No consideration at all of tradeoffs, IE how much dust/water proofing do we lose and how much bulk/weight it will add.
There are not enough reasons for every model to need a different specific set of tools. There's one common reason: to make service difficult.
> No consideration at all of tradeoffs, IE how much dust/water proofing do we lose and how much bulk/weight it will add.
Seems like it's all about tradeoffs. They're trading whatever hypothetical advances you're referring to here for less tech waste and lower consumer costs. They're deciding that it's an area in which manufacturers aren't allowed to innovate, because the innovations are trivial compared to the externalities that they impose.
You don't because that's not actually what most consumers want, and thus the misguided need to regulate it.
- Consumers optimize for what looks nicest in the store, and it's easy for the store to bury the nonreplacability of the battery under a thick layer of tech mumbojumbo.
- Most consumers (at least here in Germany) get their phones from their phone plans, so they are limited by what the phone companies offer with their contracts.
You could turn the argument around: clearly consumers do want this tradeoff, because they have decided to vote in governments to legislate for it to be a requirement.
If you think that's an overly simplistic argument, then I invite you to re-evaluate yours.
Looking at the iPhone 14 iFixit kit, the tools are not particularly exotic... pentalobe/tripoint screwdrivers (kinda mandatory for super small screws) and just a bunch of things needed to work with small devices, spudger, tweezers, suction cup, clamp. Stuff that for the most part has been part of fixit kits going back many generations.
A generic toolkit for working w/ most Apple devices shouldn't have a particular high number of parts.
I've stripped a handful of smaller torx heads due to worn bits over the years. Can't recall ever stripping a pentalobe.
I won't argue Apple came up with a new design for security purposes, at least initially. But that doesn't mean they didn't come up with a superior design for tiny bits at the same time.
Samsung Galaxy S5 had:
- easy user removable/swapable battery 2800mah
- external port for microSDXC
- audiojack
- was still IP67 dust/water resistant (up to 1m for 30 min)
- 5.1 inches AMOLED screen
- just 145g weight
- just 8.1 mm thickness
- this was already mass produced in 2014
But that nomenclature is void if you ask me. I got water on the upper front part of my iPhone XS which is IP whatever and Face ID died. Apple said they wouldn't give me a new one because water resistant doesn't mean they have to replace your phone when something happens.
They didn't do this for water proof iPhones - that were lame excuses. They removed e.g. the headphone jack early to increase incentives to adopot (the then future) Airpods.
This was an outright lie; some Android manufacturers (I believe it was Samsung and Sony, but maybe others as well) had waterproof phones with headphone jacks and it didn't seem to negatively affect the phone in other ways.
Also, I can't figure out how there could be more than one way to replace the battery. It's incredibly simple.
Samsung even had a warning display on the phone when you turned it on to make sure the battery was secure.