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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

> A modular iphone that has an easy to replace battery, easy to replace screen and is maybe 2mm thicker to account for it? That would be a sellout.

The number of people who might actually like this is very tiny. Most of them do product reviews. But their audience is not going to care. Think about your older uncle. Your niece in her 20s who loves to paint and read but doesn't want to replace hardware. That's what most people are like.

Those are the people who Jobs focused on impressing and enabling to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. That is the focus that has been lost without Jobs, IMHO, and it's the focus that makes the products better for people who want to get the most out of their products per unit of time invested in learning how to use it.

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I am thinking about my older uncle and my niece in her 20s. They're smart-enough people, and they're quite aware that a modern phone can be very expensive to fix.

In particular, I'm thinking that I (a person of reasonable technical skill) would love to help them out by changing the designed-to-be-swapped screen on the phone they dropped instead of them paying someone else to conduct surgery on it.

The price of replacing the screen is mostly the part itself. It’s extremely easy for any random shopping center phone store to replace in like 5 minutes. But the part itself costs more than an old phone is even worth.

Every time a family member has had a cracked iPhone screen replaced it has never really worked properly again. It may be easy but it’s apparently not easy to do it well.

That's because most of the screens on the market are fake and significantly lower quality than the genuine ones.

Did they get it replaced by Apple, or some guy in a mall kiosk?

My mom got her battery replaced at an Apple Store and the process broke the phones ability to connect to the internet or the cellular network. They ended up replacing the phone.

I fail to see the issue. Apple broke the phone during a repair and replaced it I assume for free.

Something to last a couple of hours became a change of phone with a mandatory round trip to Apple. Apple themselves are sometimes not able to properly repair their own allegedly repairable phone.

I see a lot of issues here personally.

How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools. The only people who change their own oil would have the skills to change an iPhone screen.

I have changed the battery on two iPhones on my own, and replaced one screen on my own. I've also once had one of those little shops do it, quickly and cheaply. I only did it on my own because I wanted to see how difficult it was. The savings in money and extra time was completely wasted other than for the entertainment value of changing it.

The slice of people who get entertainment value out of changing their screens, yet does not have the skills to do it on a current iPhone, must be quite small. Surely less than 10% of the population, for a "feature" that has easy alternatives of paying somebody $20-$30.

> How many people do you know who want to change their own oil in their car? This is a frequent, required maintenance. Yet I can't think of a single car that advertises its ability to be maintained by somebody without special tools.

Those are two very different topics. Sure, cars don't advertise their ability to be maintained without special tools. But I also know a lot of people who do in fact want to change the oil in their own car (because it's not hard, and much cheaper once you have the tools).

Of course they don't advertise it: Most cars are dead-nuts simple to change the oil on.

If changing the screen of a phone were as simple as changing the oil in a Honda is, then none of this conversation would have to happen.

Changing the windscreen|windshield might be a better comparison.

Yeah most people will get it done but if it's actually built to be repairable those little shops can do it better and cheaper.

Big bonus points for making spare parts available without all the BS strings attached that apple currently has.

I've owned several Nokia phones in the early 2000s. It was dead simple to replace a battery. My 70 year old aunt who is a tailor by trade knew how to pop out the back, and insert a new battery. There's absolutely no reason a screen replacement can be made as simple. The Fairphone series has already achieved this for screen-replacements (albeit with a bit more difficulty than a simple battery replacement.)

Even if the majority of people are unable to do these part-replacements themselves, it is still a massive improvement to make them easy to perform. The reduction in expertise required to perform these replacements would significantly reduce the cost of these operations while simultaneously reducing e-waste.

Unclear – I assume many in their audience also break their phones somewhat regularly, they'd probably appreciate not having to drop $99 or even more abroad for a battery replacement.

Users who break their phone regularly are not breaking the battery.

They do break their screen often though, which is what op mentioned

spot on

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