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
You're confusing (perhaps intentionally) right to repair with the EU's proposal to mandate easily swappable batteries. They are not the same thing.
When they are, there will be plenty of people capable of making it easy. There always are.
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.)
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.
The fact that they've become a luxury brand is a compounding factor you cannot dismiss. You're comparing apples to oranges.
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-...
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.
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.