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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill and exactly what is wrong with the current state of self repairs. Never mind the DRM on the battery so that the phone won’t recognize even a genuine battery as genuine without involving the 3PL to marry the parts together…

It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet?

I can (with a bit of a stretch) understand why they would not accept just any OEM part, but making extra difficult to even use an Apple bruine battery with the rest of the Apple hardware, that’s also very unnecessarily self repair hostile.

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> You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill

You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?

Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. The fact that people are rushing to criticize the move suggests more that people like to find reasons to complain about everything.

It’s surreal to read HN threads where people are floating ideas about making laws to prevent companies from designing better hardware products just because they want to replace batteries with a screwdriver. I guarantee if you put a screwdriver-repairable phone and a modern iPhone in front of average consumers, 99% or more would choose the modern iPhone without a second question. The obsession with easy battery replacement seems limited to a very narrow set of people while the rest of the population has moved on to appreciate the benefits of modern sealed phones such as impressive resistance to water damage.

People can just buy a Fairphone if they want one with a detachable battery. It is however bulkier, heavier and not waterproof.

Swappable with the aid of a screwdriver != detachable

My fairphone battery is removable with no screwdrivers whatsoever.

Of course, I was obviously unclear. My point was it is also possible to design a phone which is waterproof, thin etc and also has a battery which is replaceable with a screwdriver. There is a wide margin between "field swappable battery" (which I do actually like, but accept it comes with some compromise) and glued shut like iPhones are. My (unpopular) comment was merely an attempt to point out the false dichotomy; you don't need to buy a FairPhone just to avoid this practice - my Unihertz Titan, an obscure Chinese phone with IP67 waterproofing, has four magnificently large philips-head screws up the edges.

I guess it's only bulkier because it's made up of several user-replaceable components.

The Fairphone 2 is a lot smaller and lighter than the FP3, though. My boss has a FP2 and my FP3 is really quite a monster compared to his.

Regarding buying one: Only us Europeans can actually do that since it's not available anywhere else.

No they can't just buy a fair phone. I want one and they are not allowed in my country.

What people want is a low cost third party shop to replace batteries

People have had that for years (including a sub-$100 device to copy the TrueTone ID for the screen and battery info for the battery).

Every small mall I can think of had a kiosk that would do it in an hour while you shopped. (Eastern MA, US.)

I’m just a consumer and have replaced 3 iPhone batteries myself and am doing a 4th later today.

Maybe you could create one, by failing to return the repair kit and forfeiting your $1200 deposit?

Completely made up and false conundrum.

You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek.

This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.

So if the market already produces that kind of phone (and I assume has good aspects in variables you didn’t mention like reliability, battery life, performance, production costs, etc…) why do we need to force Apple to produce the same? Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?

> Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?

It sounds straightforward but actually isn't. In a perfect world with unlimited resources and no dangers of pollution etc it would undoubtedly be a clear yes, but in reality the consequences of all sides have to be evaluated to decide this.

I’m actually suspicious that the phone doesn’t really exist, that some compromise was made by Apple or the other vendor to achieve their design goals. Saving people from themselves is reasonable given socialized environmental costs, but given that the battery makes up much of the phone these days (and Apple thankfully requires them to be returned for proper recycling), what we are trying to save are the higher value but less environmentally expensive components (eg screen, semiconductors).

We don't need to force them. Where did I say I want to force them?

I pointed out that the conundrum of repairability vs. quality is made up, or at least dramatically overstated.

There is currently only one company that I know of that focused on repairability in their phones (Fairphone) and they have a hard time competing on other factors due to the fact that they are tiny.

Now your are going to say that them being tiny means nobody wants repairability. Then I'm going to say that people do, but it's just one aspect and that the phone is lacking in others. Then you are going say that this means you can't build good repairable phones. To which I will say that you can but nobody but one small company is trying. At which point we will be stick in an endless loop.

Truth is, if Apple really wanted the could design their phones in such a way that you could open the back with a couple of screws go replace the battery, but they have no motivation to do so and instead prioritize other aspects. 99% of the industry does the same.

Screw choices are really important when it comes to reliability and production costs. Yes, they could make a couple of screws that the user could remove, but those screws also tend to come loose on their own…

I don’t really buy that apple’s engineers are incompetent, rather they are making a bunch of design decisions and trade offs that make their phones more appealing for consumers to want to buy. Yes, they could make other trade offs.

I never said they are incompetent.

These trade offs are far sampler than what they want people to believe. Apple has the budget and the talent to do it. They don't because they don't want to. //edit: also screws are not the only option, see Pixel 6 which doesn't have screws but still makes it easier to open up the phone.

That's fine and that's their right, but we should call it what it is, and not act like a screw is something impossible to design.

I was referring to

> This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.

It seems like your first comment was claiming that Apple could easily solve these issues without trade off.

Yes, I think they could. They have the best engineers in the world and incredible amounts of money. The regularly invent new manufacturing techniques to enable their new designs. They often invest heavily in their suppliers to enable them to make the parts they need.

If Apple wanted to they could make an iPhone that people love and has all the features they want and be much easier to repair then the current version.

Apple tried to make the MacBook Pro just a few millimeters thinner and gave us the disastrous, almost-universally-loathed butterfly keyboard. I feel like your view that Apple engineers have massive design margins they are choosing not to exploit is just not real.

Maybe your view that a massive design margins are needed is not real.

Literally the choice of glue can make a huge difference for ease of repair with no impact on the design.

This is a general argument against all most forms of environmental or safety regulations.

If you believe calls to conscience and market forces alone are insufficient for issues like eWaste then regulation like right to repair is a tool to consider as a society.

That wasn’t the point of parent comment. It was that you could have this all without making trade offs.

>You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek.

[citation needed]

This assumption (that there are minimal tradeoffs when optimizing for repairability) has not been my experience in industrial design. Every single product has tradeoffs between size, weight, cost, ruggedness, ease of repair, etc.

I believe Apple didn't set out to make it difficult to repair, it was just a side effect of not caring one way or the other and optimizing for the other aspects.

Personally I buy products that are more repairable even when they're slightly less waterproof or sleek than what Apple offers. But I recognize that the vast majority of consumers do not share my preferences and Apple's products seem to do a fine job of catering to that market segment.

(That's not to say that there aren't valid reasons we might want to force companies to make products repairable just like we already force them to make products safe, just that if we do there will be design tradeoffs involved.)

> I believe Apple didn't set out to make it difficult to repair, it was just a side effect of not caring one way or the other and optimizing for the other aspects.

Apple's efforts with DRM and using IP law to restrict parts supply seem to clearly indicaye a desire and intent to limit the ability to self-repair. While there are legitimate trade-offs to make, it seems obvious to that Apple has made choices that unnecessarily reduced repairability.

Why should Apple allow people to use their trademarks in order to fool people into paying more for “genuine” components. Do you think Louis Rossman was going to tell his customers that, “I know this replacement battery has an Apple logo but I didn’t buy it from Apple.”

I'm not aware of any "fooling" happening, AFAIK, the batteries were genuine batteries and were for products that Apple no longer provided repair services for.

So, yes, Apple should absolutely allow repair shops to source genuine components for products they no longer support. Blocking this is uncontrovertably anti-consumer behavior that boosts Apple's profits while hurting their users and creating more e-waste.

They obviously were not genuine. If they were he would have bought them from Apple.

Lol. Yeah, right. "Any" trained industrial designer?

Why has fucking nobody ever built this fantasy product, then? Because NOBODY has. We've had to listen to 15 years of this whining and NOBODY to date seems to be able to do this supposedly-trivially-easy thing you are talking about.

Because they don't want to.

Also e.g. the Pixel 6 has an element in the display assembly that makes the repair easier + a glue that melts well.

Older iPhones were also easier to open, but their glue gets seems to get more aggressive each year.

The whole access via glued display construction can be fairly easy to work with when the display assembly is done right and they use a glue that melts well.

And sure, the even easier access design around screws is harder to do, but also possible. See the iPhone 6, which used screws and a much weaker glue.

>You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right?

Ah, yes. That's the way it's always been done, let's not rock the boat, shall we?

>And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools?

Wouldn't it be nice if the official mfg'er was a bit more helpful for some subsets of it's customers, though?

>Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves.

Praise Apple, how generous of them! Their profits have really been struggling and they didn't have to take this loss, but they did. Stellar folk.

> Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves.

Apple is no saint. Right to repair became popular and it's getting law.

If it's at a loss, it's a consequence because they made repair hard.

Yup.

In this case, let the law prevent a certain outcome.

Let the market figure out how to cope.

Not having easily replaceable batteries (and pardon me but I don’t consider requiring 79 lbs of equipment and a 1200$ deposit “easy”) in modern phones is akin to selling cars with the tires welded on.

It is ridiculous, consumer hostile, and wasteful.

Batteries are consumable, they should not be a reason to throw the phone away once they stopped working.

You don’t throw your house away when the garbage bag is full or when the tap starts leaking. These are things you’re expected to replace and it can easily be done with simple tools.

Phones shouldn’t be any different when it comes to their parts, especially consumable ones.

If my house was 90% garbage bag, I’m not sure. Houses get razed and rebuilt all the time, especially in Japan. They are not as modular as we’d like them to be, as I’m finding out in planning a kitchen renovation.

Around by us in a city in the UK i'm unaware of any house that has been knocked down and rebuilt except for situations where a large house is knocked down and replaced by flats. For someone to knock down their own house to re-use the plot for a new (single occupancy) house is just not how we do things here.

But saying that, we do tend to build houses with materials like bricks which are designed to last hundreds of years, and this is not necessarily how it's done elsewhere. We tend to renovate rather that demolish and rebuild. Our home for example is 110 years old, and is in a street of similar age houses. There are some missing ones down a neighbouring street, but I believe these were destroyed by bombing in WW2.

Whoa whoa hold on. You can pay Apple to replace your battery. That’s been true for years. I’ve done it with multiple phones. We just had Apple replace the battery in my wife’s iPhone SE (the original version) and it’s working great.

The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery.

But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.

> The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery.

The metaphorical tires are DRM'd on by a company that has been actively trying to prevent third party repair shops from being able to work on your car.

The doubt of Apple's intentions here is not happening in a vacuum, but against their consistent and ongoing efforts to make self-repair unnecessarily difficult.

There is absolutely no evidence about Apple's "intentions" or "efforts" here, despite constant hectoring and bad-faith, zero-evidence arguments from people like you.

"Unnecessarily" difficult? Whatever. What you really mean is that Apple has been optimizing for durability, water-resistance, and smaller size, and people like you don't like those choices, so you are having a tantrum. Those choices, of necessity, mean that repairs are going to be a bit of a pain.

When we’re talking about “right to repair,” we need to distinguish between:

a) the use of DRM to prevent repairs

b) the physical challenge of working on complex things

c) planned obsolescence via consumables

The big problem with Apple and many companies is a), and I support efforts to make that illegal.

Problem b) is unavoidable for complex things. And there are design trade-offs that deliver benefits for costs, for example thin waterproof smartphones have hard-to-replace batteries. I’m not a fan of trying to use the law to force one set of design decisions on everyone.

Problem c) is an issue for some Apple products like EarPods. But not for iPhones, as I point out above.

Problem B may not be completely unavoidable but it also isn't a valid excuse for deliberately anti-repair design choices. Some things are indeed tradeoffs in terma s of repairabilty vs. features or costs, but some design decisions have little to no effect on features / cost but a large effect on repairability or durabilty.

Now, you can't always legally separate which tradeoffs are which, but I do think there is real value to finding ways to incentivize companies that make durable, repairable products. Those products produce a lot of value for society but manufactures can have a hard time recouping much of that value in the sale price, leading to bad incentives.

It honestly seems perfectly reasonable to authenticate a battery which is among the most dangerous component of a device I regularly hold in my hand and up to my head. A fully charged iPhone battery probably has enough energy to blow body parts off.

You absolutely do not need any special equipment to change a wheel. In fact, the only equipment you need comes with the car, a jack and a wrench, and a spare wheel (or at least they used to). Sure, you need to buy the tires, but you also need to buy the battery.

Which one inflates the new tires, the jack or the wrench?

The tire shop who mounted the tires on the wheels, or a simple bike pump.

But I thought changing the wheels was a simple process you could do at home with the tools provided with the car?

A bike pump and a tire shop aren't provided with the car. Hell, most don't come with jacks or a wrench either. Some won't even include a spare tire/wheel nowadays.

Repairs can be pretty easy when you pay someone else in a shop to do the hard part for you.

In my case, replacing my iPhone battery required no tools at all after I paid the Apple shop to mount the new battery in the phone.

money can be exchanged for goods and services?? you tell me this now??

The tool to mount a tire onto a wheel costs between $50 and $2500 dollars and is very large. The alternative - a spare wheel - is a kludge! Cars carry around an entire tire and wheel all the time in a special compartment because you can't expect people to mount tires themselves. Or modern cars spec run flat tires which come with a host of their own tradeoffs.

> But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.

That is not a constant of the universe, and is entirely dependent on the design. A long time ago, I had a Palm Treo 650. The removable back cover didn't require any tools to remove, after which the battery could be popped out. I could carry spare batteries with me and swap them out as needed.

Does this change the design constraints? Yes. But pretending that it's outright impossible ignores the decisions that were made during design.

I did not claim it’s a constant of the universe or outright impossible. This thread is about working on iPhones.

And if you dropped a Treo the battery cover stood a 100% chance of popping off and the battery would land 100 meters away in a bush or down a sewer grate. Terrible misfeature.

but the screen wasn't cracked though...

Personally I've needed lots of batteries replaced and lost 1 phone to water damage. It's not at all clear to me that hermetic phone designs are the right tradeoff from a utilitarian perspective. On the other hand, if utilitarian phones sold better somebody would be making them.

Tires have obvious engineering constraints that presumably led to the current approach. Maybe a bit of path dependence as well. It's completely incomparable.

If car manufacturers changed the design of their cars so that you no longer could change them with just a lug wrench and jack, I'm pretty sure a lot of people would complain.

This is what happened with cell phones.

This analogy only supports Apple's method? Car shops have a lift for easy access to the car and machines for balancing your tires. Very expensive equipment that almost no one has, which also goes for the tools for replacing an iPhone battery.

Also Apple is not "consumer hostile", come on. That's a ridiculous accusation.

Anyone can mount a wheel. Clearly the author is talking about a hypothetical vehicle where the wheel has been welded to the axle assembly.

Actually replacing the tire on a wheel has practical engineering constraints that leave it best suited for shops. Even changing bicycle tires is non trivial and the performance and durability demands there are negligible in comparison.

That's subjective. I don't think the procedure to replace the battery with the tools provided by Apple is complicated.

There is an easy option: have Apple or a repair shop replace the battery.

All your complaints are addressed in the light of that simple and well-known fact.

Right. It’s the same here with hacker news people toting how proud they are of their website that only uses 2KB of JavaScript.

A lot of us ignore these people and happy produce websites that use jQuery and have 10MB of JavaScript and have iPhones that are hard to self repair, and live very happy and fulfilling lives.

Some things are still smarter than others.

Before the appearance of the iPhone, regular cellphones had always been consumer-friendly enough so that no maker would ever consider not having an instantly user-replacable battery.

Any further migration toward the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach so strongly embraced in digital tech by companies like Microsoft would have been immediately rejected.

A battery without user access would be recognized as disposable electronics by design.

People knew that something like that would be a stupid phone, certainly not a smart one.

What made a smart phone smart at the time was its PC-compatibiliy, with regular removable user storage like memory sticks which you can pull out of the phone and plug into your PC to read & write directly. So there was functionally no limit to the internal storage to begin with. And advanced free PC software to owners so they could interface to the phone through its often-unique USB cable or alternatively by Bluetooth, or even earlier IR.

The phone couldn't actually be used as a hotspot itself, but it would get one PC on the internet and the PC could do the rest.

And that was everywhere you could get a simple cell signal, before data plans existed and for years while less-smart phones dependent on data plans were still waiting for the data roll-out nationwide to reach their neck of the woods.

> It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet?

Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. Dying battery (every three years or sooner) is a powerful force making a customer consider their options including buying a new phone. This alone makes companies design their products deliberately introducing friction to the repair process (even if it their own repair process). Marketing allure is just too tempting to pass by.

> Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool.

This is exactly why we need laws to prevent this kind of behavior. It’s against the greedy nature of companies and their desire to externalize social costs, the only way to stop this is by making it illegal.

This is a rather narrow view.

Nobody markets the difficulty of repair, they market waterproof phones, that survive being dropped in the sink or toilet or pool, or whatever.

When it comes time to buy a new battery, and the option is a $70 replacement service or 10x that for a new phone, will a $45 manual repair with a screwdriver really drive more people to replace the battery instead of buy a new phone?

The idea that these processes are all driven to make people buy new phones instead of replacing batteries doesn't make much sense to me. The numbers don't really show that.

And when we consider the value of being able to drop a phone in water and not have to replace it, that's pretty damn high and probably saves a ton of phones early compared to the people that were willing to do a $45 battery replacement but not a $70 replacement and instead opt for a new phone entirely.

It's not complicated.

- Go to an Apple Store and have them replace it for you. - Go to a third party repair store at your own risk - Do it yourself in the official Apple recommended way

I'm not sure what people want. It used to be easier until the iPhone 6S, starting from the iPhone 7 in 2017 Apple started gluing the screens to make them waterproof. That's the complicating part. I'm pretty sure 99% of the customers would rather have the phone to be waterproof then easier to repair.

Apple can't win here it seems.

> It shouldn’t be so complicated.

It's not - it's Apple's way of scaring people away from repair.

These tools most likely make it more convenient if you have to open hundreds of phones per day, but for a one-off repair you can get away with a hair dryer and cheap iFixit tools just fine.

Just as the Porsche/Mercedes/BMW service manual is not shy about defining a service procedure that uses the best available tools, I’d expect the Apple service process to spot themselves the best available tools as well.

Shade tree mechanics find a workaround in both cases. If you make a mistake with the shade tree tools, it’s on you, not the manufacturer, which feels fair enough to me.

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