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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

While I don't share the sentiment, I get the refusal to participate in the Apple App Store ecosystem. It's clear what the ideological issue there is.

But I do not at all understand the enmity some nerds have for non-replaceable batteries. Over the last 10 years it seems like Apple has run an experiment on whether batteries work better when they're tightly integrated and not replaceable, and that the results are demonstrably in. The performance I get from non-replaceable batteries has been so much better that I would automatically be suspicious of any device that had replaceable batteries. Meanwhile, if I really want to carry a spare battery with me, I still can; it just takes the form of a USB charger.

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I think they're largely fine with carrying a USB charger, the complaint is that the built-in battery is known to degrade over time. If your device has a removable battery, you can get a new one and pop it in. But when everything is sealed together that becomes a much riskier job.

A lot of people replace their phones on a 2-3 year cycle. If you could get a new battery for $30 and install it yourself in 30 seconds, would people be throwing less phones out?

You'll note that Apple's warranty language (and probably everyone else's) specifically defines batteries as a "consumable part." Given that, it's a bit of a dick move to make them so difficult to replace.

If you could get a new battery for $30 and install it yourself in 30 seconds, would people be throwing less phones out?

Having had cell phones starting in 1994, when replaceable batteries were just how it was done, I can say people did replace their phones just as often as now.

My memory is that people replaced them every year back then, in part, because the batteries were so awful and new phones kept coming out with better battery life.

Today, many (most?) people keep their cell phones for at least two years, and on HN it seems to be even longer. I have an iPhone 5 from 2013 that I use for traveling, and it just keeps going. Using a seven-year-old phone would have been unheard of back in the days of replaceable batteries.

The battery is the fastest-degrading component. It is also one of the most easily replaceable components, speaking in general and not specifically to the way Apple designs it to be non-removable. The desire to replace the fastest degrading component to extend the life of the device makes perfect sense from the consumer's perspective.

Additionally, most phones have a 2nd and 3rd owner (a child, or exported to another market). A 3 year old Pixel still has another 3 years of useful life at least.

Frankly it is ecological cancer to operate the way Apple does.

Pixel's don't have batteries that are intended to be user serviceable either. Plus, they don't get 6 years of updates...

At least it's easy to drop by an Apple store to take advantage of the trade-in/recycle program.

You can pay Apple to put a new battery in an old iPhone.

Only if you have a spare, or you use it so little that you can do without it—no mobile email, no GPS, no AAA, and no 2FA for up to a week.

Up to a week? They can do it in the store the same day if you make an appointment.

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/battery-powe... warned that they'll try.

“In more complex cases, we might need to send it to an Apple Repair Center.”

There are no “complex cases” of battery repair. They are referring to cases where there is other damage they have to fix first (which they stated).

Not everyone lives near an Apple Store either.

Thankfully Apple has recently made genuine iPhone batteries more available to repair shops, but that was just 4 months ago. They spent 13 years not doing that first.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/29/20838307/apple-iphone-rep...

People have been able to go to a shop and get batteries replaced (whether they were genuine or not) for a decade. It’s only been within the past two or three years where it made the slightest difference between whether it was genuine or not.

How inane is the comment you just wrote. Please just, reread that to yourself a couple times. It's MaDnEsS

A replacement battery installed by Apple is $49-$69. I don't know if I would trust a third party battery in my phone

I have an iPad Pro that had battery issues, and Apple replaced it toward the end of the 1-year warranty. They also said that if it happened again (outside the 90-day warranty that comes with all replacements), they would swap the entire device for me for the price of a battery replacement ($100). While this seems inconvenient, it actually makes it very easy to swap batteries. The price is not great, but considering the cost of an iPad Pro (closing in on $1,000, depending on size/storage), it's not a bad deal. Plus, you're not just getting a new battery — everything is new, and there's a 90-day warranty on everything.

> A lot of people replace their phones on a 2-3 year cycle. If you could get a new battery for $30 and install it yourself in 30 seconds, would people be throwing less phones out?

For apple products specifically this isn’t a big issue. I got my iPhone battery replaced for $29 a few years ago. I’ll probably get it replaced again at the end of this year if there’s still no SE-sized phone released to replace it (I think it’s $49 now).

For anything that’s not an apple product, finding a store to replace the battery is going to be a lot harder or impossible. I definitely prefer the choice to use removable batteries or rechargeable AAs on stuff like game controllers.

Given that you only replace them every few years at most, it seems reasonable to make the operation a little bit more work-intensive to gain on other aspects.

In the end it's still nothing very challenging to replace an iPhone or iPad battery.

'tptacek, your Twitter is (or was, I guess, I don't think he's talking about that problem much right now) full of retweets of Pinboard saying things along the lines of "Companies throwing money and lobbying to influence legislation is bad and should be stopped."

A decade later, the [iPad] is ten years old and Apple has killed 20 state Right to Repair bills, in part to lock out third parties who might change you batteries for you.

How can you not understand that? Not allowing "plug'n'play" batteries that anyone with a screwdriver could do is at least hypothetically justifiable as a design decision, but Apple's batteries are replaceable and they go to great steps to prevent indie shops from doing so.

They demonstrate it pretty repeatedly by selling it as an extremely marked-up service in Apple's stores.

What a weird response. The premise of my comment is that the Apple-style soldered-in integrated battery design is better than "plug and play" batteries you can install with just a screwdriver. If you don't agree with that premise, that's fine; maybe say why? Otherwise: what's your point? I'm saying the products are better for how they're designed.

I'm pretty sure Apple isn't making gigantic bank off battery upgrades.

To be candid: I don't much care about "Right To Repair". I'm not animated by most nerd policy priorities, like "Net Neutrality" or "Copyright Reform" or whatever. Those aren't my political priorities and they're not the concerns Pinboard is surfacing when he talks about Microsoft and Google donations.

I don't really care about Right to Repair, either, but the the criticism of the Apple battery situation in this post is explicitly about a private company bribing legislators into making a decision that benefits no one other than Apple itself and said legislators, and in the post it's quoting, none of your criticism of his criticism applies, because it was way before Apple had any time to collect evidence that making batteries harder to replace helped the consumer in any way.

While I don't mind the battery situation outside of the legislative issue, I do disagree on your claim that they're "better" in some way (but again, irrelevant to the original criticism).

Here's an anecdote to elaborate on why, since you asked:

I've had a few iPhones, varying degrees of battery quality, fairly well taken care of. I've also had a few other phones of various manufacturers and operating systems, mostly with replaceable batteries.

The ones with replaceable batteries had equivalent-to-better battery life than the iPhones I've had, including before replacing the battery, and especially after the battery on the iPhones had worn down a bit. Without iOS's battery management that throttles performance to save battery life, I've had iPhones that at 87% of max capacity (I just checked the one I'm currently using; it was probably higher when I tested this a few weeks ago) that can't outlast an HTC phone from eleven years ago that I've replaced the battery on a single time, when doing comparable tasks, and that's not even getting into the modern devices I have that beat both of them by a decent margin. This includes both with the screen on and the screen off.

Apple's battery life comes from software band-aids, not some magical benefit of soldering on batteries. Soldering just serves to make the device thinner, which is of dubious benefit.

Nobody had to bribe anyone to make products with integrated batteries.

> I'm pretty sure Apple isn't making gigantic bank off battery upgrades.

Agreed. Considering that getting an iPhone battery replaced directly by Apple costs about $49-$69 overall (as others have mentioned in the thread already), they almost definitely are not making bank off it.

Are iPhone batteries really soldered-in? I've replaced a couple cracked screens, and vaguely remember replacing a battery on older iPhones, and I'm pretty sure I didn't need a soldering iron

How do you measure the performance you get from non replaceable batteries is better? Batteries have generally been getting better.

Modern electronics is generally a bad environment for batteries, so they tend to wear out much faster than the rest of the hardware. With a good design, wear parts are easy to repair, or as least as easy as possible.

> But I do not at all understand the enmity some nerds have for non-replaceable batteries.

Devices exist on a repairability spectrum, from the industrial appliance which is delivered with full electric schematics and every part stamped with a replacement order number, to the black-box NUSPI ["no user serviceable parts inside"]. The enmity is not really about batteries, but having that one question stand in as a measurement to ensure the device meets a minimal standard for allowing third-party repair.

I'm not sure where your confusion comes from.

I have a tablet from 2013. It works very well but the battery has worn out. I now have to throw it away because I can't replace the battery.

Apple provides a battery replacement service for iPad for $99 so you technically do not have to throw it away if it still works for you

Way longer than that; the first iPod was almost 20 years ago. Also kickstarted the crazy idea of using a standard connector for charging (although of course FireWire didn't work out)

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