Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xffff2 | Hacker News Reader

No, the list was "Cheaper, higher battery capacity, water proof, smaller, stronger". I don't think it's all that controversial to say that there are engineering tradeoffs to be made here. You can make a waterproof phone with a removable battery, but you can't make a waterproof phone with a removable battery that is as good or better than an iPhone in every other respect too. If you could, iPhones would already have removable batteries.

View on HN

> If you could, iPhones would already have removable batteries.

A crazy take since apple has very clearly made anti-consumer moves in the past.

If having a baked in battery caused there to be 1% more iphones sales which would they choose.

You were likely nodding along when Jobs was out there telling people they were holding the phone wrong.

The crazy take is thinking that a design choice that causes there to be 1% more iPhone sales is an anti-consumer move.

Can you explain your reasoning? Is there some minimum sales threshold required, and 2 million iPhones wouldn't meet it?

If people buy more of a product, that's because it's better in some way. Maybe it's cheaper, or maybe it's better quality.

The point is that the incentives are not pointing towards "make better phone" they are pointing towards "sell more phones"

Sometimes "better phone" drives "sell more phones"

Sometimes it doesn't.

Very often it does, certainly more often than a government regulation results in a better product.

Planned obsolesce are anti consumer and increases sales. So yes anti consumer design can increase sales volume, that is often the point.

Replaceable batteries lets you use your phone longer, that means people will take longer to buy a new phone and reduce iphone sales. Such anti consumer moves requires regulations to be fixed, since there is no incentive for the company to be pro consumer here.

That relies on the questionable assumption that consumers don't understand the overall value proposition.

My point is that if it's all of those things (crucially, including cheaper), then it's a Pro-Apple move to manufacture iPhones that way. There would be no downside. To the extent they make anti-consumer moves at all (which I'll cede for the sake of keeping this brief), they do so because those moves are pro-Apple.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com