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Comment by barbs | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely disagree.

Having replaced the screen, battery and home button on my 1st gen iPhone SE myself I can confidently say that Apple do not make these easy to repair yourself, and arguably make it more difficult to drive business for their own repair service. Lots of tiny screws requiring particular tools of different lengths that can't be mixed up, lest you permanently damage the phone. Glue that needs to be carefully removed or you risk dangerously damaging the battery. Just look at their repairability scores on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... .

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Repairability was bad but has gone up a lot, they did a big internals redesign for iPhone 15 to make it easier to swap batteries and replace screens. Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved. Most people struggle fixing big things, let alone sub-mm precision things. But this helps the 3rd party repair shops a lot.

> Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved.

User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

And at the time they were comparable to a flashlight in terms of complexity, not running AAA games with raytracing and a camera pipeline of untold complexity. It’s almost like having anything this complex working requires insane engineering and miniaturization, this is not due to “planned obsolescence”, especially if you take a look at the second hand market. No other brand has even remotely similar resell value.

Gaming laptops have user replaceable batteries.

How much battery capacity, physical size, weight, or waterproofing are you willing to sacrifice? Because for me, it’s straight up zero

> How much battery capacity

Batteries used to last a lot longer

> physical size, weight

Phones used to be a lot smaller as well

Phone batteries used to be a lot smaller, phones used to draw a lot less current and have smaller screens and be a lot stupider.

> User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

Few enough people want them that no one makes them anymore

(That’s what people mean when they say no one wanted them)

<Jack Sparrow voice> but you have repaired it </>

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