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> Or Apple could make it easier and cheaper to replace the iPhone's battery Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been run

> Or Apple could make it easier and cheaper to replace the iPhone's battery Apple charges $79 to replace a battery. Seems cheap to me. And, btw I have been running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8%. Seems pretty good to me. I think peoples expectations are just absurd.

epmaybe 9y ago
It's not cheap for me, as it is nearly half the amount I paid for my iPhone SE. At that point, I'd be much better off buying a newer phone. As for the battery only being reduced by 8%, I think that's a huge positive point for the SE and its internals. This phone just lasts so long that you charge it less than the other phones Apple sells.
- pdpi 9y ago
  Did you buy it second hand? Or was that on contract? If on contract, are you sure that's what you paid for it?
  - smhenderson 9y ago
    That’s about they cost at Walmart with straighttalk. My son still has an SE he bought a few years ago. No contract, just prepaid service every month
    - prodent 9y ago
      SE only came out in March 2016.
ksk 9y ago
Yeah IMHO, the $79 is fine and so is the turnaround time. In fact I had mine replaced for free (6s) through a recall program they had. IMO, the problem is Apple either tricks you into upgrading your OS or constantly nags you if you don't. When you find out that the new iOS has slowed down your phone, you're forced to keep using it instead of being able to revert your phone back to the factory state - something every user expects out of a consumer device.
- asendra 9y ago
  I also had mine replaced for free (6s) on the same recall program ~11months ago. The battery still has 95.7% of the capacity, with 400 cycles, yet my device is throttling the cpu between 30% and 50%. It was how slow it was running that made me upgrade this year instead of the next which was my original plan. If I had known that replacing the battery fixed the speed problems I would have saved the money. They really need to communicate this reduced power state to the user.
- ProAm 9y ago
  $79 is a lot for a battery.
  - ksk 9y ago
    Yeah, and I support the 'right to repair' laws, which could make that even more affordable.
- jcadam 9y ago
  iOS 11 turned my iphone se from a solid, dependable little device into a flaky, crash-happy rectangle of frustration. 11.2.1 and they still haven't fixed all of the major bugs. Including this one that is driving me insane as a developer: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896
  - seba_dos1 9y ago
    I don't know much about the older versions (last time I have played with iOS was iOS 7 I think), but I have recently got an iPhone 5S for development with iOS 11.2 and it's definitely one of the most glitchy mobile OSes I have ever used - and I've used plenty of community managed AOSP "ROMs", Replicant with missing drivers and some Openmoko distributions. I didn't expect much, but I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. And I'm not even using it as a phone.
have_faith 9y ago
> I think peoples expectations are just absurd. From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  The batteries are replaceable — you just need a few tools.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    That's true for iPhones before the 5 series. After that, it just goes completely bonkers. See my sibling comment to yours, and the two iFixit guides linked from there - as I mention there, I don't regard the idea of doing my own device repairs as especially trepidatory in general, but current Apple hardware is an extremely special case.
    - ballenf 9y ago
      True, but we're still not talking about the batteries being soldered to the board, like with RAM or storage on newer computers.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        A point, but as far as I know the next phone manufacturer to do that will be the first.
        throwanem 9y ago
        ...he said, before checking the iFixit teardown for the used iPod Touch bought to serve as a stereo headend. It's not precisely a phone, but that's not much excuse.
- throwanem 9y ago
tjoff 9y ago
Maybe a third of that is a reasonable price. Oh, and 50% after two years is a pretty good rough estimate on phones that are charged often.
eat_veggies 9y ago
$79 is quite a bit of money to pay each year, considering I can buy two batteries and a charger for my Android phone on Amazon for far less than that.
- narrator 9y ago
  My brand new Note 4 battery costs all of $13 and took 30 seconds to change. The last couple of revisions of phones aren't that much better than previous generations. This seems mainly due to Moore's law slowing down. Heck, Intel hasn't released a process shrink in 4 years. Apple and other vendors are going to have to start pulling even more of these planned obsolescence tricks if technology doesn't pick up soon.
  - balls187 9y ago
    Samsung brand battery, or is it just a replacement part?
    - eat_veggies 9y ago
      I find Anker batteries to be the same or higher quality than Samsung's own. They usually run for about $10-$15.
- eyeareque 9y ago
  A replacement iPhone battery can be bought on eBay for around 10 bucks shipped. I’ve replaced a few iPhone 6 batteries. Support a small business and have someone else install it for you if you need a new battery. It won’t cost that much. If Samsung had stores they would charge you something near Apples price without question.
  - slig 9y ago
    How trustable are those no-brand batteries? I'm kind of wary of buying a no-brand battery that will charge everyday on my night stand.
Finnucane 9y ago
I got a new battery for my iPhone 5 for free as part of the recall. It's now going on five years of service and still works fine.
jakobegger 9y ago
Given that you can buy these batteries for under $10 on ebay, I do think that $80 is expensive. Also, Apple‘s service is atrocious. Mail it in, and you‘ll be without a phone for up to two weeks (!). I tried bringing mine to an authorised service provider in Austria, and they told me it would take 24h to get a quote, and the actual repair would take up to two weeks. I went to a 3rd party shop, it took them about 15minutes to do the swap, and it cost a fraction.
- balls187 9y ago
  I'm always leery about buying batteries off ebay.
  - eyeareque 9y ago
    I’ve bought two and they were great. eBay has reviews now so you can have some confidence in the seller.
    - acdha 9y ago
      They’ve had reviews for ages. The problem was that scammers learned how to game them.
toast0 9y ago
Samsung charges $25 for a Note 4 battery, and the user can easily replace it. If they had kept the battery as easily replaceable, Samsung wouldn't have had to recall all the Note 7s, instead they could offer to take the phone or ship a safer, lower capacity battery and a consolation prize for lower capacity.
beamatronic 9y ago
The battery itself is a $10 part. If I value my time at say $100 an hour then the $79 isn't the issue if I have to waste my time going to the Apple Store. $79 is not the issue. My time is.
paulus_magnus2 9y ago
Making battery non-user replaceable we're engineering a time sink + cost sink on the side of the user. This isn't progress, it's rentseeking. $79 per year x 1 billion phones. Apple profit on the transaction is smaller than my loss. It takes me 15sec to replace battery compared to driving to/from the store & involving 5 people in the process (sales, technicians, accounting). It's a clear win- lose with a negative total transaction.
lloeki 9y ago
Anecdotal sample of wear ratios as reported via coconut battery: - my iPhone 6S, barely one year in: down to 87%, 282 cycles. - a friend's 6S+, one and a half year in: down to 74%, 398 cycles - another friend's 6S+, two and a half years in: down to 54%, slightly less than 600 cycles Those LiPo are supposed to last 800-1000 cycles before dipping below the 80% mark and it's a far cry from that. Even before I checked the values for mine I noticed a cliff effect when charge goes below 40%, at which point it takes only a dozen of minutes of light use to drain. This is not OK. I can readily accept a non-replaceable battery on a 800-1000€ phone but it has to keep giving good performance (WRT both battery life and throttling) for three years (it was so for my iPhone 3G and 4). Changing the battery on my dime each year is not an acceptable solution. This is poor engineering that minmaxes thinness vs battery, and I see the same trend on the MacBook line, which currently makes me very unlikely to upgrade my 2013 rMBP.
- m_eiman 9y ago
  I've read somewhere, that I can't find at the moment, that Apple expects/promises that Mac batteries will retain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and iOS devices will retain 80% after 500 cycles. The lower cycle number for iOS devices is presumably due to them being exposed to higher temperatures (in pockets e.g.) and not having any active cooling to counter this.
  - m_eiman 9y ago
    Found a source: https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/
jhack 9y ago
So on top of spending $800-1000 on a new phone, you'll have to spend $80/year just to maintain its original performance. Cheap!
prodent 9y ago
> running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8% Or maybe it's only degraded by 8% because it's only a year and a half (a year and 9 months tops since the first ones were sold) old?

epmaybe 9y ago

It's not cheap for me, as it is nearly half the amount I paid for my iPhone SE. At that point, I'd be much better off buying a newer phone. As for the battery only being reduced by 8%, I think that's a huge positive point for the SE and its internals. This phone just lasts so long that you charge it less than the other phones Apple sells.

pdpi 9y ago
Did you buy it second hand? Or was that on contract? If on contract, are you sure that's what you paid for it?
- smhenderson 9y ago
  That’s about they cost at Walmart with straighttalk. My son still has an SE he bought a few years ago. No contract, just prepaid service every month
  - prodent 9y ago
    SE only came out in March 2016.

ksk 9y ago

Yeah IMHO, the $79 is fine and so is the turnaround time. In fact I had mine replaced for free (6s) through a recall program they had. IMO, the problem is Apple either tricks you into upgrading your OS or constantly nags you if you don't. When you find out that the new iOS has slowed down your phone, you're forced to keep using it instead of being able to revert your phone back to the factory state - something every user expects out of a consumer device.

asendra 9y ago
I also had mine replaced for free (6s) on the same recall program ~11months ago. The battery still has 95.7% of the capacity, with 400 cycles, yet my device is throttling the cpu between 30% and 50%. It was how slow it was running that made me upgrade this year instead of the next which was my original plan. If I had known that replacing the battery fixed the speed problems I would have saved the money. They really need to communicate this reduced power state to the user.
ProAm 9y ago
$79 is a lot for a battery.
- ksk 9y ago
  Yeah, and I support the 'right to repair' laws, which could make that even more affordable.
jcadam 9y ago
iOS 11 turned my iphone se from a solid, dependable little device into a flaky, crash-happy rectangle of frustration. 11.2.1 and they still haven't fixed all of the major bugs. Including this one that is driving me insane as a developer: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=176896
- seba_dos1 9y ago
  I don't know much about the older versions (last time I have played with iOS was iOS 7 I think), but I have recently got an iPhone 5S for development with iOS 11.2 and it's definitely one of the most glitchy mobile OSes I have ever used - and I've used plenty of community managed AOSP "ROMs", Replicant with missing drivers and some Openmoko distributions. I didn't expect much, but I honestly didn't expect it to be so bad. And I'm not even using it as a phone.

have_faith 9y ago

> I think peoples expectations are just absurd. From the perspective of environmentalism, I think all phones should have mandatory replaceable batteries. Is that really so absurd? Why are companies allowed to design devices with such disregard for the environment.

jakobegger 9y ago
The batteries are replaceable — you just need a few tools.
- throwanem 9y ago
  That's true for iPhones before the 5 series. After that, it just goes completely bonkers. See my sibling comment to yours, and the two iFixit guides linked from there - as I mention there, I don't regard the idea of doing my own device repairs as especially trepidatory in general, but current Apple hardware is an extremely special case.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    True, but we're still not talking about the batteries being soldered to the board, like with RAM or storage on newer computers.
    - throwanem 9y ago
      A point, but as far as I know the next phone manufacturer to do that will be the first.
      - throwanem 9y ago
        ...he said, before checking the iFixit teardown for the used iPod Touch bought to serve as a stereo headend. It's not precisely a phone, but that's not much excuse.
throwanem 9y ago

tjoff 9y ago

Maybe a third of that is a reasonable price. Oh, and 50% after two years is a pretty good rough estimate on phones that are charged often.

eat_veggies 9y ago

$79 is quite a bit of money to pay each year, considering I can buy two batteries and a charger for my Android phone on Amazon for far less than that.

narrator 9y ago
My brand new Note 4 battery costs all of $13 and took 30 seconds to change. The last couple of revisions of phones aren't that much better than previous generations. This seems mainly due to Moore's law slowing down. Heck, Intel hasn't released a process shrink in 4 years. Apple and other vendors are going to have to start pulling even more of these planned obsolescence tricks if technology doesn't pick up soon.
- balls187 9y ago
  Samsung brand battery, or is it just a replacement part?
  - eat_veggies 9y ago
    I find Anker batteries to be the same or higher quality than Samsung's own. They usually run for about $10-$15.
eyeareque 9y ago
A replacement iPhone battery can be bought on eBay for around 10 bucks shipped. I’ve replaced a few iPhone 6 batteries. Support a small business and have someone else install it for you if you need a new battery. It won’t cost that much. If Samsung had stores they would charge you something near Apples price without question.
- slig 9y ago
  How trustable are those no-brand batteries? I'm kind of wary of buying a no-brand battery that will charge everyday on my night stand.

Finnucane 9y ago

I got a new battery for my iPhone 5 for free as part of the recall. It's now going on five years of service and still works fine.

jakobegger 9y ago

Given that you can buy these batteries for under $10 on ebay, I do think that $80 is expensive. Also, Apple‘s service is atrocious. Mail it in, and you‘ll be without a phone for up to two weeks (!). I tried bringing mine to an authorised service provider in Austria, and they told me it would take 24h to get a quote, and the actual repair would take up to two weeks. I went to a 3rd party shop, it took them about 15minutes to do the swap, and it cost a fraction.

balls187 9y ago
I'm always leery about buying batteries off ebay.
- eyeareque 9y ago
  I’ve bought two and they were great. eBay has reviews now so you can have some confidence in the seller.
  - acdha 9y ago
    They’ve had reviews for ages. The problem was that scammers learned how to game them.

toast0 9y ago

Samsung charges $25 for a Note 4 battery, and the user can easily replace it. If they had kept the battery as easily replaceable, Samsung wouldn't have had to recall all the Note 7s, instead they could offer to take the phone or ship a safer, lower capacity battery and a consolation prize for lower capacity.

beamatronic 9y ago

The battery itself is a $10 part. If I value my time at say $100 an hour then the $79 isn't the issue if I have to waste my time going to the Apple Store. $79 is not the issue. My time is.

paulus_magnus2 9y ago

Making battery non-user replaceable we're engineering a time sink + cost sink on the side of the user. This isn't progress, it's rentseeking. $79 per year x 1 billion phones. Apple profit on the transaction is smaller than my loss. It takes me 15sec to replace battery compared to driving to/from the store & involving 5 people in the process (sales, technicians, accounting). It's a clear win- lose with a negative total transaction.

lloeki 9y ago

Anecdotal sample of wear ratios as reported via coconut battery: - my iPhone 6S, barely one year in: down to 87%, 282 cycles. - a friend's 6S+, one and a half year in: down to 74%, 398 cycles - another friend's 6S+, two and a half years in: down to 54%, slightly less than 600 cycles Those LiPo are supposed to last 800-1000 cycles before dipping below the 80% mark and it's a far cry from that. Even before I checked the values for mine I noticed a cliff effect when charge goes below 40%, at which point it takes only a dozen of minutes of light use to drain. This is not OK. I can readily accept a non-replaceable battery on a 800-1000€ phone but it has to keep giving good performance (WRT both battery life and throttling) for three years (it was so for my iPhone 3G and 4). Changing the battery on my dime each year is not an acceptable solution. This is poor engineering that minmaxes thinness vs battery, and I see the same trend on the MacBook line, which currently makes me very unlikely to upgrade my 2013 rMBP.

m_eiman 9y ago
I've read somewhere, that I can't find at the moment, that Apple expects/promises that Mac batteries will retain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and iOS devices will retain 80% after 500 cycles. The lower cycle number for iOS devices is presumably due to them being exposed to higher temperatures (in pockets e.g.) and not having any active cooling to counter this.
- m_eiman 9y ago
  Found a source: https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/ https://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/

jhack 9y ago

So on top of spending $800-1000 on a new phone, you'll have to spend $80/year just to maintain its original performance. Cheap!

prodent 9y ago

> running my SE for a couple of years and the battery is only reduced by 8% Or maybe it's only degraded by 8% because it's only a year and a half (a year and 9 months tops since the first ones were sold) old?