New iPhones might be forced to have a removable battery

Now I can use the phone for another 1-2 years which is great. I love the form factor as well and right now Apple doesn’t have anything comparable, but I hope they’ll make a small phone again.

Also, the unofficial replacement is not that much cheaper, you get a no-name Chinese battery (which is often worse than the original and more dangerous) and it might break things like FaceID/TouchID because the security chip will be reset and the non-official repair shops don’t have any means to reprogram it (as far as I know).

For me I'd do it at the store because it's the only way to make sure you get a good battery. Most cheap batteries are crap (or at least you won't know if it's crap until it's too late).

If it was possible to get a battery that was 100% known to be original, and I could save a few $ by taking it to a corner shop to have the work done, I'd definitely do that for a phone out of warranty. But in my experience this just isn't possible (which is perhaps a better complaint to direct towards apple than the battery hatch complaint: I want to be able to buy original parts in any shop anywhere).

If the aftermarket battery is fine, you only gain a little. If the aftermarket battery disappoints, you lose big. So it's cheap insurance.

For phones with user replaceable batteries you'd still need to buy batteries. And there job cost was only a small part of the $79.

Also as I said below if you replace the battery yourself TouchID will stop working as the security chip thinks the phone has been tampered with, so if you wanna keep using that there’s only the official route I think. Not sure about FaceID but it might have the same problem.

Good lord that would be awful, I'm shivering just thinking about it.

I was trying to say I would rather pay 5x more to do it myself. And if it was not for their intentional sabotage,there is no way having them repair it would be cheaper. There will always be cheaper lower quality batteries from china,not needing specialized tools also means $0 labor cost!

This is one of the main reasons I hate(and I don't mean that casually) apple as a company. How dare they tell you what you can and cannot do with your own property? How dare they sabotage their products so that customizing it in any way or in this case even repairing it becomes difficult,it's your property now,not theirs! Imagine getting takeout food where adding salt would ruin or poison the food because the chef wants to control your ability to customize the food to your taste! Intentional sabotage should carry a severe legal penalty. Property rights matter, the right to sell a product to consumers however is not a right but a privilege companies like apple enjoy by the good will of the governments that represent the people.

Also, this entire argument feels like it's getting way too much significance. It's definitely doable, even with IP68, there are tons of replaceable-battery-operated waterproof devices out there, this shouldn't be a reason.

That, and also that they were denying it, yes.

EDIT: And since the battery is non-replaceable, basically that also means with age of phone it just gets slowed done. Did/Does Apple kill the throttling if the phone is on the charger?

How would being able to take out the battery help? I don't think your boss would be pleased if you were on-call and your work phone's batteries were taken out.

If you had done something of a middle class vs rich person. Or a homeless vs in debt and barely living paycheck to paycheck person then those would make more sense. And in those cases. The morals are close to the same for both scenarios.

The ones that are worth anything to anyone already get shipped off to third world countries and refurbished en masse.

I have a really hard time imagining any significant environmental impact from this.

So what do they do with the batteries and electronics afterwards? Do they ship them to a developing country to dismantle and dispose of properly?

My current 3 year old phone is also a dying breed where when the time comes, I can buy a genuine Moto battery for $AU16 delivered and replace it myself in under 30 seconds.

The only way to get a similar number of cycles with a phone battery would be to put a large heat sink and possibly a fan on the phone’s SoC and battery or to permanently throttle the SoC so that it never gets hot, even when all cores are maxed out. Essentially, the choice would be a brick-like phone or a phone that runs like it‘s a decade old. Neither seems like the sort of compromise consumers outside of a small niche would buy.

Of course in the future we may see battery chemistries that aren’t so sensitive to heat, but no such battery is on the market currently.