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> Chemically strengthened to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic, the glass is ultradurable. ... though the battery is still non-removable, so
by disposable 16y ago
> Chemically strengthened to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic, the glass is ultradurable.
... though the battery is still non-removable, so the ultradurability of the glass is really a moot point.
- brk 16y agoWhy is it still a moot point? Are you implying that the battery will go bad before the average users expected lifetime of the phone is reached?
- disposable 16y agoYep. Their statement implies that with this glass the phone is going to stay usable longer than its existing revision. However Jobs himself said that the battery in the current iPhone is non-removable, because he expects everyone to upgrade before it reaches the end of its life.
- disposable 16y agoJeez. Would you look at all this downvotes, eh? Just read what Apple says - "and more scratch resistant than ever" - meaning that this glass is meant to protect against casual scratches, and not against the glass breakage during accidental drops. The point being that the time it takes to scratch the heck out of 3GS glass is more than a lifetime of its battery. I've been carrying my iPhone in the same pocket with keys, coins and god knows what else for several months now and it still has NO scratches. Hence the original comment - the lack of ultradurable glass is not exactly a problem with existing generation of the iPhone.
- anigbrowl 16y agoWell, not if you drop it on the pavement; though how it actually behaves in that situation remains to be seen.
- enjo 16y agoI have to bet that broken glass is the #1 cause of iPhone failure... I've seen it probably 10-15 times in various places.
- el_chapitan 16y agoIt is the cause of my 1st gen iphone being on the brink. I'm hoping I can get it to hold out until the end of June.
- bruceboughton 16y agoShocking! If you drop a complicated electronic device with a glass touch screen, it might break. The durability of the glass is surely to prevent breakage when you sit on your phone or drop it from a reasonable distance, no?
- solutionyogi 16y agoJeez. Why do you think that ultra-durability is to make it easy to change the batteries? Ultra-durability is for the situations when I drop my phone by accident and instead of breaking it, it survives the drop. And I don't understand certain folks' obsession with changeable batteries. You need to have those stupid opening compartment for batteries which always breaks down. I also remember that when my Blackberry used to hang, I would have no choice but to remove the batteries so that I can reset it. The on/off switch has always worked if my iPhone gets stuck up. Says a lot about how solid iOS is.
- disposable 16y ago> Why do you think that ultra-durability is to make it easy to change the batteries? What? Why do you think I think that?
- yanowitz 16y agoBecause that's the only way to parse the durability of glass being mooted by the fixedness of the battery. Maybe you meant "until I can swap the battery, I don't care what changes they make to the case" or something similar? It's genuinely a confusing point as currently phrased.
- freakwit 16y agoI parsed it as "The overall lifetime of a phone is generally limited by the death of it's battery rather than the glass. If the battery could be replaced, the durability of components would be more of an issue."
- lincolnq 16y agoThat's how I parsed it. Not sure why you are being downvoted, except perhaps people being annoyed because the inability to replace the iPhone battery is an old complaint that they've all heard before. But I think it's a legitimate point.
- wmf 16y agoiPhone batteries can be replaced, although at $80 it's probably wiser to just buy a new iPhone every two years. http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/service/battery/ http://www.apple.com/support/iphone/service/battery/
- whalesalad 16y agoI'd take a non-removable battery any day of the week, over one that I can pop out any time. I've never opened the battery door on my Nexus, except to turn the thing off from a gnarly overheating freeze. Every time I dropped my HTC Magic, the battery cover would come off, the phone would fly in one direction, and the battery would fly in the other. What does that mean? The phone turns off! The iPhone 3G was the most durable phone that I ever owned. I could drop it during a phone call (happened once) and picked the thing up a second later to continue talking. You lose a great deal of 1) internal space and 2) structural integrity when you make the battery removable. Having a non-removable battery means that you can skip implementing all the rails and pieces to hold the door on, the frame to hold the battery, etc... gives you a bigger battery overall and more room for other goodies, and/or a smaller phone overall.
- nooneelse 16y agoIsn't flying apart a pretty good way to dissipate some of the kinetic energy that might otherwise go into components breaking?