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?
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.
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.