Smartphones are highly "engineered" products (in the sense that they are more than a simple combination of off-the-shelf parts). And typically the more "engine

Smartphones are highly "engineered" products (in the sense that they are more than a simple combination of off-the-shelf parts). And typically the more "engineered" a product is, the more difficult it is for an end-user to service. That goes double if it's extremely space-constrained, as engineers are forced to get "creative" to fit their constraints. As a relatable example, consider PC building. In a standard PC case, you can pretty much throw together any selection of (compatible) parts and expect them to work. In contrast very compact mini-ITX builds can be very challenging, not all combinations of parts will fit in a given case, heat becomes challenging to dissipate without excessive noise, and assembly can be very fiddly, with exactly one right order to put all the parts together. And even if you are doing the smallest fiddliest case you can buy, you still will not actually approach the sizes that are possible with an engineered product like the MSI Trident 3/Corsair One/Zotac Magnus let alone the noise profiles. That said, Apple definitely crosses the line from "compact product that is necessarily difficult to service" into actively obstructing service efforts, which is a problem. For example I accept that soldering parts down is thinner than socketing them, but it's an asshole move to glue components into place. Apple is certainly not alone here, however. It's virtually impossible to find a phone without an integral (non-replaceable) battery nowadays, and MicroSD slots are rather uncommon as well (yes Google, I know there's a lot of bad flash out there, that's why I source nice stuff from camera stores). I don't have any good suggestions to fix this, there's no "but wait there's a better way" at the end of this post. There was a prototype phone a while back that was built from pluggable "modules" but obviously it hasn't taken off. The closest thing is probably a dedicated hacker/tinkerer phone like the Neo900 but you will definitely have to live with it being 3-4x as thick as an iPhone. The iPhone is making enough compromises in terms of functionality (eg battery life, external antenna connector, etc) that there might be a niche for a more full-featured device but it's clearly not what the mass market wants.