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Comment by cryptos | Hacker News Reader

That is all very well and I really appreciate Apple's long support for iPhones, but Apple did popularize firmly bonded batteries in its phones and even in notebooks. A battery is a wear part and should be easy to replace. Every thing else leads to more waste.

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I do not necessarily disagree about the fact that batteries should be easily replaceable. On the other hand, I do not think that Apple's motivation was pure greed: if you make the battery an easily replaceable part you also need to encase it in a shell, and make it robust enough that even untrained users can safely handle these.

This means that you have to make it bigger (externally) sacrificing actual internal volume. A softer shell (that will be reached only by qualified personnel who will later properly dispose of the old battery) give you a slightly longer battery life.

So they decided that (battery life+markup in handling replacements+making sure only certified batteries will be used) > (user convenience) which I think is not such a stupid idea: outside HN maybe not everyone is willing to grab the closest screwdriver when having to deal with their phones...

Plenty of other manufacturers manage a decent replaceable battery, I don't see why Apple can't.

Other manufacturers tend to also have way bigger phones.

Are you sure? The differences between say Samsung J3 and iPhone 6 are negligible (iPhone 8 is even slightly fatter). About 1.5mm thickness and that mostly because plastics have to be thick to survive falls and not because of removable battery. If it were made partly of steel it could be a match.

The size is different (J3 is bigger) and materials are a bit better in the iPhone... But we're comparing a budget phone with a flagship here.

Oh, and the battery is also bigger.

You do not need a shell. A pouch of sufficient strength is good enough. The tricky part is getting it to make contact consistently and to not worsen the cooling too much.

The Galaxy S5 (and previous models) has a removable back (just needs a fingernail) that gives access to the battery (which also requires only a fingernail). These batteries are not so incredibly hazardous that they need a shell - I've opened up other devices with bonded batteries and their battery packs are not so much easier to damage that an "untrained user" is at risk of severe injury.

The battery cells are designed to be fairly robust - punctured a Kindle battery during a screen repair (friends roommate came home drunk, bumped into the table while I was picking away at the glue) and there was a very brief tiny poof of smoke and nothing else. If the battery hadn't been glued, that situation would have been impossible.

I also don't recall seeing any news articles back in the days of near universal user swappable batteries about widespread incidences of users being injured by swapping phone batteries.

It's also less likely you will damage a battery if you just have to undo a couple screws instead of sitting there with a heat gun, from a repair tech perspective - but I've only seen batteries held down by screws in unibody laptops.

> It's also less likely you will damage a battery if you just have to undo a couple screws

Which is exactly how you change an iPhone battery. They're not glued, and even have pull tabs. I don't get where the myth about iPhone batteries being hard to replace comes from (probably conflating the situation with MacBooks).

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975#s182...

> Apple did popularize firmly bonded batteries

Have you disassembled an iPhone or even watched a video on it? There’s a pull strip which makes the battery pretty simple to release. It’s not like it’s superglued to the case.

I have, which is why I know how poorly those pull strips work. They often break off leaving the battery firmly attached and it needs to be heated/pried off (which can be quite dangerous).

The pull strip was a nice addition, but they need to improve their strength so they cannot break.

Retail employees have to do the same procedure; they're instructed to pry the battery if the strip breaks. So I don't think this is a particularly difficult procedure.

I didn't say it was "difficult" I said it was "dangerous." If an employee punctures the battery it can cause a fire.

I've replaced batteries in a 4 and 6 and neither has been that difficult with an iFixit guide

iFixIt are forced to use unofficial parts (Apple won't sell to them), unofficial guides (Apple won't provide the documentation), and no jigs/tools (proprietary). iFixIt aren't a good argument for why Apple's devices are easily repairable, they're an example of overcoming the roadblocks Apple puts between the consumer and repairing their Apple device.

> iFixIt aren't a good argument for why Apple's devices are easily repairable...

No one is arguing that Apple's devices are easily reparable; they arguing that they're not as hard to repair as it is being suggested.

For what it's worth, I replaced the battery in my 2013 Macbook Pro last week, and it was quite easy.

I used dental floss to saw through the adhesive and then adhesive remover to clean up afterwards. I didn't have to remove a single part from the laptop.

I recognize that a phone battery is more difficult, but firmly bonded batteries are really not an insurmountable hurdle.

> A battery is a wear part and should be easy to replace

In my experience, the screen is the wear part. As a klutz, I prefer the lighter phone (which impacts with less force) bonded batteries enable to a user-replaceable batter phone whose broken screen forces replacement.

It is - pay $29-$79 to Apple. How much cheaper would it be to buy the battery yourself?

Of course. That Apple is concerned with sustainability and durability is a sad joke.

The reason why no one "rush[ed] out of the room and call[ed] their broker to sell Apple shares" is because no one believed it!

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