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Comment by adesanmi | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand how this is Anti Consumer in any way? I have an iPhone and a FairPhone. One’s niche is that it’s repairable, and the other is that it’s not. A consumer who wants a repairable would buy something like a FairPhone (modular parts!!!) and someone like my mum can get her all-in-one “nice” experience.

They’re allowed to have an opinion, and with engineering there are tradeoffs. They tradeoff design with repairability and have the opinion that it is a good tradeoff. They want to test that opinion with the market and it resonated. What’s wrong with this?

I genuinely am confused as to the anti-consumer moniker when the consumer has never had more choice?

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> and someone like my mum can get her all-in-one “nice” experience.

This is a great example of what I had in mind. Apple has successfully convinced you that pairing every part of the phone to the motherboard such that it can never be replaced by anyone other than Apple (usually for a price greater than the phone itself) is somehow essential to the iPhone Experience™ and beneficial to the user.

Why would a consumer like my mum care about opening the phone up?

You still haven’t explained how choosing to tradeoff design over repairability is anti-consumer when the consumer can buy a FairPhone right now (who, I can tell you, have a significantly worse experience and design than my iPhone, but I don’t care because I can tinker with it!)

I think you just don’t like the company and are looking for silly reasons to bash them.

> Why would a consumer like my mum care about opening the phone up?

Because in a few years the phone will be unusable because of the battery. Your mum probably doesn't care about how new and fast it is, it will likely still work fine for her, but she'll likely have to replace the whole phone because of the battery.

She does replace it every couple of years (well, I do anyway) and she loves that fact.

What confuses me about all this is the fact that anyone who wants an easily repairable phone has access to them on the market, as I’ve been saying, I support companies who make this stuff because I like tinkering with hardware.

I think Apple should continue to be a company that biases towards design - trading off repairability if it comes to that. That’s ok because if I don’t like it I can buy a different phone.

My mum just wants a phone with the feature she cares about, and when it gets slow or bad, she rings me up to upgrade.

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