To be fair, replaceable batteries in laptops and phones also used to be the status quo and Apple successfully changed that. Just because it’s the status quo wouldn’t prevent Apple from “thinking different”.
I feel like this gives far too much credit to Apple. Any one company can "think differently" but Apple shouldn't get the blame for all of the other companies following suit.
Remember the ads Samsung ran before axing the headphone jack a year later?
Apple had (and still have) the status and prestige to do anything and make that a standard. If Huawei/Samsung/etc didn't include chargers, didn't use USB or USB C, changed from 3.5 to some proprietary audio jack first, they would have been ridiculed.
But once Apple changed these things (except luckily the USB), these companies could point out that "Apple does this, so it must be an acceptable idea".
The most annoying thing about this is that they are trying to spin these changes as innovation or something for the environment.
The simple reason is that Apple is the only manufacturer in a specific market. The market for MacOS (or in the case of iDevices, iOS) users.
What that means is that Apple can introduce a pretty shitty change and not lose too many customers to other manufacturers because switching from Apple to another manufacturer is much harder than from Dell to HP.
So, for example, if Dell were to introduce those shitty butterfly keyboards, that were nearly unusable and got spoilt so easily, they would have to change back to their old keyboards within months, unlike Apple, which managed to stick to that design for years and generations of devices without suffering too much.
I use that example because it was an unambiguously worse option, so it nicely illustrates how Apple has a lock-in that others don’t. But Apple can use that lock in to then introduce what are potentially more useful changes (USB2) and/or changes that are not fully baked yet (USB-C), and not suffer the consequences other manufacturers would.
If they make the wrong call, they’ll handle it. Or they won’t and you’ll get burned a little bit.
When Apple makes an obvious error, like with the keyboard, or something external is holding back the quality of the product (recent pre-Apple silicon laptops) you do have to sort of pay attention and if possible steer around the problem.
As an example I largely sidelined the weak 2018 MacBook Air and instead invested in maxing out a Mac Mini. That turned out really well for me.
Sometimes, like with the butterfly keyboard, it feels like Apple does not take enough responsibility for screw ups and take greater measures to make customers whole.
This happened recently for me with the iPhone 12 Magsafe Silicon case, which is a good product but flawed in the context of the iPhone upgrade program.
In that way, I think Apple could and should be much more generous about returning value to its customers instead of to shareholders.
If there were any existential threat to Apple, I’d say it’s the need to reward shareholders instead of customers.
I totally get this interpretation, but I genuinely cannot work out how to tell the difference between this explanation and the alternative explanation that this actually just is what the smartphone market prefers and when given the choice they will choose it.
That would also explain why essentially all competitors copy the change one product cycle after the first company makes the change. Unless you’re suggesting that Apple’s competitors are actually colluding with Apple to remove the headphone jack despite strong market opposition, I really don’t see how you can definitively say that Apple and its competitors aren’t simply making products that most people prefer.
Speak for yourself. The butterfly keyboard is the only laptop keyboard I have ever encountered which I can type on for a full day without flaring RSI. Despite having a fully-loaded 16" with the replacement keyboard, I still use the 4.5-year-old butterfly model for almost everything.
Friends and jumping off bridges and all that.
I get that Apple has immense sway in these marketplaces but I've never gotten a good explanation for why it's Apple's fault when another company makes that same anti-consumer decision. Headphone jacks being the most prominent example.
And not even all the things I listed really annoy me, I have listed examples for things where Apple had to be the first from the established manufacturers. For example the audio jack, I basically never used wired headphones in the last 6 (?) years (since the first time I bought Beats with Bluetooth), so I don't even care.
And when Apple did this, they were able to pack more wattage on their MacBooks, making them last substantially longer on a charge than competitors. Competitors had to do same to eventually catch up.
A bunch of android phones had wireless charging years ago, including one of the nexus devices IIRC. Great! I'll buy a couple of wireless charging pucks and use them. No more flakey USB ports that give up before the phone does.
Apple didn't pick it up.
Android phones all dropped the feature.
Apple picked it up, hyped it, rolled it out.
Android phones started appearing with it again.
It's like Apple has to lead the way, and even useful features can't survive in the android ecosystem without Apple's blessing.
The motorola Nexus 6 had Qi charging in 2014, then that manufacturer seemed to back away from it. Huawei only picked the feature up in 2019 AFAICT, my P20 pro didn't have it.
But yes, it does look like the galaxy phones have had it all along. I wonder why I discounted those?
Well sure nothing “could have happened” without the first company doing it and then the rest of the companies also doing it. But you can’t blame just Apple for an industry wide change. Sure they where the first major company to push a single button mouse, but you can’t blame them for there being no two or three button mice on the market today. That’s not something they made happen, that was an entire industry adopting their practice, and the consumers backing that decision.
It's not about blame - Apple has repeatedly changed the landscape of computing for decades. Mac, modern laptops, iPhone. Downplay their influence if you will, but they have been the harbinger so often before...
Apple was the first to put a trackball in a laptop (though that laptop was, in the rest of its design, at least five years out of date – hardly modern), invented the laptop palm rest, and – much later – was the first to put an Ethernet port in.
I really like the look of this over the tile products personally and it’s “rightly sized” to me. I definitely will see myself owning a few of these air tags
They solved the waterproof phone with a headphone jack many years ago, went with with the craziness of removing it for no reason reason like Samsung and apple, and have since put it back in all of their phones as there hasn't been any noticable improvement in phones that have removed it, but now you have to make sure your headphones are charged.
Newer ones, I don't know. It does look like Apple is starting to move in truth toward the hostility to DIY repair they've always been claimed, in the past often falsely, to display.
It's a shame. I really like the idea of that purple 12 mini - it'd go so well with my fountain pen! But if I can't fix it myself when it needs fixing, that's a much knottier problem.
I suppose if you can't lift 80lbs out of an awkward spot, it's also not user replaceable? The line has to be drawn somewhere.
I guess it depends on what you think of as innovation. Their marketing pointed to "scalloped" batteries instead of square so they can take up more empty space (plus the space that would have been used by covering the battery and a fatter connector).
In my experience, their batteries went from 200 charge cycles, about ~4 of battery life, and often failing before reaching it's end of life to 1000 charge cycles, about 8-10hrs of battery life, and rarely getting "service" warnings suggesting replacement. At least last time I needed to swap batteries I just needed a small screwdriver.
I was very concerned when they ditched removable batteries because that was one part I constantly had problems with. Since those issues were address I'm very glad they went that way.
I'm confused, are these standard CR2032 batteries or not? Do I have to buy some special Apple battery?
Funnily, the time for replaceable batteries in phones seems to have arrived, but users are now trained not to expect it.
Sending your phone in for a manufacturer battery replacement after 2 years of use to get a further 2 is a good compromise in my view. My last replacement was about $50.
I have a small one on me always that can charge my phone twice over
Because the obvious issue is that most people won’t.
Supporting 5-10 amps requires very small pins. It's a tiny percentage of the battery size.
> Then there’s the plastic lined battery well, as well as the plastic battery case. It’s not as simple as throwing plastic around a battery and calling it a day.
Yes, those are the layers of plastic I was talking about.
I didn't say you could slap something together in half an hour, I said it would cost close to zero dollars when talking about the per-phone price.
That very last phrase you said a millimeter. None of this will fit in one millimeter, which was my counter.
For the layers of plastic, the battery already has a wrapping, and the phone already has a back. You just have to reinforce the wrapping on the battery. How much thickness do you think that needs? It's definitely not five millimeters.
“It’s two lines of code, how hard can it be?”
More seriously, the cost of designing a battery pack goes way beyond that, just like in software there’s a world of difference between an internal and an external interface. Adding ESD protection for instance can be a headache.
It's absolutely bonkers to suggest a 20-30% increase in total cost that would be driven by design costs; that's more than doubling the entire design budget!
Just as an example, modern batteries require keeping track of a lot of parameters and metrics, and require keeping control of things like cell balancing. Making a battery removable means having to move all this into the pack, which then implies having exposed critical interfaces.
As an example check this device by Texas Instruments: BQ40Z50-R2. This gives you a lot of the functionality to the point that Apple keeps variants of them in current laptops, even if they're not removable anymore.
To make a software equivalent, imagine building an enterprise product that connects to a database, and then being asked to have this link exposed through public APIs. Now you need to consider delightful things like authentication, or being vulnerable to DDoS.
1. That just moves from phone to battery, doesn't it? That's not a cost increase for the bundle.
2. You don't need fancy things like cell balancing for a phone battery.
3. Even with this chip it's $4 BoM for small batches and significantly less in bulk. So that could be a 1% cost increase. So we have that, a thin plastic shell, and a tiny connector. How are we hitting 20-30% increases, hundreds of dollars?
2. You need a lot of fancy things, just not cell balancing. That “battery health indicator” all iphones have, guess where that’s from.
You can take it from someone who has built several devices with replaceable batteries, or we can just keep debating until I’ve fully explain to you how you actually build one of these.
The thing is, I don’t want to waste more time on this, you can do your research on your own, or just keep your preconceptions, whatever floats your boat.
Every phone needs new subassemblies and procedures. For the PCB, you end up with an extra one that's tiny true.
> 2. You need a lot of fancy things, just not cell balancing. That “battery health indicator” all iphones have, guess where that’s from.
Sure, okay.
> You can take it from someone who has built several devices with replaceable batteries, or we can just keep debating until I’ve fully explain to you how you actually build one of these.
> The thing is, I don’t want to waste more time on this, you can do your research on your own, or just keep your preconceptions, whatever floats your boat.
Where would I look?
I'm trying to follow your logic. But you mostly keep naming things phones already have. They already have all this engineering work. They already have the battery chip, it just changes location. And that chip is less than $3.
Could you please give me a couple sentence explanation of how you arrived at 20-30% for a phone that's designed from the start to have a removable battery? You keep nitpicking me for not understanding an argument that you never explained!
My understanding goes something like this: Posit a $600 phone of which $50 is the battery pouch. Remove battery pouch and chip from phone, replace with a connector, phone now costs $550? Add plastic shell and $3 chip and connector and tiny PCB onto the battery pouch. For the total price to rise 20%, doing that has to cost more than $100 and leave you with a battery that costs more than $150. How?
And phones didn't get massively cheaper when they stopped letting you remove batteries...
I do like having a thin phone, but the utility of a replaceable battery has been sorely downplayed over the years.
Yeah it's not free, but it's really nice if you underestimated your battery life since you're not tied to a single spot while charging it.
I realise that capacity is theoretically orthogonal to swappability, but functionally it's relevant because battery casings, compartments, connectors and chassis strengthening elements all take up space that could otherwise go to a larger battery pack.