-and-light segment devices.
If you're asking why phones don't have modular memory, the answer is simple: they're optimized for small size and low power, and adding a connector would compromise on that. Also, it would require inventing a new memory standard since modular LPDDR does not exist.
> So where is the exponential cost?
You see exponential costs if you look at devices that actually have extended lifetimes. I'm not talking about one consumer phone compared to another. In the scheme of things, they really all have expected lifetimes around a handful of years. Compare the redundancy and expected lifetime of consumer products to industrial products to aerospace products if you want to see how making something last a long time can be very expensive. If you want to double a product's lifetime, you are often looking at 10x the cost, if not more.
> This is a "current vendors are crap" problem rather than any kind of technological barrier.
Well, it's not possible to make a phone without relying on vendors for some parts. There are too many specialized parts. Not even Apple has enough resources to in-house it all, and they have been trying.
Or they could just raise the price by five cents and make even more money per unit and get more sales because more people are attracted by the upgradeable device than are deterred by a 0.01% difference in price on a $500+ device.
> But most mid-to-high end phones do have a significant number of modular parts. Battery, camera, speakers, displays, and sometimes IO are modular on many phones, and repair shops will fix these for customers.
Modular in the sense that they're intrinsically separate components you have to go out of your way to stick together, not in the sense that they're attached with standard modular connectors and are easy to replace.
> Modular CPUs are generally not available on laptops anymore, that's a thing of the past anymore.
This is basically down to Intel changing their CPU socket every ten seconds, not any actual cost reason. Nobody cares if you can replace the CPU if the upgrade isn't compatible with the socket. The laptops that previously had this didn't have a significantly higher cost.
> Modular memory and wireless are starting to disappear, in part due to latency requirements for the later memory standards, and packaging and power requirements for popular thin-and-light segment devices.
Dell has sorted this and it's on track to become the standard:
https://www.storagereview.com/review/dell-camm-dram-the-new-...
> If you're asking why phones don't have modular memory, the answer is simple: they're optimized for small size and low power, and adding a connector would compromise on that. Also, it would require inventing a new memory standard since modular LPDDR does not exist.
So invent a new standard. All new standards are invented by somebody; see above. If Dell can do it, why not Samsung?
> You see exponential costs if you look at devices that actually have extended lifetimes. I'm not talking about one consumer phone compared to another. In the scheme of things, they really all have expected lifetimes around a handful of years.
You can run the latest version of the Linux kernel on commodity PCs from the 90s. Why can't you do that on a phone half that old? None of the reasons are good.
> Compare the redundancy and expected lifetime of consumer products to industrial products to aerospace products if you want to see how making something last a long time can be very expensive. If you want to double a product's lifetime, you are often looking at 10x the cost, if not more.
These products are expensive because they're purchased primarily by bureaucracies and everything purchased primarily by bureaucracies is cost inflated. Which part of extending the lifetime is the part which is supposed to make it so much more expensive?
> Well, it's not possible to make a phone without relying on vendors for some parts. There are too many specialized parts. Not even Apple has enough resources to in-house it all, and they have been trying.
You don't have to make your own DRAM or display because those were never the issue. The lack of support comes from the SoC whose vendor has published neither driver source code nor documentation sufficient to write one, so when the kernel they gave you a binary blob to go with falls out of support you're screwed.
Qualcomm has been a major offender here and is one of the only suppliers of performant SoCs for phones but they're supposedly getting better. Samsung has no excuse because they make their own chips.
There is a lot of excitement around RISC-V because it could potentially do something about this, if not by actually producing a competitive chip then by putting pressure on the incumbents to get it together and publish open source drivers.
You're arguing against the specialization of labor. I don't think this is a winning argument.
Labor specialization is supposed to make things more efficient. You have some expert who can do the job in five minutes that would take you an hour, and then you can justify paying them ten times your own hourly rate for those five minutes.
It doesn't do any good to cause something to take the high-paid expert an hour instead of five minutes, all it does send the device to the landfill because the repair becomes uneconomical.
What about poor folks just trying to keep their phone running and quite literally can't afford to buy a new phone because they live paycheck to paycheck?
Or lets look at it more self-serving from your corporate perspective. Say, your company is coming under hard times. You need to find places to cut. With repairability you can opt to just replace batteries, no upgrading, save some cash across your fleet of thousands of phones. Your boss is happy and you save money to survive another day.
This stuff doesn't have to only be for power users, that's just how it's marketed to you.
And you think the less fortunate are going to buy a niche $730 phone just so they can buy a $105 screen for it later?
No, they're going down to the Boost/Metro/Walmart/DG and picking up a whole new BLU, TCL or Moto G for less than $100.
Also, as for poor folks. Many of them buy iPhones. They do this because appearing poor with a cheap phone from Walmart hampers your career trajectory. These folks are essentially "faking it til you make it". This isn't even wrong, it's just a fact of the way society perceives people. Unfortunately, folks look down on you if you don't own a Samsung or iPhone and wonder why you have a budget flip phone.
These very people are those who would benefit from affordable phone repair. They can easily replace a battery or a screen without paying another $1000+ for an iPhone. This helps them keep up appearances while saving money. I know many, many folks like this. It's important we fight for these repair options to help all of us out.
However, I'm just saying that market is not incentivized to do so. The BOM cost would be too high and the volume too low for it to be a cheap phone to begin with, so the affordability angle is a non-starter. Cheap high-volume glued-together phones will always be cheaper.
If people really can't afford a screen replacement at a repair shop, the market will sell them a <=$50 phone. If people really don't want to buy a $50 phone and want to spend more for an iPhone, they have demonstrated that they are willing to make the sacrifice to do so.
If people want an iPhone, then the Fairphone is not a solution to that problem either.
Does it? I don't think most people have even heard of it.
And it's the exact reason that people keep wanting Apple to make a repairable phone. Someone else can do it, and do a fine job, and you say "green bubbles" and turn up your nose. Well then, where's the repairable phone with blue bubbles, pray tell?
You're dangerously close to an admission that "the iPhone crowd" wants the logo as a status symbol and excluding underprivileged aspirants by increasing the cost of entry is the point.
I'm not doing it, I'm saying that the crowd that cares about iPhone brand image, cares about iPhone brand image.
> You're dangerously close to an admission that "the iPhone crowd" wants the logo as a status symbol and excluding underprivileged aspirants by increasing the cost of entry is the point.
I don't know why you think I would pretend otherwise. Apple's brand image is as a premium product, and Apple has been openly hostile to unauthorized repair for the stated reason that many aftermarket parts are of lower quality than OEM parts. Apple obviously doesn't want low quality refurbs floating around and diluting their brand image.
The company obviously has a bit of a cult following, but the point is that there are crowds who would have no objection to any premium phone whether it be iOS or Android but would put you in the outgroup if you showed up with a flip phone or anything else that cost <$200. A repairable premium phone checks the box.
There are also crowds that want to see the Apple logo or they'll cast you out. Which makes it hard to argue that there is no market for a repairable phone from Apple -- because there are clearly people who would buy it.
> Apple's brand image is as a premium product, and Apple has been openly hostile to unauthorized repair for the stated reason that many aftermarket parts are of lower quality than OEM parts. Apple obviously doesn't want low quality refurbs floating around and diluting their brand image.
That is indeed their stated reason, and yet Toyota maintains one of the highest brand ratings for reliability even while anyone can have their Prius repaired at an independent shop with third party parts.
That's all it is in the US and has been for a long time.
Android was superior for the longest time. I was shocked when I used a friend's iphone and saw they couldn't create folders to organize apps, didn't have widgets, etc.
People in the US just want to be in the club, which is where the ridiculous 'green bubble' snobbery comes from.
I appreciate your cost focused perspective on this. I really do. What I'm trying to argue is that it is necessary to stop doing this. I foresee that just like the EU forcing USB-C into the iPhone, we could also see more repair-ability to combat climate issues, e-waste, etc.
The world is going to have a hard pill to swallow, not everything is about profits. Sometimes things need to be done because they are good for us and our society.
> If people want an iPhone, then the Fairphone is not a solution to that problem either.
I don't think the Fairphone is necessarily the solution either. That was never what I was arguing about. I'd appreciate it if you'd stop bringing it up. I'm not talking about the Fairphone. I'm explicitly talking about why an iPhone user might care about repair-ability.
I mean, I'm not against repairability laws as a matter of consumer protection, but I think it's pure conjecture to jump to the conclusion that it is undoubtably better for the environment.
If you add 10% of material to the average device to gain 5% average lifetime, you're not decreasing waste. I don't think it would add any lifetime personally, as repair and refurbishment shops already know how to open phones that are glued together and there is a huge industry that refurbs these phones already. I doubt screws will increase the average lifetime of the average phone, it'll just increase the number of screws in the landfill.
Legislation should set a minimum on quality, repairability helps on setting quality standards. This goes for many appliances as well as phones.
I'd rather have iron screws in landfills than extra glue.
It does not need to be a 1000 dollar iphone to consist of quality parts. We can wait for 5G to become main stream before requiring it.
Back then things moved so fast
In a completely unrelated world, where smartphones were not prohibitively expensive but still expensive enough to be a rare purchase, people in my country repaired old phones by buying new batteries. Those used to cost only a quarter to a half of the price of a new smartphone, and street-side cellphone accessories shops used to carry both original, branded batteries and cheap, knockoff batteries. The knockoffs were only about $10-$20 cheaper, and people were smart enough to know the difference it'd make.
I’m not sure I understand. An iPhone SE is cheaper than a fairphone, with longer support and far better specs. From a quick search, third party knock off replacement screens and battery replacement kits are cheaper for an iPhone, I assume due to the orders of magnitude difference in scale.
The math isn’t working, from my simple perspective.
I personally don't really care what FairPhone does. I care about general repair-ability of all tech and what benefits that has for flexibility, affordability, and competition in the economy and for the end user.
A refurbished iPhone 12 is $449. A brand new iPhone SE is $429, $17.87/mo. for 24 months... or $11.91/month from a carrier. AppleCare+ with Theft and Loss is $7.50/month So you're looking at ~$20/month for a phone that Apple will replace instantly if it breaks or gets stolen. Is someone who doesn't have access to credit really going to be able to afford a cheaper android phone and the tools to repair it and the parts to repair it?
It creates jobs by letting independent repair shops legitimately fix and repair your devices. Small business is important to our economy. It also creates competition for service. You AppleCare service is good... for now... how long before Apple becomes like IBM? Maybe it'll never happen, but it might!
Also, by making the iPhone repairable, it sets a standard (and possible legal backing) to make every device repairable. This applies to different phones, your laptop, your car, the speakers you bought.
It also allows someone to buy a part and replace it instead of chucking the whole device when some small part breaks. This helps reduce e-waste and general landfill garbage.
It also allows folks who come under tough times to just buy a knock-off battery and have their cousin install it until they get their next pay-cheque and can afford to take their phone in for Apple Care.
You're thinking only about yourself, what about people less privileged than yourself? What about people who rely on Apple to do the right thing so that their manufacturers follow suit (Android)? You can't just trust a company will always be good, sometimes you have to enforce or push for good.