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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

The other factor is if the phone doesn't have a user-replaceable battery then it has a short self-life regardless of the software situation. Batteries don't last.

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Maybe Linux phones have that problem. Apple has battery conditioning drivers on MacOS and iOS to ensure batteries last super long. I'm almost 3 years into my my 6 plus end battery life has not degraded substantially. And replacing it is pretty cheap.

Apple is affected. It depends on how you use your device, you can easily kill you iphone battery (as well as any other phone) in two years from normal use. It's one of the main complaints I hear from iphone folks.

That is why "lasts whole day" isn't good enough for a new phone. In a year it will not last a whole day. And it will seriously hurt the longevity of it, but noone cares.

They don't care because Apples batteries degrade much more slowly than others because of that conditioning software. And eventually you always have to replace a battery. Removable makes that a little easier, and a little cheaper, but the tradeoffs (lower capacity, more frequent replacement, worse build quality and packaging) aren't worth it for something an iPhine only need to do every 3 years in normal use.

Anecdote: I'm getting ~9 days to a charge with my Nexus 5. Battery life improved after I moved from CM to LineageOS. Max was about 7 days on CM. I know batteries don't last forever, but the hardware is still perfectly good. Google doesn't care about Nexus 5 owners anymore. It's sad really. They should at least open source the drivers if they don't want to support it anymore. Even if I purchase a new phone, this one could still make someone happy for many more years. It doesn't belong on a rubbish heap.

It will make someone happy, if you put it on ebay.

Is that 9 days idling? That's fantastic for a nexus 5! Mine is running stock Android, it's over 2 years old, and the battery lasts maybe 16 hours with normal daily usage. It's still a very capable phone, but it's a shame it's becoming unsupported and slowing down as makes their apps more sluggish. I switched to an iPhone SE recently, Google's apps run much better on iOS in my opinion.

Often it shouldn't be that difficult to replace it, at least if the phone isn't entirely held together by glue.

Your mileage may vary. Replacing the battery in an HTC One M8 is like performing eye surgery via the rectum.

In most cases, you can still replace the battery. It just isn't that easy.

In most cases, a more powerful inexpensive phone would cost less than trying to replace the battery. Heck, if you value your time a new phone is probably less expensive that trying to salvage an old one.

They also told me on reddit, that it is probably not such a good idea to buy a cheap battery for a device, that has a battery that is not meant to be removed, because the resulting cheap quality may make your phone go up in flames.

Anyway, there are still so many devices where you can remove the battery out there.

And not everyone has money as highest priority, so I'd rather take my time and buy a new battery for an old phone than throwing it away and creating unnecessary electronic waste, just to save a few bucks.

Plus when you buy a new device, you will need some time to transfer your data, and set it up again, possibly experience new bugs and what not. So that also costs some time.

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