How the iPhone 16's electrically-released adhesive works
ifixit.com
ifixit.com
The press seems to treat iFixit very favorably. I'm not quite sure why, as what they do is little different than Ford lobbying for truck-friendly policy or Smith & Wesson lobbying for gun-friendly policy. That said, they are nice enough folks and I wish them all the success in the world, especially as they are HQ'd here in my home town.
”In the second scenario, anodic delamination is caused by the oxidation of the surface of the aluminum substrate and migration of Al3+ into the adhesive. This will lead to fast debonding since the substrate layer bonded to the adhesive is no longer supported.”
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/admi.202101...
The research team’s video of it in action (also linked in the article) is pretty impressive!
And you are honestly asking if they thought to maybe try heating it up?
yeah it's amazing to me that laymen often do not understand that experts have more understanding than they do. i see this all the time and it's incredible.
"surely i, who am very smart at what i do, when i turn my attention to this other thing, will notice something in mere seconds that those who have spent years focusing on this have not considered. that is entirely plausible."
I know that no one has those exact thoughts and I am obviously exaggerating for effect, but the root of that exaggeration is the same as I see every day. laymen thinking they are smarter than experts in the expert's own field. i don't understand where this is coming from but it is very common since the pandemic.
It seems to come from a misunderstanding of expertise. Experts are often deeply focused on a specific issue and provide highly specialized advice. The problem arises when people either dismiss this advice outright, believing they know better, or when experts themselves overstep and present their advice as the only viable solution, missing the broader picture.
In the case of Apple’s screen removal method, it’s not that experts didn’t think of simpler approaches like using heat, but rather that they likely considered and discarded it for technical reasons. Just because a solution seems obvious to us doesn’t mean it hasn’t already been carefully evaluated by those with far more experience in the field.
This gets to the heart of why decision-makers must take expert advice but balance it with other factors. Experts, by nature, can become so focused on specific details—like examining individual leaf cells—that they fail to see the trees, let alone the entire forest. That’s why we shouldn't let any single expert dictate the entire process. If you let a lawyer design your product, it might be lawsuit-proof but unusable. If a security expert designed it, it might be unhackable but frustrating to use. And if an abstract artist designed it, it might be beautiful but completely impractical.
The pandemic is an extreme example of this problem. We didn’t just listen to epidemiologists; we listened to a specific subclass—the doomsday epidemiologist. The more balanced experts, who understood their role as advisors and recognized how their guidance needed to fit into the bigger picture, were sidelined. This led to morally reprehensible policies, like forcing children to die alone in hospitals and isolating the elderly in nursing homes, all because visitors were banned. In Australia, they even killed 15 shelter dogs, including puppies, just to prevent volunteers from traveling to pick them up [0]—another example of blindly following extreme advice. These kinds of decisions, made in the name of public health, are why many people have lost trust in “experts.”
Good product design—or public policy—requires input from multiple experts and a balance of priorities. Letting one perspective take over is a recipe for disaster.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/08/23/austral...
It doesn't take into account the economy part.
For instance, Iphone 15 display price 350€, s23 108€.
They are mostly similar, s23 has 120hz OLED, iphone has 60hz OLED. The phone sell for similar price in Europe (800 vs 869€)
The difference is I can buy s23 display from third party manufacturer, apple you can't or you loose feature you paid for like true tone.
pass. everything samsung is doing lately makes them a company that I will no longer buy from.
apple isn't perfect, no one is, but any company that puts ads on top of my content that i paid for with money on my own tv that i paid for with money is getting kicked out of my house hastily and permanently.
The price of the phones is similar - good point there, but it's entirely possible that Apple has other components that are cheaper (especially electronics)
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/youre-wrong-60hz-on-the...
I’d also disagree that they’re the same screen as another user pointed out, the iPhone has a better screen. Even if Apple decided to charge more for parts, that’s their choice. True Tone can now be used with 3rd party screens, so go buy the cheaper knockoff screen if you so choose.
Apple has done more to make this phone repairable in the last 3yrs than I think any OEM has done since waterproofing started and phones became sealed. The electrically released metal covered battery is going to be a huge thing for self repair. You or I might find it easy to just yank a battery out, but someone somewhere will follow the instructions and then puncture it and sue the OEM for the battery fire, and this hugely reduces that liability.
No?
Why should we stop comparing Apple to its main competitors because they took a minor step in the right direction but still miss the mark by a wide margin? It's only fair to keep them on the hook for things where they do worse.
I don't want Apple to progress. Apple is not a kid to coddle. It's the most profitable company in the world. Being best in class in repearability is the bare minimum we should expect for them, not something we should hope for.
> The electrically released metal covered battery is going to be a huge thing for self repair.
They could just stop gluing battery entirely. It's not like it's an impossible engineering challenge. It's soon to be mandatory in the EU anyway.
As someone who has repaired numerous cell phones over the last decade, I firmly believe the new iPhone is now far easier to repair than the new Samsung Galaxy, and I challenge you to prove me wrong. It might now be the most repairable mass market phone. You’re welcome to whine on the internet if you think that that is “holding them accountable”, but at the same time appreciate the change.
> They could just stop gluing battery entirely. It's not like it's an impossible engineering challenge. It's soon to be mandatory in the EU anyway
Disagreements over that not being the place of a government aside, while I suppose they could screw it down like a laptop, this is my point, they made it better and you’re still complaining. If it isn’t good enough for you then don’t buy the product and buy something else. If the entire market wanted repairable phones (instead of a maybe 1% that I myself am a part of) then they would make phones that fit together like legos. This grandstanding that there is a moral requirement of companies to design products in the way you want is silly.
You are the one making grandiose claim.
Is it full of glue? Yes. Do they still tie spare parts origin to functionalities semi-arbitrarily? Yes. Are there spare parts far more expensive that they should be considering their actual costs? Also yes.
> Disagreements over that not being the place of a government aside, while I suppose they could screw it down like a laptop, this is my point, they made it better and you’re still complaining.
They could just do like the Fairphone or any other companies from the past decade and make it properly swapable.
Once again, I don't want them to make it better. I want them to make it properly repairable. I don't give a tosh that it's improving. They have unlimited budget if they want to.
> This grandstanding that there is a moral requirement of companies to design products in the way you want is silly.
It's not grandstanding. If you want to bury your head in the sand and pretend there is no issue with e-waste and obsolescence, that's your choice. Sadly we share the same planet so I will still do everything I can to force Apple to actually make good choices considering they don't seem to be able to do so unless they are forced to.
Parts serialization didn't make thievery of phones go down. How could it? It's thievery of opportunity. Do you really think an hypothetical thief which would be like "how damn the phone I just pickpocketed is an iPhone. Let me give it back I can't sell the parts" exist?
The only thing it does is allow Apple to keep parts price artificially high, business as usual for Apple.
Tamper-proof? Hardly.
Also, checking eBay, it looks like an oem display (not from apple) for the iPhone 15 is only $150-170. From apple directly it’s $235. By comparison, I can’t find any way to actually buy an OEM display for Samsung phones. They just offer repair services.
If the device can only be repaired by having extremely specialist tools, skills, etc. then it's still repairable, you just need to invest in those things which costs $$$. But it's hardly worth doing, because by the time you've done so the next iphone rolls around and the skills/tools lose most of their value.
If the device can easily be repaired but the replacement components cost so much it's hardly worth doing the end result is the same: Devices won't be repaired because it's not financially attractive. Which is exactly what Apple wants, they're only doing this because the EU is practically forcing them to.
This isn’t Apple being evil, it’s just basic cost of goods. It’s like complaining that a 10 yr old car is too expensive to repair cause the parts cost too much. Yeah… at some point they do, relative to the value of the car.
If that 10 year old car was designed with a non-standard shape battery, it would get a lower repairablity score. If additionally the OEM sued anyone who made batteries in that shape it would get an even lower repairability score. If on top of that the car was designed to turn on the check engine light if its battery was made by anyone other than the OEM then it would get an even lower score.
Almost every battery in a phone is a 'non-standard' shape, even including when you could pull the back cover off and swap batteries. Companies have been making custom batteries since the dawn of the cell phone, pretty much.
>> If additionally the OEM sued anyone who made batteries in that shape it would get an even lower repairability score.
I'm not aware of this. Source? Making knockoff components using Apple's logo and such is not the same thing.
>> If on top of that the car was designed to turn on the check engine light if its battery was made by anyone other than the OEM then it would get an even lower score.
Where, exactly, is this message on an iPhone? You mean the single pop-up window, and the notice in the settings menu (that you can easily ignore)? Yeah, not the same thing. It's unobstrusive, yet visible enough so a person who buys one knows if they have 3rd party parts in their phone.
The metaphor is not literal.
> Making knockoff components using Apple's logo and such is not the same thing
I think I was misremembering the lawsuit you are probably thinking of.
> Where, exactly, is this message on an iPhone
Again, the metaphor comparing iphones to cars is not literal.
Whoops! I guess you got me!
After all it really is actually super easy to buy new parts for Apple products either from Apple themselves or the thriving third-party market!
And on top of that, once your local repair shop has the parts, they are super easy to install.
Surely my damaged iphone mini 12 will be easily repaired at a reasonable price by the skilled technicians at the Genius Bar who have parts in stock and tools ready to go. It would be absolutely wild if their price for that service was based on the price of the latest iphone rather than the cost of parts and labor for the actual service. But certainly they wouldn't be able to get away with that due to, as we agreed earlier, the thriving market for third party parts and repair.
Surely my damaged 4 year old car will be easily repaired at a reasonable price by a skilled mechanic at the car dealership who have parts in stock and tools ready to go. It would be absolutely wild if their price for that service was based on the price of the latest model year car. But certainly they wouldn’t be able to get away with that, thanks to the thriving third party mechanics.
Oh, except… yeah, these are the exact same thing pretty much. The only difference is cars have many more components and individually they cost less, whereas phones only have a handful of components and each cost a considerable portion of the phone cost.
Your specific complaint about the iPhone 12 mini seems extremely unfounded, as well. Their repair cost (which is totally turnkey) is $89. Seems extremely reasonable for a turnkey repair from a first party vendor. Surely, maybe you can buy a “new” 12 mini for $200… but this is just like cars. At some point it’s “mechanically totaled” and the repair cost doesn’t make sense. And that point changes for a car too, depending on if you use a dealership service department or a third party mechanic.
Obviously the dealerships are typically more expensive but that is from marking up parts and labor not from trying to pressure you into buying a new car. If Ford had it the way Apple does brakes would be built in to the transmission, last for 60,000 miles, and be priced at $25,000 to repair.
My specific complaint about my 12 mini is that it needs a new frame, back glass, camera, and battery. $89 dollars is obviously unrealistic for those parts. And, like you say, phones have fewer parts that make up a larger portion of the total cost for the product. Unlike with a car, you can actually swap everything into a new frame pretty easily.
To continue stretching the car analogy, that's like saying you bring in a car to the dealership that only needs a new gas tank, new infotainment system, new bodywork and frame, and then you're outraged that they want to charge you $25k! Most of the car is damaged, you scrap it and some third party can salvage what's valuable and repair some other car.
The labor cost for replacing parts on a car isn't just another ballpark. It's another planet.
Obviously if you want to replace every part of the phone it is going to cost more altogether than a new phone. No reasonable person would argue that. And of course there are limits. The screen and mainboard are by far the most complex parts. The frame is trivial by comparison.
The problem is that there is effectively no real aftermarket for parts and repairs. Apple all but refuses to sell parts and makes using third party parts as onerous as possible.
They have been able to get away with it so far by riding the wave of quickly advancing mobile technology. But as next year's phone starts to look less and less different from last years phone, people are going to start to get serious about repairability and Apple is going to be forced to make some changes.
Then what’s your point? Labor costs on phones aren’t insignificant, and unless you want this done by people that make minimum wage (with minimum wage results, likely), it’s going to add substantially to the cost of a repair. Proportionally it will add a lot, too, since phones cost so little compared to cars.
> The problem is that there is effectively no real aftermarket for parts and repairs. Apple all but refuses to sell parts and makes using third party parts as onerous as possible.
Three points here:
1. Apple sells pretty much all of their own parts for phones up to 5 years old at this point. I don’t know how this is “refusing to sell parts”.
2. Many vendors (Samsung being notorious for this) don’t sell parts at all. Or if they do, it’s not many generations, and only specific models.
3. Third party parts for reasonable valuable (to the company making them) components do exist for most Apple devices. It might take a bit (a couple years) … but they definitely exist. Just check aliexpress some time. This is pretty much the same as cars; third party parts take awhile to come. Quality is variable, but that’s the case with any 3rd party part.
Keep in mind that apple is intentionally killing the third party market. You cannot make a third party screen for an iphone that behaves the same as a regular screen, the iphone firmware will detect this and prevent it.
Because at some point it ampers the repairability. If something is technically repairable but it cost more than buy a new one, can you really say it's repairable ?
> Also, checking eBay, it looks like an oem display (not from apple) for the iPhone 15 is only $150-170. From apple directly it’s $235. By comparison, I can’t find any way to actually buy an OEM display for Samsung phones. They just offer repair services.
I don't believe that apple is going to let you 'calibrate' a third party manufacturer display, so you lose feature that technically work.
Meanwhile on Samsung, or whatever other Android manufacturer, you put the new display and everything works as before.
So you can't use the price of iphone third party manufacturer to compare it, or else you got to add the price of the feature you loose, like true tone, faceid, and so on.
This iFixIt article made it fairly clear that the new version of iOS allows you to pair and calibrate first or third party parts after making a repair at home.
> it worked impressively smoothly on our vanilla iPhone 16: one click to pair and calibrate all components at once, and no bugs to be found.
> with iOS 18, they would stop disabling True Tone and battery health for third-party parts.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/100266/the-end-of-parts-pairing-...
You're saving money, but taking a chance.
There are other hidden costs to repairs too. One is you’ve “broken the seal” and now your device isn’t “stock” anymore. The water seal might not work as well. The display connector might be slightly loose and tweak out. The screws might not be factory torqued down.
For a car it’s similar too… maybe after that accident the frame is now just slightly off kilter. Maybe there was that proverbial “extra mystery bolt” left over.
Then there is opportunity costs. Is repairing it really the best use of your time and money? What other things could you have done instead of repair? I dunno…
All I’m saying is, repeatability isn’t the end all be all. It’s yet another set of trade offs factored into product design like security, user experience, quality, cost, time to market, size and weight, durability, etc.
I think the score is fine. But there is a second score not mentioned that is “is it worth repairing”?
It blows my mind that I never made this connection before.
Phones and other electronics are not a lot different in that manufacturers don't really want you to fix them and any sop towards repairable phones is under duress from legislation or . Hell, good luck even finding a genuine battery, I can't even get one for a ThinkPad and they're supposed to be good for that.
To be honest I'm fairly cool on repairability for phones as they're so tightly engineered, it's genuinely hard to engineer and they cycle so fast the parts go out of production in weeks.
Even worse. Electric cars have a huge battery, that may have a compromised integrity after small bump. It is quite difficult to resell EV, if log shows airbags popped at any point!
This is being fixed as electronic components are being switched to 48v. 12v hasn't been enough for a while. Lots less wires and control modules with 48v.
It is my opinion that iFixit is starting to turn from being actually hacker friendly into something of a mouthpiece for too-little-too-late corporate-sponsored initiatives designed to curb right-to-repair efforts. The money coming into their business from corporate programs is evident, and it's evident they are strongly perusing that market. I'm not convinced it's going to be a win for consumers though.
I found the recent release of their soldering station at $300 to be particularly distasteful. If you want to spend that kind of money on soldering tools, go for Metcal. Otherwise a Pinecil and a USB-C power bank give you exactly the same quality and control for 1/4 the price.
The electro-release adhesive is cool as hell though; no denying that.
Not worth it at all.
S23 is way too cheap. I was expecting it to be 150. On the other hand Apple is way too expensive. Even accounting for their "tax" I was expecting 250.
Not having watched The Office in a while, this immediately made me imagine Michael Scott's response, and made my morning a bit brighter.
It was caused by using the wrong glue to hold up a 26 ton slab of concrete - which immediately caused me to say "There is a right glue?"
Dude..
They ended up settling with the contractors for much more.
Maybe not the Catholics, but the Latter Day Saints are still building plenty:
https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/photo-gallery/sa...
(For context, they refer to them as temples rather than cathedrals , but the general idea of it being a place of worship with lots of effort put into architecting it remains)
I visited a recently constructed Hindu temple in Atlanta last year. Very impressive. All imported marble. Sounds like these guys have been building them all over:
> A number of shikharbaddha mandirs (large traditional stone mandirs) were inaugurated in major cities; London (1995), Nairobi (1999), New Delhi (2004), Houston (2004), Chicago (2004), Swaminarayan Akshardham (New Delhi) (2005), Toronto (2007), Atlanta (2007), Los Angeles (2012), and Robbinsville (New Jersey) (2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochasanwasi_Akshar_Purushotta...
Cathedrals were the result of centuries of research into materials science, physics, and geometry -- and that's just considering the buildings themselves, not even the often-intricate religious art within.
Some of the challenges and solutions in cathedral architecture took generations to solve; in many gothic and neogothic cathedrals with particularly tall, internally-unsupported naves, solutions like flying buttresses were thought up to support the walls externally -- sometimes with multiple layers of buttresses-upon-flying-buttresses. Developing the right cement and figuring out which type of stone you could use alone were often a project that took years, especially for landmark churches.
These churches sometimes took decades or centuries to build, depending on how you measure it (basically, if you include significant reconstructions).
They also weren't representative of the average construction project in essentially any region where there are cathedrals; those were more likely to be houses, shops, and other commercial buildings like port structures.
Things like flying buttresses or new, opulent-but-functional arch designs also weren't representative of the average innovation in those times. Depending on where you look, that might be stuff like, a new loom variant that lets you produce new patterns, or a new kind of cheese that ages quickly while having a similar enough flavour to a slower-aging, more expensive type of cheese.
My overarching point is -- at any given point in time, the average invention is small and boring. Specialists are a valuable resource, yes, but the more specialized they are, the smaller and more boring their contributions will seem to the average person outside of that specialization. Landmark innovations are built on thousands of smaller innovations made over years or decades, and those smaller innovations were usually invented by someone who's spent the past 25 years of their lives obsessing over that tiny thing, having published dozens of papers and argued for years about something you've likely never even heard of.
Also at least one DiY cathedral build: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez
China built a entire high speed rail network that's about the size of all the other ones in the world, combined, and they did it in 20 years.
China built a high speed Maglev train between Beijing and Shanghai, I think Japan is going to build one soon, too.
The US has been building hyper tall pencil looking skyscrapers in Manhattan for about 20 years.
There are tons of amazing tunnels being built around the world, as we speak.
India, China, Indonesia, etc. are building amazing subway networks in tens of cities.
The scale, complexity and sheer audacity of what we're building has never been seen in the history of the world.
Wouldn't just some thin rubber layer prevent whatever movement they are trying to prevent?
This is not usually a design goal
From wiki:
> Hydrogen fluoride is an extremely dangerous gas, forming corrosive and penetrating hydrofluoric acid upon contact with moisture. The gas can also cause blindness by rapid destruction of the corneas.
Standard lead acid batteries in every car and UPS also release H2S in vast quantities when old and charged, and nobody seems to care.
> accasionally rupturing
You know this is most likely results in a fire right? There is no case where even a slight chance of it happening is safer.
But yeah they mostly do lipos these days for thinness and weight reduction despite the obvious drawbacks. I wouldn't really ever buy a laptop with a lipo myself, shit's just gonna inflate and split it in half.
It's not just laptops anyway, EVs, power tools, flashlights, power banks, li-ion drop in replacement car/ups batteries. Anything that has a lipo has at some point had a cylindrical model too.
Edit: I looked at the Gigabyte A5 and agree that it's probably using cylindrical cells. It appears to be a Clevo system, so there were probably other brands reselling as well. But it's not quite a current model (3 year old processor), and the reviews seem to agree that the battery is one of the worst things about the machine, because the capacity is way too small for that class of machine.
Neat!
Adhesive is needed because there can’t be any pressure against the underside of the display module, and the battery can’t be allowed to move even a slight amount during drop impacts.
They're thicker to account for a solid plastics barrier between the battery compartment and the display backside to protect the display from the user during battery replacement. Glueing the battery to the phone backplate allows the manufacturer to skip the .5mm of plastic.
I realize if this logic was applied to everything the phone could double in thickness, but for a consumable part like a battery, it seems worth the sacrifice to make the repair trivial for the average user armed with nothing but a small screw driver.
People not, but marketing people do.
There isn’t really a marketing strategy of “nobody values this but we will fight to the death to get the product designed that way so we can spend a ton of money convincing consumers to want something they don’t”.
Or, let me rephrase that, there is no sustainable marketing strategy like that. People do try (see: New Coke, Humane AI pin).
[1] https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/articles/1538
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/intel-revives-the-mh...
(Manufacturers probably also like phones that have to be replaced in a few years due to battery age.)
But simultaneously, I don't know if that many people would consider it to be selling point either nowadays. Battery capacities don't seem to shrink as quickly anymore, such that the phone probably gets damaged/stops receiving updates/is replaced anyway by the time the battery would need swapping.
Although perhaps that'll change now that the changes between even 2-3 year models are getting pretty small and software support periods are increasing.
I will rather pay the extra 50€ in case I need to change the battery in a few years.
The glue goes with the battery, and there is probably a few patents on this magic glue, so generic battery manufacturers will be prevented to be able to add this glue to the new batteries they will want to sell.
So generic battery manufacturers could presumably buy the tape from Tesa, license production themselves, risk producing their own variants, or supply replacements without electrical debonding (the consumer probably doesn't care that the replacement battery doesn't use the same debonding tech their original battery used).
I would guess that not original parts which could work get refused by the app?
Batteries being perhaps the only exception, and even then, the battery identification chip and flex cable is original apple, just the cell is switched out.
"Inspired by the starter key of the legendary Porsche 917..."
Here's a decent explanation: https://circuitcellar.com/research-design-hub/basics-of-desi...
“Circuit Cellar” reminded me of something, and led me to find this is the descendant of Steve Ciarcia’s 1980s BYTE magazine column. After several iterations, it looks like Steve sold it to an employee.
Look at the video in the article around 7:29.
The article calls out the soldered-on heatsink plate, but it's not very clear from the pictures how it actually works in the stack-up without reference to the video. I don't know why they didn't do a better close up of both sides of that, maybe it's in a different article.
A 9 volt battery uses six smaller 1.5 volt cells connected in series to achieve its 9 volts. But cramming that many cells into a compact enclosure leads to less space, resulting in lower energy density and shorter lifespan.
Why would a 9V battery have less energy density than 6 ordinary AA cells of 1.5V each? If you shrink down AA cells to the size and shape to pack into the rectangular 9V form factor, isn’t it exactly the same energy density as full size AA’s?
That said if you need 9 volts ask a church. I know we would gladly hand you a box of half full ones as you have to pull them out of the wireless mics before they die. And older Shure mics are 9 volt.
But then the question would shift to: Why wouldn’t a AAAA cell have the same energy density of a AA cell? Remember that the argument is about energy density, not total energy.
By the way, I think that fsh’s reply is a convincing answer: it’s the extra packaging that kills the density.
I just assumed by now that waterproofing was caput because of all the falls and acted accordingly keeping it far even from splashes.
Last weekend we had a party here at home, the whole family and friend at pool, barbecue and beer. I am in the pool, and "hey, someone dropped the phone in the pool, folks!".
I retrieve, and it was my phone. Other than the annoying message that it couldn't charge because the charging port was wet until it got dry, no problems, so I think waterproofing is still working.
Maybe I am lucky, but I had flagship Android phones that I paid as much for as I would pay for a flagship IPhone at the time, and none of them have been so durable, either I got a cracked screen, or didn't have updates anymore, or it got progressively slower around the 2 years mark. I think the only smartphone I had in my whole life as durable as this one was my Sony P910 that I got in 2004 only to replace it with a Motorola Cliq some 5 years later.
In my personal experience with cell phones with removable batteries, whenever one of them hit a hard floor, all that happened was that the battery cover and the battery were ejected. You just had to put the battery and battery cover back into the phone, turn it on, and everything worked fine (perhaps with a few extra cosmetic scratches on the phone's plastic casing).
Building IP-rated submersible widgets that have removable parts isn't common in the world of consumer pocket computers these days, but it's not impossible either.
I can't see where they get 10 times the value. Yes, it's got a better camera.
Where is the value with iPhone?
Apple is 100% milking the buyer in a way the lower end Android chain just isn't in the business of.
People don't not buy top flight iPhones because something else is worse, it's because they 1) can't afford it (priced out) or don't "know" better (don't have an appreciation for just how great the experience is).
Maybe, a top flight Apple experience really is 10x a lower end Android experience.
First, it's the fact that everything has a decent (if by now overbearing) design language and everything (more or less) just works and fits in the Apple ecosystem, and the momentum to date has meant the feature set and 3rd party app offering is pretty darn good (Anrdoid may have great hardware and an equivalent feature-set in software, but is it as consistent and polished or truly well-designed overall?).
Second, it's the fact that there are no good alternatives. Sorry, but the Android ecosystem is not good enough. Not close, not second best, just a non starter, for Apple acolytes.
Third, there is no serious competition. Ok, there are oddball more independent offerings, but let's be real. They are nowhere near as polished.
Therefore, nothing much is really pushing top flight Apple prices down other than people's ability to pay. Because enough "experiences" have been pushed to mobile by now, it's sort of a necessity to have something to answer that need.
Maybe, someone, somewhere, could make a serious competitor to iPhone. It is 100% possible. But it does not seem to be done now.
And so, the price is what Apple has figured out people are able to pay in order to maximize overall corporate profit.
Is it worth it? Well, if it enables serious business, then, yes, best Apple phone and best apple laptop are worth it, easily.
The problem is this (best iPhone) became the stack for mobile when things (capabilities all around, specs, and prices) were more middling, and it's hard for such people to go to Android. And it's hard to juggernaut into serious competition in the particularly highly complex technical space because of the hardware and software investments made in the past couple of decades that have really built up. (When iPhone started it didn't have copy/paste, but look at the over-complexity now.)
Oh, come on guys, you don't pass a voltage through something, you apply a voltage to it and then (if it's conductive) a current will pass through it.
"Revolutionary battery"
I fully expect Apple to release a phone in the future with a removable battery and claim it is some incredible invention of theirs when it was Apple that pushed everyone to the non removable battery in the first place.
AIUI Apple didn't push anyone, Apple would be happy to be the vendor with the longest battery lifetime: If you use a thin foil instead of a hard shekll and glue it into place for stability, of course you have a bit of extra space inside the battery.
They indirectly did. The "Free Market" showed that it is way more profitable to sell a shinny skinny phone that many replace instead of fixing after a year. No one cares about what is actually better for the user when more money can be made. Prime example of that is when apple removed the ESC key in favor of a touchbar. That doesn't even address the other issues such as the environment which has an even smaller interest.
Back in those days phones would effectively become obsolete after a year or two anyway (from the perspective of a significant number of consumers) so I'm not sure that mattered too much.
Also there were plenty of Android phones with replaceable batteries available for years, the market just didn't value that compared to the visual and technical design improvements that weren't compatible with user-replaceable batteries.
Also modern batteries are generally a lot better.
> Prime example of that is when apple removed the ESC key in favor of a touchbar
How? Apple tried that, it failed, they recognized their mistake and reverted to normal keyboards i.e. it's an actual case of the free market working as expected and the opposite of what you're claiming. Also how do you think Apple could have made more money by adding the touchbar? Surely it's significantly more expensive than an extra row of keys...
Of course it didn't stop Dell going down the same path a few years latter due to who knows what reasons...
Especially for minor annoyances, design optimizations/flaws like USB-C, glued batteries, no side-loading etc. that don't outweigh the other advantages that specific product has over it's competitors for the overwhelming major of consumer.
I personally found Apple sticking to lighting to be a minor inconvenience at most but it might have been different for other people.
I know some people consider replacing an almost new phone unethical, no matter how it's done. That seems a bit calvinist… the iphone can be sold for about half price and the buyer will get support and upgrades for 5+ years. From my environmentalist point of view, I don't see anything to complain about. Some people pay Apple a pretty penny to get the New Shiny, other people get a well-built device at a good price with comparatively long support, Apple profits, all three are happy.
How so? If removable batteries were favored by consumers it would seem the Android devices that offered them far longer would’ve continued to have them.
Apple successfully brainwashed consumers via their brilliant ad compains that thinner and shiny is better than usability, longevity and the environment.
Samsung and others copied what made more money.
We in tech, myself certainly included, often have an idea of what people should want or prioritize rather than what they do.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this. Do we have data on changing the battery of a stolen phone having any meaningful impact on people/society?
At least we know one boundary - in London, about 91k phones were stolen in 2022, of which a lot are expected to end up shipped to China [1] to be either parted out or its identifiers reflashed so that they can be re-sold. The true number is likely to be significantly higher, as not everyone is willing to go to the police and deal with the paperwork when someone snatched their older-issue phone on the subway when the police doesn't do shit anyway.
And the latter part is the problem. The UK could impose inspections on outgoing parcels, say to listen for Find My BTLE beacons, and China could impose the same kind of inspections on incoming parcels or shut down the companies buying up clearly stolen property. But UK politics are too busy embroiling themselves in bullshit scandals and China most likely actively wants to contribute to the growing sense of destabilisation in Western societies, so here we are.
Assume an average value of 300 € per stolen phone, and alone London's citizens and visitors experience 30 million € in damage from stolen phones alone. It's utter madness.
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13757041/Chinese-ci...
Otherwise making a report seems to take about half a day anyway and achieves precisely fuck all.
Sure, stuff are stolen and resold, sometimes as part. I'm not denying it. Not sure how user-replaceable batteries will impact that in any meaningful way, especially if the world already has "Chinese criminal city for stolen phones". Do we really see an important amount of stolen batteries in lawfully owned and maintained phones to the point a DRM on batteries would benefit legit users?
Let's not assume DRM will reduce theft and criminal activities.
The stolen batteries have to end up somewhere and official spare part supplies are really expensive (unless you are a certified partner shop of a specific manufacturer of course), so it's most likely they end up distributed into the grey market.
If I were to decide upon a global regulation, I'd say that spare parts have to be made available under FRAND terms (so, no more preferential pricing) and all valuable components have to be reasonably e-marked, that there be a public global registry between device identifiers and associated component identifiers, and that when someone presents a proof-of-purchase plus a police report, all components get denylisted... and when a device recognizes a change in its parts, the component's identifier is checked against the global denylist. If there is a match, the device's user gets a warning, and the owner of the original device who made the theft entry gets a notification, let police do their job then.
In fact, the screen and various other parts are held on with the same adhesive, and its strong enough that unless you go into this service menu you wont get it apart without damage.
And then the service menu is locked and will only work if you're apple authorized or meet some very stringent criteria like uploading 3 copies of your passport and driving license and a receipt showing purchase of the phone in the same name.