Typing from a 4 year old non-repairable phone (Samsung S8).
If you want a repairable phone, good, but don't take away my choice of slim water resistant phones.
Get off my lawn HNers keep on complaining about big screens, non removable batteries, and lack of headphone ports, but nobody cares because people actually want those things.
Oneplus will repair it for £200 for the part PLUS tax PLUS shipping PLUS labour and I'll have to ship it out of the country somewhere and wait a number of weeks they won't disclose to have my phone back. Heck, they won't even tell me how much the labour cost _might_ be.
If they'd sell the parts and allow one of the many phone repair shops in the UK to fix it, I could have it within an hour or two for little more than the cost of the screen itself.
This isn't about making your devices shitty, fat and not-waterproof, it's about enabling people with the wills and the skills to buy the tools and the parts to do the job.
Heck, under a good right-to-repair, I could buy the screen myself and fit it if I wanted.
So many people miss the point of right-to-repair. It's not about making things less this or less that, it's simply about giving you the RIGHT to buy the parts you need and the tools you need to repair the thing you own.
Even if you decide not to fight this one, please consider informing one of the major consumer rights organisations so if there is a design flaw and others are experiencing the same problem the manufacturer can't bury their head in the sand and try to avoid responsibility. Other big tech firms have allegedly done this in the past and bad publicity is often what brings them round in the end.
I had a case on the phone which I removed just an hour earlier because it was dirty underneath, and wit lockdown and working from home I wasn't leaving the house, I saw no need to put it back on, felt like Karma.
Yes I believe the design contributed significantly to it breaking, it just wasn't the time for me to add more stress trying to fight it.
I'm a strange way, it was a good thing, I'm a perfectionist, and having a broken screen put me off wanting to use my phone, that's a good thing in a weird way.
Hint: it's not the non-replacable battery why people upgrade phones.
And while you can argue about whether thin laptops are necessary, for people who carry their phones in their pants pockets, an extra couple millimeters gone is genuinely a meaningful difference.
There's no propaganda there.
I doubted this so I looked up dimensions. Samsung Galaxy S6 from 2015 is 6.8mm thick, with removable battery. S10 from 2019 is 7.8mm thick. So your theory doesn't seem to match reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S6#Battery
In any case, it's apples-to-oranges and doesn't mean anything. Cell phones can have functionality added that takes up the difference in thickness -- e.g. keeping the phone the same thickness instead of it getting even thicker.
But main point is, they're thinner basically by definition. There are necessarily more layers of materials.
Of course there are some tradeoffs but it just doesn't seem so significant that EVERY brand refuses to offer even one model with a removable battery. There are definitely some people that want it despite the tradeoffs. As other commenters said, people have huge phones now and use cases. So I think manufacturers have a special interest in maintaining the situation for planned obsolescence.
I've had an iPhone battery replaced 3 times now. It's not a big deal to have the store do it for me, nor is it that expensive.
The bigger use case for swappable batteries is to have a spare, but these days people just carry an external battery pack with them that's the capacity they need, which is far more flexible (hold 10 full charges if you need, not just 1!) as well as not tied to any particular model.
So I just don't see any special interest -- it's just giving people the thinness they want.
[Citation needed]
My "thin" phone double in volume with the require case, so "thinness" is really a joke...
Give me back the old phones, removable battery, more thick, but more compact in the end, and more easy to carry around. The bigger screen it's in the end useless to me.
Also I've had my S8 fixed twice (motherboard change).