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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

I view this differently. This article is documenting a process people are surely curious about. But the costly deposit and multiple heavy pelican cases of supplies show just how deep the hole Apple has dug for themselves really is. Apple is so anti-repair they have no provisions for a reasonable at home process. You must realize that a $1200 deposit alone means this process is out of reach of many people.

Meanwhile I recently pulled all my old smartphones from a storage bin and the rear cover pops right off, revealing a battery which comes out with no effort. There’s even an affordance for your finger nail to catch the edge of the rectangular cell. Obviously newer phones are waterproof and arguably more durable, but Apple has gone so far towards a factory sealed design as to require absurd equipment to do a proper job.

What this all makes me wonder is: what would this all be like if Apple had never dismissed user replaceable batteries? If they had just as many years of engineering behind a removable back cover as they do with high resolution screens and custom processors? How many billions have they spent on this and that improvement, and what would the phone look like today if some of that had gone to making a phone not destined for the landfill?

To me, the size and cost of their DIY repair kit is a monument to how far from repair Apple has strayed. Fortunately I suspect that if they stick with user serviceable batteries, the process will be a whole lot simpler once they’ve really put some engineering effort in to it.

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It's a trade-off. I am someone who repairs my own stuff. I've repaired my fridge, my dishwasher, my oven, my microwave, my garage door openers, my 1998 Jeep Cherokee, and on and on. 99% of people do NOT do this.

I've replaced the batteries in multiple first generation iPhone SEs.

I'll never replace a battery again in an iPhone, nor do I ever desire too. The phones have become too hard to open, but in return, Apple offers battery replacement for a reasonable charge and a modern iPhone is nearly water proof, more durable, more compact, and with better battery life than ever.

For a portable device like a phone, I'm happy with the trade-off, and I think the market shows that most consumers are too. The trade-off for a laptop is less clear to me, but nor is replacing the battery in a Macbook as hard as replacing it in an iPhone.

The things that really drive me crazy though are devices that don't need to be sealed that are. Homepods, Sonos speakers, previous generation Apple chargers with hardwired cords, those sorts of things.

I just had to order an entire new Vitamix S-series blade base for $75 that I could repair myself if they’d sell me just the rubber seals and a couple bearings — And I probably don’t even need the bearings from them since they look like standard 8mmx22mmx7mm skate wheel bearings, but who knows, maybe theirs are food safe.

https://www.vitamix.com/us/en_us/shop/s-series-blade-base

($75 is probably even a fair price. It’s just the principle of the matter.)

Anyway, I feel about this article as wfhordie does. It's not just descriptive of the process, which would be fine. It's filled with snark, and doesn't acknowledge the trade-offs in manufacturing a more easy to repair device. Engineering is always trafe-offs. Shame on The Verge.

Playing devil’s advocate for just a second, I really appreciate that my Homepod & Sonos are sealed. It allows for longer device longevity when placed in high humidity environments (bathrooms, tropical areas, etc.).

Definitely a trade-off game with all hardware devices & Apple (and others) are not blameless when it comes to engineering things to be purposefully difficult. However, I think we often underestimate the sheer number of environmental constraints an international hardware retailer with near universal demographic appeal has to account for in designs.

Agree on everything else. The article gets a thumbs down.

I don't think it's all that hard to make a replaceable battery and have the phone be waterproof or small. My Go Pro has a replaceable battery and it's waterproof. Googling there are plenty of waterproof phones with replaceable battery.

I'm out of touch with 99 percent of people do. Can they really afford to call the repairman for every minor appliance issue? Or do they just live with it until replacement?

Labor is very expensive, more than parts.

For something like a washing machine that costs $750 and has an expected lifetime of 10 years, it's hard decision of when to repair vs when to replace.

Say my washer is already 6 years old, it breaks, and labor + parts to fix it would be $250. I might decide to give up and buy a brand new one instead.

Which means it ends up in the landfill.

I wish there were more repair cafes that might takebin items like that.

I had this Vitamix frustration with v-moda. I had a couple missing screws on a headset. They were totally unwilling to send a couple screws from the USA to New Zealand in an envelope (even at my own expense), instead insisting on the whole headset being shipped back to them, halfway across the world, at their expense. There is such a horror of simple parts being made available for home repairs.

Sorry for my french but this is all a bit of bullshit. I have some old sport watch that I open with a cent coin, it is completely waterproof as it was 10 years ago (so seals work), its whole sealing part is tiny and doesn't interfere with design/size/weight/price. If one wanted to manufacture top of the class phone with removable battery, it would be entirely possible.

But since we all know revenue is not anymore primarily function of units sold, but services continuously sold on top of those devices. Taking huge commission on every app sold, proprietary/brand stuff like cables (even if they fray worse than 1$ ebay ones), cases, buds, anything.

Apple used to be pioneer of this bad behavior, but now most manufacturers jumped on that wagon since apparently people kept buying their products anyway. I used to just pop back lid on my Samsung S2 to change sim card or add memory card, now with S22 that's a pipe dream.

I wouldn't call it a trade-off. I would call it what it is - customers are not pissed off enough to affect sales in negative way. So let's do it and milk them more. One step/slot/port/3.5mm jack at a time.

I get what you’re saying but I think a 10 year old sport watch and a modern iPhone aren’t really comparable.

Unless you’ve turned off the “sent from my Casio” footer.

If you can open up your watch with a coin then obviously the design is affected by this being something you can do. Saying that it doesn't interfere with design, size, weight, or price is disingenuous. Of course it does. It might influence those things positively or negatively, but it absolutely is affected.

If you have to put in a mechanism to easily remove a battery from a phone then how wouldn't that affect literally all of those factors? What sort of properties would this entail and what would be suitably easy to remove? That answer is different depending on the person. Some people perhaps just want the back to slide off, which would probably require a plastic back. You could add a hinged door, but that would certainly add to its thickness and affect the design. You'd also need to have a way to interface the battery to the phone. Phones that had easily replaceable batteries had contacts built into the phone and the battery that were sufficiently large as to make it nearly impossible for someone to fuck up the installation of a new one. This obviously added weight and thickness to the phone.

I'd love to hear how you'd engineer it to be just like a phone without an easily removable battery without affecting the criteria you listed.

You have a storage bin holding old smartphones with readily replaceable batteries.

That suggests to me that readily replaceable batteries isn't anywhere near the entire story in terms of keeping phones out the landfill (or in your case, a storage bin).

You are correct. without datasheets, you have no way to even approach reprogramming a computer system. Those datasheets, schemata, and documentation are some of the closest, most tightly held trade secrets in the tech world.

Increasingly, the world has gotten away from "sell thing to owner to own" to "sell hook for revenue extraction from User". part of which has also increasingly been "be the unofficial or unnoticed arm of power by keeping inconvenient things hard to acquire as determined by the parties in power". Say... industrial equipment without backdoors.

Until I can load my own firmware/microcode, it ain't mine yet. I'd love to have a cobbled together group of heterogenous computing devices just for the novelty.

And that’s the reason to continue to grow the FLOSS / Open Hardware ecosystem.

You don’t have to program or fix stuff yourself. But you should be able to hire your local shop to do it for you at reasonable expense and to keep your old, but good, stuff running as long as you like.

While flip phones are disposable are their price point, that’s not true for hardware like smart phones or beyond. We need better, sustainable solutions.

The lack of user replaceable batteries is one symptom of a larger problem, yes. And the symptom being discussed today.

Part of the issue with old smartphones and batteries is that every battery is a snowflake so eventually nobody is willing to produce the replacement battery anymore.

Contrast this to car batteries where the form factor is specified within certain limits.

This is, unfortunately, a point where the law probably has to step in and say "battery replacements must be available for 20 years" which would make it unpalatable to be a snowflake anymore. At that point, the suppliers would get together and agree on a "standard" battery form factor.

Smartphone software being pure garbage along with the games Qualcomm and the network operators play make up the rest of the story.

They don't force you into the tools, the deposit or anything else - they offer you parts at the same prices they offer to third-party service providers and Apple stores. They even offer you credit for returning the old parts. If have your own iFixit kit, the only thing you're on the hook for is parts cost.

Access to the tools for what is likely at-cost shipping prices seems like an above-and-beyond thing to me that the right to repair folks weren't even asking for.

Considering that batteries still only last about a day and Apple led this shift to non-user-swappable batteries they still deserve some blame for landfill culture. Most of their efforts around repair appear to be the minimum anyone motivated by new sales would do once faced with looming regulation.

Even if at cost the extreme sophistication and complexity of such tools reinforces the point that these devices aren't really built for repair. They're built for eye appeal first and foremost.

> Considering that batteries still only last about a day and Apple led this shift to non-user-swappable batteries they still deserve some blame for landfill culture.

Sure, but it seems like this makes phones thinner and lighter and consumers want that. It "sucks" that Apple gave them that option and they went for it, but I don't consider this to be inherently malicious.

> Even if at cost the extreme sophistication and complexity of such tools reinforces the point that these devices aren't really built for repair. They're built for eye appeal first and foremost.

…these are the tools that Apple uses to repair your phone?

Intent is less important when we're burning the world for blue bubbles, cheaper waterproofing, and a few millimeters thinner.

If iphones had to be priced with externalities included (via regulation) I suspect they'd get user replaceable batteries shortly there after.

I suspect that of all the things burning the world, it's mostly oil and cars. iPhones are unusually useful, but they're not unusually resource intensive.

Just because something is worse doesn't mean we should ignore the problems of the first.

If you've ever heard someone talk about frying fish, and how they have bigger ones that need frying, they're probably speaking metaphorically.

Some things are mutually exclusive. User serviceable phones and more sustainable transportation are not.

> Sure, but it seems like this makes phones thinner and lighter and consumers want that

Or Apple devices are also a tech fashion statement, so their loyal consumers will put up with everything Apple changes. iPhones could show off their sleek design if they weren't designed to need a case. People definitely wanted bigger screens and batteries for years, and Apple was very reluctant until the iPhone 10. I'm sure many iPhone users miss the fingerprint reader, but they won't get it, and they will still buy the next model because the slight and gratuitous design differences make it obvious you're using an old iPhone.

>Or Apple devices are also a tech fashion statement, so their loyal consumers will put up with everything Apple changes.

This argument is tired; it doesn't explain why every other manufacturer on the planet has also gone down this route. It's just an argument that helps nerds feel good (those other guys aren't real techies, like me, they only care about fashion).

Leading fashion brands have network effects and it can create something like Stockholm syndrome to those who buy into it. Other manufacturers often follow leading brands for prestige, or because people become accustomed, not always because the direction is objectively better when accounting for costs to future generations.

No, it's because Apple phones have margin. They make money. Their competitors desperately want to make money.

They make their money selling phones wholesale into retailing supply chains. One of the rules of those supply chains is that the OEM eats the costs of early returns.

So they removed every widget that they possibly could and then glued everything down so that it could not possibly come loose, be dropped, wedged etc. during the warranty period.

Battery doors, headphone jacks, you name it. All gone.

End customers don't seem to care. Phones with swappable batteries, headphone jacks, etc. exist. They don't sell well in high margin markets.

Why are there so many imitation Louis Vuitton bags? If Apple makes a fashion phone with an hourglass shape, and they make money, others will copy it. just as Apple copied bigger screens and batteries, but labeled it as "Pro" or "Max" so following a trend felt new.

> Considering that batteries still only last about a day and Apple led this shift to non-user-swappable batteries they still deserve some blame for landfill culture.

I disagree. I think you're conflating home user repairability with longevity of the device. Just because the user can't repair it at home doesn't mean it goes in the garbage. More realistically a broken phone will be traded in, Apple will repair it, and it will be sold refurbished. Apple phones hold their value very well, and there is a booming second-hand market, even including officially by Apple.

I wouldn't be surprised if the average lifetime of an Apple phone exceeded that of even a "repair friendly" Android phone. I'd love to see data on that either way, but until we have it, you can't say whether the design of Apple phones contributes to landfill culture or not.

Apple is in a class of their own in some ways, so until they offer a repairable one I don't think a fair comparison can be made.

I always say the same, people wants 2022 tech with the simplicity of 1980s tech. You’re holding more computing power in your pocket than the one that brought apollo to the moon and yet want servicing it to be as simple as undoing 4 screws.

Yes, I want that. I don't really see how increased computational power should make a device impossible to hold together with 4 screws.

Absolutely!

My 1980's tech is repairable, and a fair amount of it is still in active, productive use.

These phones and computers can be made more serviceable. Doing that will reduce profits and that is why it is not being done.

And so we have plenty of people who can figure out how to service the tech anyway! I am one of those types of people and have always explored fixing it no matter what.

(I do not do phones, though I have fixed tablets and computers)

There are always some of us with these skills. Humans are pretty great that way. We are considerably more diverse and capable as an species than we may appreciate.

And what happens?

Of course that lowers profit too!

Now we have right to repair as a thing to be settled because some of us are a bit too greedy for others of us to tolerate.

And regarding phones, my preferred phone is falling out of support. It had a headphone jack and performance is right there, sans a faster than 60hz display, which is no bother. Grew up with 60. Love it, but I digress.

I need to be careful with this phone, and that is fine. Keeps me from doing too much crap on it and that helps me be more productive and less tied to the thing. No worries yet.

Now, I have two of these. One has a cracked glass and a battery not long for this world. When I want, I hook it up to keyboard, mouse and display and it works great! Perfectly fine Android PC. I may start building some software for it too.

But, as it is right now, email, remote conferencing, Libre Office, Microsoft if needed, CAD, STL file, bitmap create, edit, Web, and, and...

I forget what the CPU is, but this old, glass cracked phone runs a Snapdragon fast enough to beat some Chromebooks I have gotten hold of.

Definitely worth winning Right To Repair. The up and coming generations are going to face a lot of challenges, and being economically challenged is, sadly, among the set of challenges.

My generation was similar, Gen-X. I grew up in fairly severe poverty. Fortunately, was not my entire childhood, but it was more than half. Made an impact, and the primary one was whether to spend to solve or repair to solve problems, and there is a ton of perfectly great tech laying around today.

It is crazy to be figuring out how we best avoid using it!

My 1980's tech is an Apple 2 computer. I still use it regularly. Mostly games, Nox Archaist released recently being top of the list. (If passers by enjoy "Ultima" style gaming, you can buy this title right off GOG and or Steam and play in emulation.)

But, yes I use it as a spiffy calculator, generating datasets of various kinds, terminal to embedded devices and when I get off my arse and finish my test and measure card, it will be a great bench computer just as it was back then.

Finally, as RMS has said about software freedoms, it is not important that people use those freedoms to the max. Many won't, and that is OK.

This is all about the people who will, or better --who have to for whatever reason.

It just needs to be possible.

> Apple is so anti-repair they have no provisions for a reasonable at home process.

Just because they don't prioritize their designs for at home repair, doesn't mean they're anti-repair. Clearly they're not anti-repair if they're voluntarily making their tooling available for repairs.

I can't really blame them for prioritizing design over repairability. At least for now, repairability doesn't sell a lot of phones -- the number of people who want to repair their own phone is so small, and I say that as someone who has repaired a couple iPhones in the past.

> show just how deep the hole Apple has dug for themselves really is

I guess it shows this hole to the public, but Apple's know this the whole time. They scale out in-store iPhone repair to 500 stores around the world where they have low-paid retail workers performing the repairs.

And it's a great service, too. You pay $50 and wait a few minutes. You get a new, genuine OEM battery with a warranty that extends the life of your phone indefinitely.

The right-to-repair people have just lost contact with reality. This is the way people want it to work. It is a great product experience.

Right-to-repair in no way prevents or hampers Apple's ability to offer that service. If people want the current state, they can continue to pay for it. Right to repair offers strictly more options and choice, it doesn't remove anything

It removes the ability of the manufacturer to make a phone that is the size and weight people prefer and has the features they want. Billions of people want a waterproof phone and I doubt you could even fill a bus with people who really give a damn whether or not the battery is replaceable in the field.

For buyers of new devices that may be true. Yet I've sold plenty of phones I had bought second hand (after years of my own use), and those with user swappable batteries are far more likely to be reused without great expense. More so if they also have an SDcard slot to minimize wear on the soldered storage.

As phone features plateau we should strive to make them last longer and avoid unnecessarily consuming tons of new material every year. (IIRC a single iphone consumes like 0.5 tons of materials to go from the ground to the pocket.)

The facts aren't really on your side of the argument. The glued-together Apple phones are the ones least likely to be in the trash. They are still shipping the latest software on phones from 2015. By contrast, removable-battery phones are all garbage practically as soon as you open the box. The Samsung XCover is only 2 years old, might not even get Android 12, and definitely will never get anything after Android 12.

Imagine a world in which iphones still had user swappable batteries. They would almost certainly retain their appeal and fewer would end up in landfills.

The fact that they've become a luxury brand is a compounding factor you cannot dismiss. You're comparing apples to oranges.

I have had batteries replaced by random repair shops for 40 euros before. If I could have done it for 20 in parts how does that change the calculus compared to a new phone?

Phones are more likely to end up in landfills when batteries and basic repairs aren't user serviceable. The calculus should include externalities like the cost in resources for new phone vs only a new battery.

> By contrast, removable-battery phones are all garbage practically as soon as you open the box. The Samsung XCover is only 2 years old, might not even get Android 12, and definitely will never get anything after Android 12.

That isn't a property intrinsic to removable-battery phones; An Apple phone with a removable battery would be the best in terms of software and battery longevity, both of which are factors which serve to prolong the life of the phone.

Ars technical has a story running on the topic of "lost" limited natural resources.

It speaks right to how landfill mining is likely to be a thing in a less distant future than many of us are likely to expect.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/05/new-study-estimates-...

Waterproof or governmental pressure?

Hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist but tracking devices dont work so well if the person being tracked can completely disable them when they wish.

No it doesn't. Requiring Apple to sell or allow 3rd party replacement parts as well as providing repair documentation does not in any way prevent them from making the phone they currently are.

You're confusing (perhaps intentionally) right to repair with the EU's proposal to mandate easily swappable batteries. They are not the same thing.

You can sell the parts and manual, sure. But making it easy for a layman with non specialized tools? That is a tall order against cost, weight and waterproofing.

Being easy isn't a primary goal. Simply being possible at all is the goal: https://www.repair.org/policy

The goal is to make sure things are possible

When they are, there will be plenty of people capable of making it easy. There always are.

I hate how we have collectively forgotten that there were waterproof phones long before this nonsense from Apple(and others, to be fair). Bah, we even had waterproof phones with removable battery doors. But of course, now somehow humanity forgot how to make those and the only way is gluing everything together.

You can fill that bus any time, any day.

In the US, roughly half the population works for less money than it costs them to exist and show up for work! How they view the world is very different than the roughly quarter of the population doing well enough to see these discussions lack relevance to them and how they live and work.

There are shared responsibilities. Nothing gets designed, used and fixed in a vacuum. Ignoring how we fix things insures our design and manufacturing work raises the cost and difficulty of repair and repurpose.

If by replaceable you include easily-changeable so one doesnt have to be tethered to a wall or portable charger, you could fill stadiums with business users easily.

They have not. You're being disingenuous. After all, battery replacements became a big deal after Apple started OTA updating and throttling performance to hide the battery degradation instead of being up front about the need for eventual replacement.

>You pay $50 and wait a few minutes.

I would have no problem if this was true. But it is not. $49 only for non-Face ID Model. $69 for FaceID, or pretty much all current iPhone lineup except iPhone SE. You also have to wait 30 min to hours depending on store. Not few minutes unless you are the only one doing Battery Swap which is highly unlikely given how they are always fully booked.

Depending on which part of the world you are in, your prospective on the Battery swap pricing differ greatly on a $10 Battery part.

iFixit is charging $39 for an iPhone mini battery, or $25 for an iPhone SE battery. Paying $25-30 for half an hour of labor—on a $400-1200 device—every two years sounds… totally fine to me?

Not when that labour is only required because of Apple's (and other manufacturers', but Apple was the first and worst to do this) malicious design in the first place.

Apple used to have removable batteries. Even when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, batteries were removable. Once Lithium-Ion batteries that can hold 70% of a charge after 1000 cycles appeared, Apple got rid of the user-swappable batteries. It’s not malicious, it’s a disagreement on what is acceptable.

> It’s not malicious, it’s a disagreement on what is acceptable.

They figured they could get away with removing it, so they did. In exchange the user got… what exactly? Absolutely nothing.

> Once Lithium-Ion batteries that can hold 70% of a charge after 1000 cycles appeared, Apple got rid of the user-swappable batteries.

That's still an absolutely pathetic lifetime compared to the rest of the device.

And that also bears out in practice, anecdotally battery life is by far the #1 reason that people buy new phones, especially in the last few years.

Anecdotally speaking I've never known anyone to get rid of an iPhone because of battery life. Ever. I've known people to replace iPhones because of cracked screens, no longer getting iOS updates, running out of storage, or simply wanting some new feature but I've never known anyone to replace an iPhone because of the battery. They're simply too cheap and easy to replace. Honestly, call and make your appointment at iFixIt or the Apple Store, drop your phone off, come back an hour later and the battery is replaced - for under $50.

>iFixit is charging $39 for an iPhone mini battery

It is absolutely fine in US. When iPhone Battery Replacement parts isn't even a listed item on Amazon but only Replacement Kits. ( Likely due to whatever agreement they had with Apple ) And Labour cost are high. One may even borderline call Apple's pricing cheap in the US. And why Apple could claim in court they made no profits in their after sales repairing services .

If you live within the Valeriepieris circle, have retail access to slightly higher than BOM of battery. Things might look a little different.

Hopefully we will have Battery improvements in the next 10 years so most of these discussions will become non-issues.

The nearest Apple Store is hours away, this is definitely not convenient and how I want things to work.

Remember when you could just buy a battery off the shelf, pop out the old battery, and pop in the new one? Without waiting for service or finding a brand store that's at best hours away? And without having to worry about whether the manufacturer has deemed your phone too legacy to allow you to replace the battery anymore?

Not to mention a battery swap means having basically immediate power replenishment on demand.

I work around this with battery cases. Everytime I do that when there are onlookers, at least one of them want to know all about it.

Demand for this is pretty high, given my experiences doing an equivalent thing where people see it happen.

And there is also the important matter of making sure the device is off and not doing something a user might not want to have done.

Sure, an ad-hoc Faraday Cage is not that much trouble, but many do not understand how or even it being possible.

No they haven't!

The experience is great from what I understand.

But there are other ways, and this is not at all about taking options away from people.

Nothing about this is exclusive. That great experience can compete with many others and should.

And it is a big world of repair out there. It all goes well beyond Apple and a few others making things painful.

How can you have a user accessible door to remove the battery while still being at least somewhat thin and water resistant?

I’m sure there are ways but I would probably significantly increase the BOM costs. For example some kind of waterproof battery that connects to a waterproof jack.

That will you the battery but cracked screens and stuff? Those pretty much have to be a pain in the ass to keep the cost, weight and watertight-ness up to spec.

Well, "somewhat thin" is subjective so that is no real barrier. Water resistant? I would think you make the phone in two halves, and it splits in the middle. This way both halves can be sturdy enough that a few screws and a silicone seal are enough to keep the water out. Maybe two halves is the wrong idea, but you can still make a stiff back shell that engages in a row of clips along the side that are tapered so as it catches it presses against a silicone seal. Then just a few screws to hold it in place.

Anyway, Apple has solved a million engineering problems. I bet if they cared as much about user serviceable parts as they do about putting LIDAR in their face scanner, we'd see all kinds of clever solutions. Seriously the idea that Apple, one of the most capable engineering and manufacturing companies to ever have existed, could not elegantly solve this problem is a bit far fetched to me. I think the only reason people cannot conceive of it is that we haven't seen it.

> How can you have a user accessible door to remove the battery while still being at least somewhat thin and water resistant?

Don't know what you mean by "somewhat thin", but as far as I'm concerned, maybe they could ask Samsung.

My Galaxy S5 had a removable battery door, removable battery, and was water resistant (I'd use it as a GPS on a motorbike, even under heavy rain). It also had a headphone jack, which also didn't seem to be an issue for its water resistance.

It was less than a mm thicker than my iPhone 7 and barely thicker than a 13 mini.

Dimensions from Wikipedia:

GS7 : 142.4 x 69.6 x 7.9 mm

iphone 7 : 138.3 x 67.1 x 7.1 mm

iphone 13 mini : 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.65 mm

I prefer the iPhone 7 for the overall smaller size, but I think that's a different issue. I never found the GS7 "thick", just "big", because it was too tall and wide and would sometimes be uncomfortable in my jeans pocket (and I'm a guy).

It's not rocket science. Most wristwatches are splash proof, many are waterproof and they're still thinner than iPhones. Tight sealing has been figured out long time ago, even for rectangular shapes.

First, it is just a little less thin, and second we make watches that handle water just fine.

Another alternative would be to make the devices fail more reasonably when wet. Just drying the thing out could work better than it currently does.

But yes! Your point is valid. We won't get the absolute pinnacle of volume and performance that way.

To that, I say we can surely find a better balance than the mess we have today, and that could start by making damn sure we permit and perhaps encourage as much innovation on the repair / repurpose side of things as we do on design and manufacture.

The times I needed my phone to have more power vastly outnumber the times I needed my phone to be waterproof...possibly by a factor of 1,000,000 to 1

There have been constant complaints that Apple doesn’t make its repair and maintenance equipment and parts available for others to use. Now that they do, it turns out they use extremely high quality professional tools to do near-factory quality work. So fine, here you are, you can get all the exact same stuff Apple uses. You win.

Great! (I agree)

Having seen that set of tools, others can and should be cost reducing them and or innovating how to do things without them, or with less expensive gear.

I guess I could go either way on this. It seems possible apple is being genuine and they just optimized for a sleek design and repairability wasn't a concern because they didn't need to support at home repairs before. This could just be the first iteration of supporting repairability and maybe they will make design decisions to make it easier in the future. Or.. They could be dragging their feet and they are trying to make it as laborious and tedious as possible to avoid needing to put too much effort into supporting at home repairs. I guess they could also just be trying to open up a new market and sell fancy iPhone repair products.

> Obviously newer phones are waterproof and arguably more durable, but Apple has gone so far towards a factory sealed design as to require absurd equipment to do a proper job.

I'm not too familiar with the matter but wouldn't other manufacturers' waterproof phones have a similar construction to enable said waterproofness?

Probably wouldn’t be that hard either to waterproof and seal everything, then have waterproof batteries and battery connectors that were splash-resistant with recommended removal + drying for a day if they do get wet.

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