3 ms·

Batteries fail on a predictable schedule. You can either design your whole battery-powered product to fail roughly when the intrinsic battery fails, or you can

Batteries fail on a predictable schedule. You can either design your whole battery-powered product to fail roughly when the intrinsic battery fails, or you can design the battery to be replaceable. Apple is trying to have the cake, by designing a product with a longer except-for-the-battery service life, and eat it too, by making the battery intrinsic to the construction, and not easily replaceable. These are incompatible goals for product lifecycle. Either you make cheap garbage that may break before the battery fails, or you have to account for repairing or replacing a failed battery in a product you have not owned in any way ever since you sold it to the consumer. The consumer-friendly way to go about this would be to offer OEM-blessed battery replacements by sanctioned professionals AND sell repair parts directly to anyone who wants to buy them AND publish specifications for 3rd-party replacement batteries AND publish instructions on how to replace the battery AND write your software to detect and report incorrect installation or out-of-spec replacement parts, while also actually accepting any repair done correctly with in-spec parts without complaint. The "issue" is that the current software is essentially saying, "we know everyone in the world who can properly replace an Apple battery, and whoever it was that replaced this battery wasn't one of them". Rather than offload the cost of their brand protection scheme onto the consumers, they could write their word trademark and mfg date to the chip in the battery, read it from the phone to report as part of battery health, and prosecute battery-counterfeiters in civil court, on their own dime, rather than using some bullshit para-DRM scheme.

zepto 7y ago
Your ‘consumer friendly’ solution seems like just the opposite. Your propose a costly scheme that would require significant ongoing investments in engineering and bureaucracy to maintain in order to support a network of less reliable repair shops policed by a never ending cycle of offensive lawsuits. Not only would that not protect the brand, but it would harm consumers through increased pricing, and harm the repair shops by targeting them with lawsuits. How can this possibly be better than the current situation where people are free to repair the device and use whatever batteries they like, and there are no lawsuits - only a message on a screen buried in the settings app!

zepto 7y ago

Your ‘consumer friendly’ solution seems like just the opposite. Your propose a costly scheme that would require significant ongoing investments in engineering and bureaucracy to maintain in order to support a network of less reliable repair shops policed by a never ending cycle of offensive lawsuits. Not only would that not protect the brand, but it would harm consumers through increased pricing, and harm the repair shops by targeting them with lawsuits. How can this possibly be better than the current situation where people are free to repair the device and use whatever batteries they like, and there are no lawsuits - only a message on a screen buried in the settings app!