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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

This isn't the first time this has happened to Apple. They use to not sell replacement batteries for the original iPods, and when people called in to complain, they were often told to buy an entire new iPod. This was settled in a lawsuit:

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/apples-ip...

Another important note is this battery replacement cost only cover the iPhone6 and up. That's only the 2015 release. That's still lubricious. If we had devices as powerful as today's cellphones that cost $500+ in the early-90s, losing support after 2~3 years would be lubricious.

In 2012 I remember seeing someone with the first generation iPhone EDGE (pre-3G). That's right; the thing was like 6? 7 years old? He really only used it on Wi-Fi. EDGE data was painful, but it was still his primary/only phone for another year.

The throwaway economy saddens me, and this move doesn't really do enough to prevent the continuing pileup of e-waste being shipped on boats to China and Africa.

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Agreed. It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs. To go further, it is wasteful to design hardware to be disposable rather than repairable and reusable.

People with jobs I wouldn’t want to do work very hard to bring us these devices, and the earth gives up resources to mine, transport, and shape the materials. Throwing things away when they could last 5-10x as long consumes our precious resources and wastes our collective capital.

Finally I’ll say that a lack of open software support contributes to this. If I could flash alpine linux on an old iPhone, Nexus, or Samsung, I could find great uses for the old hardware. Such a project is now underway (Alpine linux for Mobile), but mobile devices are still a morass of unpatchable secret binaries with glaring security holes.

I know we can better use our resources than to throw a two or three year old flagship phone in the trash or let it waste away in an old drawer, but it will take us demanding more of manufacturers and calling them out for their waste before they take action on it.

> It’s also a waste of human labor to throw away devices when they could still be made useful with some simple repairs.

Are you sure? Assembly line production is highly efficient, that's why warranty service usually means "throw way the old one into the refurbish or recycle pile and give you a new one", not "fix your old one"

> Assembly line production is highly efficient

The highlevel production may be, but rare-earth mining is incredibly dirty (and some of them, if not sourced from fair trade, directly fund warring groups), and IC manufacturing isn't exactly environment friendly too, lots of nasty chemicals used there.

There's quite a bit of work into recycling those, and Apple has already has the means of recovering much of it - pity people don't generally return their used phones to them, though. Your replacement battery is unlikely to be recycled better than when it's done in an automated manner on a fairly large scale.

Of course Apple can get away cheap because of that "people don't even try to recycle" thing. Forcing the industry to do the same thing that happened with bottles (everyone has to accept bottles over certain capacity they sell, and _pay for them_ — though right-wing governments are shuttering those programs) would work wonders, and likely be far better than the romanticised "repairability."

> far better than the romanticised "repairability"

I decide on my own what I want, which is to fix the damn thing if it's fixable and not spend 1000$ on a new one. And to fix it is "far better" than to recycle it, or to have it artificially slowed without explanation and deceived into buying a new one.

Apple is not the company I once admired. Time passes, MS is slightly more ok and Apple is bad. Weird. I wouldn't have guessed in the early 2000's.

"And to fix it is "far better" than to recycle it"

Because what, because you say so? I mean, I can say it's far better to dress my phone up in a green skirt and hang it outside my window as a Christmas decoration then. About just as relevant.

"Time passes, MS is slightly more ok and Apple is bad."

You seem to have missed the lesson from the Apple thing: companies ain't your friends.

Recycling old phones in bulk may still be cheaper than individual phone repair.

My guess is it's not really much of a waste of human labor, but it is extremely energy inefficient. Energy used in production is generally many multiples of that used during operation. So extending usable lifetime versus manufacturing a new device is more energy efficient in most cases.

How can it not be a waste of human labor to have devices with artificial roadblocks to extended lifetime in place? We have sources of renewable energy, but human potential is the most valuable thing of all. Despite all our advances in manufacturing technology, they seem to be exploited largely to make more stuff faster that needs to be replaced sooner, and the humans never seem to benefit with a reduction in labor.

Which is a more efficient use of our labor? The manufacture of a phone with a removable battery or the manufacture of a phone with a non replaceable battery?

Both situations benefit from the efficiency of modern production lines, but in the former case that device can be easily refreshed by a lay person out in the real world while with the other phone, the same amount of manufacturing resources went in to a phone that only lasts two years.

No matter how “efficient” our modern manufacturing methods are, using them to make a device that lasts two years uses more resources per unit of delivered utility than using them to make something that lasts 5-10 years.

Also the reason why it’s cheaper to manufacture new than to repair is exactly because repair is not engineered in to the design. If you have to de solder a battery and crack a case to replace a LiPo, it’s going to be more costly than if you just remove some screws and pop out a connector.

There are phones with removable batteries, but consumers largely choose phones without removable batteries, and the market serves them.

It is possible that ecosystem lockin effectively prevents consumers from displaying affinity for removable batteries.

Where can I buy an iPhone with a removable battery? I didn’t realize I had that choice.

You can have removable battery, or top of the line phone. Choose one.

False choice, some people would pay extra for a removable battery. There's an entire market for external iPhone battery packs, which are heavier than a removable battery.

less and less phones with replaceable batteries among flagship ones.

> Such a project is now underway (Alpine linux for Mobile)

Check out PostmarketOS. It's made a lot headway into attempting to create a single, semi-universal image that can be used on multiple devices.

What bothers me about PostmarketOS is that they are focusing on pretty much everything except 3d data/phone calls/texts.

You know, those reason I carry a mobile phone in my pocket in the first place.

I hope they don't lose focus. Imho having a popular device being well-supported would be a killer feature. A bit like a flagship model, you know.

I was surprised to find out my son's robotics team used old phones as robot controllers. No idea what software they used.

If it's FTC robotics, they typically use an app framework that manages the wireless connection and enforces some game rules (ex: autonomous vs driver controlled period), and they just program in Robot behavior around that.

Or at least that's how it was when I left a couple years ago.

It's because everything is so cheap nowadays, because all the externalities that we worry about (pollution, resources running out, etc.) are left for the public and future generations to bear, with those who actually cause those externalities not paying their dues.

Unfortunately, I don't see this changing within our culture of mindless consumerism and a governance system based on what is essentially legalized bribery ("lobbying").

Who are these magical "they" we own Apple we vote in people in congress and on and on.

What's your point? Neither you nor me personally can tell Apple what to do, and certainly not congress.

That's the point of my pessimism – modifying your own behaviour does not make any difference. Even if millions of people boycotted iPhones that would still be a smaller loss for Apple than changing how they're doing things, because doing things right is suicidally expensive when most of your customers don't care. An even smaller loss would be doing some marketing to make most of boycotters ambivalent enough to forget the whole thing.

Using Apple just as an example, could be any company or government.

We can't because we do not care enough. You don't have to boycott Apple largest apple shareholders are pension funds so intermediaries owning shares of Apple on your behalf.

> We can't because we do not care enough

There's a difference between "me" and "we". "We", the majority, could, if we cared. "I", alone or even in a sizeable minority group, can't make a difference, regardless of how much I care.

People can certainly be very self centered, but a big part of this _collective_ culture of either caring or not caring for various things has been manufactured entirely artificially by governments and corporations alike.

Politicians in the US do not do what their constituency wants. This is before getting into the numerous issues like gerrymandering, lobbying, lack of education and informed public, propaganda and social media, etc.

As far as owning Apple, unless you are a major (read: majority) holder, good luck trying to make any difference because the actual majority holders want the profits, and they are not (as much) concerned about the externalities involved.

> Politicians in the US do not do what their constituency wants.

Actually they do, if enough of them care loudly enough to organize and push back. Constituent participation in the ACA Repeal debate earlier this year caused the measure to fail. They had to sneak a small, partial repeal into the huge tax bill they just passed. When the dust settles, blowback from that sneak might cost more then a few their jobs.

99+% of all laws by content are not going to enter the public's awareness. Aka, if a tax bill is 1000 pages people may notice 10 pages worth of changes at the very high end, but that's about it. The average is far worse with many bills especially at the state or local level simply ignored in their entirety.

In practice this basically rounds to zero on most issues, especially over time.

That's why people largely vote on lines of ideology and hot-button issues; they're (ostensibly) voting on character and judgement, leaving the minutiae to Congress and bureaucrats to figure out.

Otherwise, what's the point of Congress if we aren't going to leave it to them to figure things out?

The point is there should not be a far-away Congress with such large powers. It worked when there were 13 states clustered along one coast. Now it's its own empire-building entity with little practical oversight.

Truth.

That's quite a simplification of the situation. While shareholders technically "own" a company, they usually don't have that much influence over a companies policies.

This holds even more true with matters that will cost the company a lot of money while giving no added value to the shareholders, such as those externalized costs by polluting the environment.

Why would any Apple shareholder willingly take a hit to their portfolio just for a "nice feeling in the tummy about having done the right thing"? Not to mention that with most publicly traded companies there's only one "right thing": Increase shareholder value, everything is optimized around that and pretty much only that.

And sure you can vote people into Congress, but what leverage do you have that those people actually stick to their word once they are there? Imho that's one of the major flaws with most representative democracies: There's only positive voting, you can't "vote out" people who didn't hold up their end, you can only try to replace them with somebody who got more votes and hope he/she keeps their word.

In the end, this is also a question of how do we want our economies to be built: For supposedly perpetual gains and growth or for a sustainability which accounts for the actual scarcity of resources not easily measured and accounted for, like a clean environment.

Apple makes great long-lasting Hardware. That being said the unreplaceable battery design is obviously driven by a clear Market Force to sway you into buying a new phone

> Apple makes great long-lasting Hardware.

Six months ago I would've agreed with you. After getting a touch bar MacBook Pro for a work computer? Not so much. I don't like the ergonomics at all, but I'm more concerned about out-of-warranty costs.

Thunderbolt glitches aside (it used to kernel panic fairly regularly upon resuming from sleep, more so if I had plugged/unplugged it into the TB3 hub), it took about two weeks before the keyboard started acting up. About 50-75% of the space bar actually works. The left command key isn't centered in its bore properly and sticks with some regularity. There's something rattling inside now too.

I'm in the market for a replacement personal laptop and, for the first time, I've doubts about the longevity of the Apple product.

Also recently I finally dumped my old black MacBook off at a electronics recycling place. Apple keyboards have really gone to crap. Yes, the non-touchbar MacBook Pros had really mushy, nasty keyboards... but the touch bar slim keyboard pales even in comparison to the keyboards the polycarbonate MacBooks got.

At least the aging MacBook Air, while not retina, is still available and is evidently the last machine with the "old" style (good) keyboard.

I've used the new keyboard, and the reduced travel doesn't bother me, but the numerous reports of failed keys to the degree of "I just wanted to clean the fan"[0] level[1] is keeping me away.

My 2013 Air is still an excellent machine though...so is the Mac Mini, if only a cheaper NUC wasn't a better option in every regard other than it doesn't (natively) run macOS. :(

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpCJzdWxEbQ

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdS3tjEIqUA

Nah, the chicklet keyboards were all crap. Even the polycarbonate MacBook ones. That old MacBook chassis was at least serviceable so that when the keyboard died on mine (after about five years) I bought a stack of top cases and replaced it.

The early MacBook Pros and the aluminum and titanium PowerBooks had excellent keyboards. I put up with the subpar keyboards because the rest of the machine was generally pretty nice and OSX is/was leaps and bounds above the alternatives.

The new keyboards are totally defective (especially v1)

This is a known issue? Great... And, yes, the work machine is a 2016 model.

Yes they reinforced the keys on v2 not too long after initial release because they have low durability especially when dust gets in as it causes the connectors to break when the keys are depressed.

Not sure how nice Apple is being with replacements. My IT department was lazy and just ordered some replacement keys off the Internet for $20/each...

I think you mean ludicrous instead of lubricious, just fyi.

Apparently it's a real word!

Here's the excerpt from dictionary.com

------

lubricious [loo-brish-uh s] adjective

    arousing or expressive of sexual desire; lustful; lecherous

------

It kinda defeats the purpose of using the word if no one else understands what it means :)

> no one else understands

I understand fine.

/r/iamverysmart?

Sexualising battery replacement schemes needs to stop.

Rule 34 cannot be stopped.

Thank you guys. Seeing it twice made me think someone should mention how aroused batteries were making the OP, but I'm glad to know there are some fellow folks who have this covered ;)

It's also an alternate spelling for libricous, which dictionary.com defines as: adjective 1. (of a surface, coating, etc.) having an oily smoothness; slippery. 2. unstable; shifty; fleeting.

So "shifty" could be what they were going for, but my sense of the other two words in definition 2 suggests that it's not quite accurate to use that sense of shifty.

The intended word was probably "ludicrous".

Maybe ridiculous?

I doubt it. He's using it to mean "slippery" or "shifty." It's not a great use of the word, but that's probably the intention.

Doesn't fit the context.

Of course it does.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It's a real word, but one that doesn't seem to fit in context nearly as well as the similarly spelled "ludicrous."

I'm still using my 2009 Nexus One. It is painfully slow, and won't run any modern apps, and I've tried to find a suitable replacement several times but it seems a shame to throw away a perfectly good phone and I just haven't found anything that is of comparable size and build quality without having to sacrifice screen resolution, FM radio, removable battery or microSD slot.

The update that ‘caused’ this issue only did so for the iPhone 6 and up so a replacement wouldn’t be necessary for older models.

Also, if you must keep using these old phones when they are no longer supported and have known and unpatched vulnerabilities, please be a good citizen and keep them off of our internet.

I find that very hard to believe. We've been witnessing these slow downs since the beginning

My 3G slowed to a crawl with an update. Made me switch to Android for a few phone till I realized Apple's software was way better.

I use a powerful xiaomi android phone and an ipad pro. Apart from the amazing apple pencil enabled apps which i would never use on an iPhone i can't see any way ios outperforms android.

Should be easy to prove that then now that it is clear what to look for.

There's a huge second hand market for iPhones so I'm guessing the majority of devices get trade/sold or at least held onto as spares until they are no longer viable.

The iPhone 6 was released September 9, 2014, which is about 3.3 years ago.

Sure, but Apple continued to sell the 5s until 2016.

And people did buy it, at least in poorer countries... I know it was on sale for less than 330 € in Serbia (istyle.eu/rs).

The 5S was released in Sept 2013 and still runs the latest version of iOS. If they were still selling it in 2016 it will likely be supported with software updates until 2019. For comparison the Galaxy S4 was released in April 2013 and received its last update to Android 5.0.1 in April 2015.

At least it's very easy to run 7.1.2 and soon 8.1 even on S3 (I do), while with iPhone you're completely at Apple's mercy.

Unofficial software downloaded as a binary blob from dodgy websites? I don’t miss that at all, though it’d be nice to be able to hack at my iPhone more.

What's so fishy about https://lineageos.org ?

What about official (but from OS, not hardware vendor) software downloaded as a source code easily compiled by yourself?

I run LineageOS on an old Moto G and think it's a great way for us technical people to keep our devices relevant beyond their intended lifetimes. For people less technically inclined I will always recommend Apple devices, however if Apple keeps rushing out buggy software releases this may change.

Exactly, only 3.3 years ago. :)

I still use a beat-up 6 with a wonderful patina and have no interest in upgrading. For me the 6 seemed to be the point where everything was "good enough". Until there's a big advance in what phones are and can do (a bit more than the iPhone X ha), I'd rather just repair what's there.

I still use a 6, and have a replacement OEM battery on the shelf in front of me. I'll get apple to do it instead, just as long as they don't upgrade my phone to ios 11 at the same time... I don't want a slower OS just to gain the ability of it telling me one reason why it might be slow.

Also - good to see confirmation id this comment I made recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15832402

5s here and still running iOS 8 to avoid the planned obsolescence. The phone is still blazing fast, but in the last year or so I've been out of luck with installing a majority of the apps that I've wanted.

That sounds like a good experience.. /s

Counterpoint; I upgraded from a 6 to an X - the screen and the camera are really truly so much better. The X has mostly replaced my mirrorless DLSR in a way the 6 couldn’t come close to.

I don't want to be glib here, but I think that the fact that you refer to your camera as a mirrorless DSLR (dslRs by definition have mirrors) is part of the reason why you can replace it with a somewhat better phone sensor.

There is nothing wrong with doing that, but it's possible because you have limited needs.

So because of communication error, you can dismiss your parent commenter as having “limited” needs? Seems a bit needlessly smug, don’t you think?

I also shoot with a EVIL system, specifically Fujifilm’s X system, and while my friends iPhone X I borrowed for a week won’t replace it entirely, it’s on a completely new level for smartphone photography and for the bulk of my photos it really can replace my camera!

Glibly saying “oh but it’s not a real camera and will never replace it” is missing the forest for the trees. Not only can it replace it in a lot of circumstances, it’s also an excellent addition to! Using the amazing screen with my cameras built in wifi makes processing and uploading images out in the field super simple.

Maybe this just goes to show how many people buy gadgets they don’t really need or know how to use.

You wont get anything close to the bokeh provided by larger sensors. It is fine as long as you know what your tradeoffs are.

Bokeh is the quality of blur, not the quantity, and it’s determined mostly by the lens, not the sensor.

I was about to join this debate and then ran the numbers and realized I still don't get this right. I was going to say it's about sensor size and bigger sensors have shallower DOF.

Here's where I go when I need a refresher - Tony Northrup's explanations:

https://petapixel.com/2014/05/27/tony-northrup-makes-correct...

There's a lot of criticisms of his series, but they're often shallow (they don't seem to watch his whole video) and actually end up agreeing with him.

I'm not saying anything about sensor size or depth of field. I'm pointing out the misuse of the term "bokeh". Bokeh is not depth of field. It's the quality of out of focus areas. You want good bokeh when you have a shallow depth of field but bokeh is itself a subjective measure of quality, not quantity.

Calling depth of field "bokeh" is like calling focal length "framing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh

He's sorta right in the sense that most people like a "relaxed" character in the out of focus areas which is very hard to achieve with tiny sensors and lenses (while for example basically every modern large format lens is extremely "creamy").

If the statement was that it’s hard to make a tiny lens for a tiny sensor with good bokeh, then I guess that could be correct (I actually don’t know if small lenses can produce pleasing bokeh). I read the comment as the common “bokeh=shallow depth of field” misunderstanding, though, because the focus was on sensor size rather than the lens.

OK let's talk about depth of field. DOF is both a function of sensor size and lens aperture. That's why small sensors even with 1.8 aperture have no bokeh comparable to 35mm at 1.8.

And anyway with very small sensors you can only get blurriness if you are extremely close to the subject, while 35mm and higher sensor formats allow for MUCH more creativity.

> OK let's talk about depth of field... small sensors even with 1.8 aperture have no bokeh comparable to 35mm at 1.8.

Bokeh is not depth of field. That’s the point.

Yes, small sensors cannot get extremely shallow depth of field. However, shallow depth of field is not bokeh. If you want to say that small sensors cannot achieve narrow depth of the field or massive subject separation or a “destroyed” background or whatever, fine. But don’t call it bokeh because that’s something else.

A lens could yield the same bokeh (blur quality) at f/2 and f/4 even though the depth of field (blur quantity) would be much different.

It think that it's an insignificant mistake that nevertheless correlated with the user being somebody who probably doesn't look very hard at MTF graphs.

I don't shoot Fuji, but I have friends that do and I wouldn't use a phone for processing the results (for software reasons, the best raw converters for x-trans sensors are Capture One and Iridient, neither of which exists for iOS - it would be nice to be able to run a good converter on an iPad pro).

Oh yeah no denying the X improves on the 6, especially screen and camera. And if I took pics regularly I’d upgrade. One of these days...

What would make me personally enthusiastically pay a lot to upgrade would be a blazing fast e-ink display. Or a flexible, paper-like body that goes rigid when you’re holding it in your hand. Or a gizmo you can just keep in your wallet (maybe resting on your finger when you want to project a touch screen on your palm or on a bracelet for your arm).

More imaginatively, I suspect there’s a lot of potential for a new lo-fi platform that makes a different set of trade offs than the iPhone and its imitators. But every aspect of the design and production would need to be nailed though for it to be pulled off. And it would require a bit of a reshuffling of what we expect from our “body computer”.

I'm still using the 3GS I bought 2nd hand 5 years ago.

Only in the house as a backup phone left permanently on charge because the battery is 99% gone.

Even though it's a little heavy, the curves make it feel nicer in the hand to me than any phone Apple has produced since.

Even back when batteries were easily replaced, I don’t think that stopped people from getting new phones every couple years.

I still have a perfectly useable Android with a replaceable battery.

People still upgraded right past it to built in batteries.

The build quality of phones back then usually didn't last longer than the battery. Keypads would die, screens would stop working, accidental damage, etc.

With phones that are now waterproof, dustproof, and have powerful CPUs and cameras, the time to replace them has lengthened. I know a bunch of people who have owned iPhones for 4+ years and were very satisfied until they finally upgraded.

The phone I have is a Google Galaxy Nexus. It only has 3 buttons, power, volume up and volume down. 6 years old, still works.

I don’t think replaceable batteries were phased out on flagship phones that long ago.

Still works is different than still working really, really well and feeling comparable to phones on the market today.

My concern is that is some lawmakers get their way; this is not just a US concern but there is an interesting lawsuit in France pending; we could end up never owning devices.

As in, if the mandated lifetime exceeds what is efficiently manufactured one direction they could go is the phone is never owned by the consumer. Its a lease.

Option number two is simply higher prices with replacement costs built into the sale price but not disclosed as the reason for the elevated cost.

Option three, We could end up having devices with reduced battery time so they can use the space in a managed manner to give similar run time over the course of the mandated lifespan. Initially they could increase battery size which normally would give more time but instead limit how much per charge you get to use. (example, my car has 18kw but only 14.2 is usable per run)

Hahaha "lubricous" - what a fantastic typo!

I can't read.

Had to look that one up, it was worth the effort.

I mean, the official definition is: "smooth and slippery with oil or a similar substance."
So I guess OP could've meant Apple is being a sneak like a snake oil salesman?

The first generation iPhone was released in 2007 so the device you're talking about would have been at most 5 years old at the time. Nevertheless that's still considered extremely old for a modern device.
(For reference, my current device is a 4 year old iPhone 5S because I like the form factor, and it still does what I need. It's just about getting to the point where I'd like to upgrade it, but that's mainly because I keep running out of storage space.)

> The throwaway economy
Apple is thinking about this, see the Liam[0] robot that takes an iPhone down to constituent parts, and consider that the aluminum, steel, and glass are all quick turnaround raw materials.
It's a start.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYshVbcEmUc

Still got my iPhone 3G and it’s suprisingly fast with iOS 4. Had to downgrade though to get back some performance

You act as if there is no method to replace batteries for the previous generations of iPhone.

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