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Comment by ornornor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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