Hacker News Reader

Comment by Polylactic_acid | Hacker News Reader

No, thats purely to prevent repair. Its perfectly possible to have a removable battery and to just not boot when one is not inserted. Thats how phones used to work ~2013

View on HN

A removable battery requires its own protective shell, which costs weight and thickness. When it's not user serviceable, it can just be a bag of acid resting on the main board, piggybacking on the device's own case for the required protection.

The protective shell can be only the bottom side which replaces the bottom of the case. The internal laptop batteries are quite safe to handle if you don't use anything sharp on them. We let people handle phone batteries for ages and they weren't nearly as protected as those old laptop battery tubes.

The phone batteries that people handled did store a lot less energy though.

They were certainly more protected than the almost naked ones I see right now which I can singlehandedly bend (but won't given the fire hazard). And not LiPol batteries too, which are super nasty in that regard: the more energy-dense the battery is, the more of a hazard.

Non-removable just means it's soldered down. Open a phone and you will see that the batteries certainly have just the kind of plastic shell that they always had.

most phones and tablets i've worked on recently certainly do not have any plastic shell on non-removable batteries; unless you consider shrink tubing a shell.

They are usually constructed of layers of battery material, wrapped in kapton tape or an equivalent, with the entire package shrink-tubed and a pigtail coming out the side for the device interface.

One could easily crush the unit by hand, the construction offers little to no protection from physical forces.

I’m not saying one is a requirement for the other, just that you don’t have to worry about the battery-removed state when it doesn’t exist.

From the tear downs I’ve seen, it seems like the primary motivation for the non-removable battery is so they can cram it into every spare piece of space.

I guess there are also multiple states of removable. 2012 macbooks had the battery in multiple packs in odd spaces like the new ones but they had a screw in bracket holding them in place which made it trivial to remove and put a new one in. The new ones have it glued down so heavily that the battery replacement process is "Take the screen off, put it on a new bottom case, throw out the old bottom half"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com