Hacker News Reader

Comment by klntsky | Hacker News Reader

> Non-replaceable batteries have NO redeeming qualities in my opinion

Non-replaceable batteries contribute to lowering the price. If the producer can expect to sell more copies of the same product, the price of a single item can be lower.

View on HN

Which is useful to the producer, not to the consumer. The consumer ends up spending more money by having to buy more phones. It's only cheaper if you're looking at a single purchase, not over time.

> It's only cheaper if you're looking at a single purchase, not over time.

It's not entirely true, if you don't buy a new phone and simply live with a battery not holding power for more than a day, you get both cheaper price of the phone and a technically working phone.

Of course someone with higher expectations for battery time will have to buy a new phone sooner, but if you can't afford it, it's valuable to you personally regardless.

If the device degrades to the point where it’s effectively useless for my primary use case, I’m not really saving money. Useful timeline needs to be accounted for when considering cost effectiveness.

You are implying that the primary use case is the same for everyone. Consider this counter example: what if I want a phone to use a navigator app in my car (to leave it always on charge)? Battery life would not be important at all.

You don’t have to buy a new phone to replace the battery. Just take it to any repair shop.

This may work for common phones (aka: Apple and Samsung phones). I had to retire a perfectly workable, but five years old, HTC phone after three such shops refused to fix it, citing unfamiliarity and cost.

I now have an ASUS phone, and fully expect the same to happen in several years.

It seems like weird logic to legislate that Apple and Samsung must make their phones less reliable for everyone simply because a 5 year old phone made by a cut price manufacturer is no longer supported.

Why did you buy the ASUS phone if you don’t expect to get support for it?

They can't really say Apple and Samsung have to do this, everybody else doesn't. And they are by far the market leaders, so they sell the most phones ending up in landfills.

I bought it used, and with the expectation that I'm going to be on the hook for my own long-term maintenance and support, as is true with more or less everything I buy. (Full-time Linux user here.)

The sad reality is that the experience of running an off-brand phone with an easily-replaceable battery would, long-term, be much worse than running a locked-in flagship that LineageOS builds for.

> Just take it to any repair shop.

Device manufacturers see that as a bug, not a feature. They are starting to pair genuine parts to a specific device, which will completely lock us out of 3rd party repair options if we accept and normalize this behavior.

See for example:

- "The iPhone 14 Continues Apple’s Digital Repair Lockdown" by iFixit - https://www.ifixit.com/News/66879/iphone-14-parts-pairing-re...

- "iPhone 14 Pro Programmed To Reject Repair" by Hugh Jeffreys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2WhU77ihw8

- The long list of Louis Rossmann's rants on the topic

Just because people who make money out of repair are making this claim, doesn’t make it true.

See for example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apples-self-service-r...

Ah yes, that 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery. The review of it was pretty interesting [0]. It's possible, but it's not exactly what I'd call user serviceable. There are a hojillion kits on Amazon which all include all the necessary tools to take the phone apart - triwing screwdriver, pentalobe screwdriver, impossibly small 00 phillipshead screwdriver, etc - so anyone that can follow youtube directions and has a steady hand can do it. It's just way harder than it needs to be so under the proposed law, they'd have to make it easier.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-servi...

Yeah - it’s fairly obvious that linked article is in bad faith.

The 79-pound repair kit is what Apple uses in its stores to avoid damaging phones that remain under warranty.

If people want to buy a bunch of cheap tools and risk damaging a delicate phone, they shouldn’t expect Apple’s help.

That's funny, I got the opposite read from that article and that it's Apple that's operating in bad faith here.

Really though I think what's important is that we should expect help from Apple. It might take EU regulations to force that, but what that really says to me is that as consumer in the US, my bar for what to expect from corporations is set way too low.

I'm going to assume ignorance over bad-faith and provide a video for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUpnrd-Xuho

I don't understand what point you're trying to make. What you're saying only strengthens my original point about Apple monopolizing repair.

My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned -- I want them to (be able to) work on my device in the event that I don't have the tools, skills or patience to do the repair myself.

> My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned

I don’t see how. The less reliable the device is, the more business they get. The more reliable the device is, the less you spend on repairs. Sure seems like opposing interests.

Repairability is orthogonal to reliability and I've only brought up complaints about the former. This dichotomy you're trying to establish doesn't have any grounding in reality.

All that repair shops can do is provide commentary and inform consumers about whether the OEM is serious about repair or whether they're just greenwashing their image and by all accounts, Apple's self-service repair program is about as anemic as their Apple authorized service provider program.

> Repairability is orthogonal to reliability

This is clearly not true when we’re discussing user replaceable batteries or the like. It’s a trade off, like most things in engineering.

There are many extra ways things can go wrong by making components such as batteries easy to replace. Poor contacts, oxidation, mechanical breakage, battery compartment doors popping off, ingress of dust and fluids, looser tolerances for the batteries etc.

Nobody discussing this in good faith can deny that these issues exist.

Pay extra for labor on top of parts, and theres a good chance theyll screw something up like the waterproofing seal or leave a loose connection that you won't notice until weeks later. Then you have to take it back and convince them its their fault and wait even longer while they hopefully don't screw the phone up even worse.

Yeah that definitely sounds more convenient than a removable battery.

> theres a good chance they’ll screw something up like the waterproofing seal or leave a loose connection that you won't notice until weeks later

You must be strongly opposed to right to repair, since repair shops are incompetent to even replace a battery in your view.

Right to repair means being able to replace the battery without risking damage to the device

Given that we've largely decided that sustainability is the way forward, an argument in favour of e-waste isn't particularly convincing.

User-replaceable batteries are just the first step. What we should all be pushing towards to reduce waste and emissions is a no-compromise right to repair, with easily accessible parts, tools and schematics.

I support the right to repair, but it's not the only way to reduce e-waste. Another complementary approach is through refundable deposits, just like with beverage containers. Include a $20+ deposit in the price of each smartphone, then refund it when the consumer returns it to a retailer or manufacturer for proper recycling and safe disposal.

Recycling is pretty much a scam, the first step of reduce-reuse-recycle is “reduce”.

One commenter said this legislation doesn’t make sense because they get a new phone every three years.

Even if they do, it would reduce demand if the phone continued to have parts and software for someone else to use.

In the very short term, maybe. But it's only cheaper for the very first phone. In a few years when the battery dies, the cost of the battery would be much lower than the cost of a new phone, which the consumers are required to buy

Same faulty logic for injket printers. They're extremely cheap so sure, you're "saving money" for a period, but the scales tip after one or two refill ink cartridges

If non-repairable products were cheaper and those savings passed on to consumers, apple products and the surface series would be the cheapest that exist. They are not...

The price of the battery or the price of the final product that uses batteries?

Regardless, it matters what your pricing power is.

For a luxury finished product - you price on what your consumers will bear (with some maximization curve).

For a commodity battery - then maybe.

Though, I'm not sure I follow your logic why this means more batteries will be sold.

Which probably doesn't reflect the real costs of extracting, processing and discarding resources and their effect on humans, life and nature very well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com