Glue helps with heat dissipation, physical shocks, vibration knocking plugs loose, provides electrical insulation, chemical resistance, and makes the components less able to vibrate over time and knock things loose, makes sensor positioning more stable, and even makes things easier to assemble since less individual fasteners are needed.
But yeah. You can either do thoughtful engineering and careful assembly... or you can achieve close to the same thing with glue.
Setting a part in a jig, brushing a dab of glue, and setting a second part on top is much faster than the same process but fastening a couple screws to the appropriate tightness. It's also less error prone and creates a better bond between the parts.
Apple and Samsung pump out tens of millions of phones a quarter. The more effort required for each stage of assembly ends up the difference of millions of phones manufactured in the same period of time.
We should put the environment and our own interests as a society ahead of the profits of these already obscenely profitable companies.
We don't allow industries to pollute the planet, we require expensive filters and waste-treatment for chemical plant effluents and catalytic converters for cars, and what not.
It's not necessarily about overall profit. Apple profits on iPhones because they sell them for many times their cost. A marginal cost increase in manufacturing wouldn't impact them much.
The problem for Apple (and other large manufacturers) is production volume. It is a massive (and expensive) undertaking to mass produce something like an iPhone in the volumes Apple does. There's a lot of orchestration between component suppliers, component transport, assembly, packaging, and channel distribution. Contracts covering all of those things are signed years in advance to reserve capacity.
If final product assembly volume drops because a worker has to spend five seconds screwing parts rather than two seconds gluing that back pressure affects everything. Supply chains are such that there's literally no warehouse space available to store backed up components or finished products.
That doesn't affect profitability but just economic feasibility of whole lines of products. There's massive demand for smartphones and there's only so many ways to get the production volume to meet that demand.
Consider PC shipments in terms of production. The global demand is tens of millions of units a year vs hundreds of millions of phones per quarter. Like I said, there's challenges to making a hundred million complex widgets that simply don't exist at smaller scales. Screws might be fine in laptops but they're a volume killer for phones.
Car assembly lines were changed to include adding the seat-belt and the catalytic converter, etc, etc due to regulatory mandates. Heck they had to redesign their entire car to include crumple zones for safety! I don't think a screw is all that much.
And so, electronics companies will figure out how to optimize their assembly lines to comply with the regulations and they will figure out how to manage the supply chain and everything else. Apple employs tons of smart people, and there are many smart people in the world who can help as well.
Worldwide car sales are tens of millions per year. Smartphone sales are hundreds of millions per quarter.
So not only are phones orders of magnitude smaller than cars there's two orders of magnitude more manufactured every year.
You can disagree with me all you want but it doesn't change the fact of those scales. Phones don't just pop out of a mold or an extruder. Manufacturing billions of them is a big deal and anything making them more difficult to manufacture affects volumes.
Sorry, but the environment comes first. They'll will just have to deal with it. This problem is imminently solvable, and tractable. We put a man on the moon, we can figure out how to automate putting on a few screws and a gasket as is done with watches and other commonplace items. Or they can come up with another modular design that is still repairable. We shouldn't put an artificial limit or human creativity and ingenuity.
In my imagining of this, a robot is doing it. Which makes me think the opposite is true: the tightness can be controlled and errors can be managed better with a screw, than with glue.
You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair.
But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.
Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year. What percent of phones are thrown out due to breaking versus people want an upgrade? Then compare to the costs and waste of using inefficient assembly techniques.
It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts.
> I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills
I think this type of simplistic framing makes the discussion end, not pointing out that there are good engineering merits for using glue.
I've worked on enough hardware design that needs MIL-SPEC ratings that I know it is highly non-trivial to make things rugged. And that things like glue go a long way towards making it so.
How much increased waste would there be if phones were significantly easier to break?
Okay, this is your view, and we have a disagreement. We'll just have to agree to disagree :)
Also, its not just about glue vs nuts/bolts - Please consider the larger picture here about repair.
>It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.
That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops. They prevent replaced parts from working by employing DRM. In any case, you're missing the general point. Right to repair isn't just about phones. We're talking about a common movement across multiple industries - Agriculture, Appliances, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, etc, etc. You can find more information here - https://www.repair.org
People don't make their decisions in a vacuum. They know they can repair their laptop, their PC, their car, etc. They know this based on their experience and experience around them. We need to promote the same mindset for other consumer electronics.
In any case, any added change will force the companies to innovate their assembly technique to reduce costs - just like every industry does when there is a new environmental regulation. The reality is we are seeing piles and piles of electronics fill up the landfills, and we need to do more to address re-use, repair and extending the lifetime of devices - This is the just one component of an overall plan to reduce e-waste.
The number of phones wasted a year due to non-reparability is a fact, not an opinion like vanilla tasting better than chocolate.
US for example, spends around 80B annually for new phones, 3B annually for repairs, with 300M smartphone users. From this you can dig further or make reasonable estimates of a lot of behavior.
> That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops.
I have family that both works at phone repair shops and that have iPhones, and they both repair them and get them repaired quite regularly. There is literally over a dozen iPhone repair shops in town, town size ~200k.
You can find more information here https://www.google.com/search?q=iphone+repair+shops
People generally don't throw out a phone because it's not repairable. They throw it out because there is a better, nicer, more featured one. And of those people I know that do get rid of them, they almost all sell to one of those places that pays you for scrap and then recycles the usable parts.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+Pro+Teardown/127551
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Buds++Teardow...
One has a zero whilst the other has a 7 by ifixit's rating.
Similarly for volume, in which the case dimensions is the important metric. Once again the volume is a battery tradeoff.
As for water resistance yes, the buds+ are IP2X versus IP4X. Under normal use this isn't important, but if argued this is the better point than bulkiness.
https://www.rtings.com/headphones/tools/compare/samsung-gala...
The point is that these are comparable devices and repairability doesn't have to make the drastic tradeoffs as your example of the fairphone 3.
Repair shops have managed to source new screens and cameras for the latest iPhones for example. Apple just firmware locks them to the device that stops them from working even though it is a identical part (except for the serial number burned into the chip).
Basically it is not about making designs that just happen to be hard to repair but instead the manufacturers are making them intentionally hard or impossible to repair for third parties to protect their own repair line and/or force you to buy a new one especially now that phones have started to last 3+ years just fine as progress on cpu speeds have slowed done.
Increasingly consumers are not buying phones every year but every two or even three years. As a result manufacturers have been designing planned obsolescence and fighting against the right to repair.
We can see from the results of direct ballot initiatives that consumers want right to repair. They want the choice if they accidentally dropped and cracked the screen to buy a new one, get a repair from the manufacturer, an independent third party or even learn to do it themselves if they're feeling up to it!
So yes, consumers can want features over repairability but they can also be against barriers for their right to repair at the same time.