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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

Counterpoint, no-one I know cares about water resistance.

The only time it matters is when using a phone in the rain. There are no other real situations in which I need a phone with me.

And a basic rubber seal is far more than enough unless you drop the thing in a pond.

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I’d say these days it’s essentially required. Common example: I had my phone in my pocket while headed to a pool party. Totally forget it was in my pocket and just got in the pool. Absolutely no problem, just pulled it out (after it was in the pool for minutes) and everything was fine. No panic. In comparison, I remember doing the same thing many years ago with a moto razr. Even after rice and drying and pulling the battery, it was toast. Had to get a new phone.

Required for who? It's fine that you need it. But I think you overestimate the number of people who simultaneously go to pool parties, jump in with their jacket on, and don't have accidental damage insurance.

Replacing your phone with accidental damage insurance is a lot more troublesome than going to Apple on the occasion you want a new battery. Insurance is often much more expensive.

the assertion from grandparent comment was that nobody needed it. parent asserts that yes, they do.

it’s nice that you don’t need it, but lots of people do. It’s a pretty basic durability/longevity thing.

don’t worry you can always move the goalposts back to “but you can waterproof a phone with a removable battery”, that’s a much more defensible bailey. “Literally nobody uses waterproofing” just was never a strong argument.

My argument is not that water resistance is not required but that it has always been present.

Older phones were already water resistant. You just couldn't chuck them in a pond.

It's a total non issue. If our Game Boys collectively survived our childhoods then a phone with far fewer ingress points is going to be fine.

You can't even use it in the rain because capacative touchscreens.

Waterproof phones are marketing.

I run with my phone. Sometimes I get caught in the rain. Water resistance matters a lot to me.

I don't know how much resistance that needs, but I'd also really like it to withstand the occasional drop in a pond.

If a plain rubber seal does that, fantastic. Though I'd really like to be 100% certain that I've closed things sufficiently.

Rain, or even a short time at the bottom of the pool, is easily managed with a simple seal compatible with user replaceable batteries. Failure rates will be a tiny bit higher because users won't always get the closure perfect, but that's not going to affect most people. What will affect most people is an immediate two or three year extension in the life of their phones with a $15 Amazon.com order.

That's hundreds of dollars a year in savings. For me it would be about $330/yr in savings, enough to cover my streaming video and music bills completely. That savings falls in half if my time is valuable and I've got to drive to an Apple store and pay $90 for the replacement, so I've never done that. Instead, I go on Amazon.com and order an entirely new phone when my battery gets to be an issue.

I think replaceable batteries will make calculus work for me and billions of others over the long haul. Maybe 50% of consumers take advantage and save money, 49.999% never notice or care, and 0.001% miss scuba diving raw-dog with their smartphones and have to buy a specialized case for piece of mind.

Apple will swap out an iPhone battery for $100. 3rd party shops are cheaper. You’d have to replace your phone battery 4x a year to save $300+ dollars.

I think he was saying that he just replaces his whole phone rather than pay Apple to replace the battery (including the effort of getting the phone to them and waiting while they do it). (It took me a while to interpret that.)

I suppose that there will be some number of phone replacements delayed if battery replacement were cheaper and easier. But I'd bet it's a relatively narrow range between "willing to let a pro do it" and "might as well upgrade the features anyway".

He's saying if he could buy a battery on Amazon then he’d do that over buying a new phone. You can actually buy iPhone batteries and they come with the tools to replace it now. He is buying a new phone because he wants a new phone. Anyone that wants to save $300/year can easily save that money already in a few ways. Apple repair, third party repair shops, or a DIY kit on Amazon.

I care, many people care if you’re around the water at all. I think it’s practically a mandate these days that a phone can survive a dip in the pool at least for a few minutes.

I've had a "waterproof" flagship phone for years now, but still would never intentionally test it.

Apparently, almost everybody other than you DOES care about water resistance.

It sounds to me like the population of HN all have swimming pools in their back garden and walk around with their iPhone in their trunks.

I don't consider this a real world position. Literally no-one I know, thousands of people at minimum, has this issue.

No reason you can’t have both

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