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Comment by philistine | Hacker News Reader

The common complaints against Apple in this thread are echoed, but no one is criticizing Apple while being pragmatic. Everybody is dogmatic.

Apple will not provide user replaceable batteries. That’s clear. It’s probably too expensive and complicated for them to do that and have waterproof devices. They instead offer replacements, and third-party shops know how to replace batteries too. With the airpods, Apple needs to be roasted endlessly for creating time-bomb trash though.

But staying realistic, Apple massively improved the repair ability with the iPhone 14 by sandwiching the phone instead of fitting it on the back plate. They also improved the repairability of their laptops recently.

The worst excesses of Apple’s poor internal design seems to be behind us.

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I am surprised to see the same user post

> no one is criticizing Apple while being pragmatic [...] it is expensive and complicated for them to do that and have waterproof devices

and

> with the airpods, Apple needs to be roasted endlessly for creating time-bomb trash

I feel like every discussion of airpods and e-waste on HN totally misses the mark. The average lifespan of a pair of airpods (across all users) is probably not very different than the average lifespan of a pair of wired headphones -- people lose/replace stuff all the time, and wired headphones fail because of stress! Just because 1% of eco-conscious power users are now forced to throw away usable headphones doesn't actually make a big difference in terms of total e-waste. Also, it takes ~4000 pairs of airpods being thrown away to match the by-weight e-waste of throwing away a single 70 inch TV. Even if you are just worried about batteries, a single e-bike battery is like 2000 times larger than an airpod battery. If one was trying to minimize e-waste through by improving the reusability, Airpods just seem like totally the wrong target compared to the hundreds of much larger products with slightly worse rates of reuse / recycle

Yeah, I definitely only expect my wired earbud headphones to last 2-4 years, which sounds consistent with airpods. Often one of the ears goes in that time because the wire breaks.

Ofc I refuse to believe airpods would last 6months before I dropped/lost/etc them. But that is just me rather than a criticism :D

Your earbud headphones do not have batteries inside them that are at high risk of never getting recycled.

iPhone batteries are user replaceable though! Apple will sell you the battery for $91 (only $45 if you send your old battery back) and will rent you all the equipment you need packed in two pelican cases for $49/week, shipping included!

https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair

Who’s the target demographic for this? Surely they don’t want a 16 year old who has never used a screwdriver before.

Why is it expected that you should be able to swap an internal component if you haven’t used a screwdriver before? Try swapping the brake pads in your car or fixing a blockage in your dishwasher and you’ll find that fixing the iPhone is comparatively quite easy.

Actually no that's exactly the target market. Who do you think is working in the back of an Apple store? Not a 35 year old EE that's for sure.

> Apple needs to be roasted endlessly for creating time-bomb trash though.

Honestly I feel like they should just be much cheaper and have a trade-in program for it to make sure they're properly recycled.

Other than the battery, what are there of valuable components in it? A tiny chip and a speaker with a tiny bit of copper? If they can fully automate the recycling and production of them, that almost seems the more sensible thing to do. But right now they're just too expensive for that to be reasonable.

There are phones targeted at construction and emergency workers that manage waterproofing and removable batteries, they just have the opposite form and aesthetic of the iPhone.

Did people already forget that Samsung made their flagship phones waterproof back when they still had removable batteries, headphone jacks and SD card slots? And looking at Tim Cook's favorite metric - just 0.2mm thicker than the current iPhone.

Not long ago we heard the same PR garbage about glue and solder being necessary for slim laptops but somehow the Framework isn't that much of a brick either.

Good points. They're now running commercials ridiculing people with S5s to get them to trade them in.

waterproof as long as you have the battery door really secure and the data port cover on?

>Apple will not provide user replaceable batteries. It’s probably too expensive and complicated for them to do that and have waterproof devices.

I just want Apple to sell ME the battery. I dont want my battery to by crypto signed to my device.

>They instead offer replacements

Exactly, _replacement_. They wont just sell me a battery. You have to give them serial number, which in most cases means client PI. You also have to send old battery back for ~$40 credit to make the whole thing any financial sense.

>and third-party shops know how to replace batteries too

Apple store replaces battery in 2 hours, third party needs to explain to every single client why he needs to wait couple of days because you cant actually keep a stock of genuine batteries. Apple also wants to have access to third party service center books for 3 (or was that 5) years for "auditing :)))

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