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Comment by newuser88273 | Hacker News Reader

I used to have that technology on my first mobile phone, back in a previous millenium. It was called "spare battery".

I think the point to be made here is the short recharge time. Did your spare battery recharge in minutes?

No, but my pain point as a user is that I want a fully charged phone right now. I don't care that the spares sit in a charging station for an hour or two; that's an uninteresting detail of the implementation.

And then battery technology improved to the point where it became better for most people to have a slimmer, sturdier device without the user-swappable part and all the doors and connectors such a thing entails.

I can't imagine it would be that hard to make the battery removable? (I don't know for sure, just pure speculation). At any rate, I'd expect at least some phone manufacturer to create a modern smart phone like that.

The Samsung Galaxy has a removable battery.

It's not hard, but it takes up more space than a permanently affixed battery (which doesn't need a user-facing battery bay, can be permanently wired in, etc.) and introduces moving parts (I recall having my battery cover open and the battery skitter across the floor whenever I'd drop my old flip phone).

Apple has been moving in the same direction for laptops. http://ifixit.org/blog/2763/the-new-macbook-pro-unfixable-un...

https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/PTdAj6LheOiy2Vu1.m... shows 8 of the 16 RAM chips (the others are on the other side) in a Macbook Air. Having them soldered straight on the board means you can't replace 'em, but it also means they use a lot less space than a stick of RAM.

I used to have that feature on my first mobile phone, back in a previous millenium. It was called "spare battery".

ftfy

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