I guess it shows this hole to the public, but Apple's know this the whole time. They scale out in-store iPhone repair to 500 stores around the world where they have low-paid retail workers performing the repairs.
The right-to-repair people have just lost contact with reality. This is the way people want it to work. It is a great product experience.
You're confusing (perhaps intentionally) right to repair with the EU's proposal to mandate easily swappable batteries. They are not the same thing.
When they are, there will be plenty of people capable of making it easy. There always are.
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.)
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.
The fact that they've become a luxury brand is a compounding factor you cannot dismiss. You're comparing apples to oranges.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.