9 ms·

So, the fact that the battery is glued into the tablet the way it is, is part of why it was at a certain $ price and had the form factor it did. Would you buy

So, the fact that the battery is glued into the tablet the way it is, is part of why it was at a certain $ price and had the form factor it did. Would you buy an iPad that cost say $100 more, and was twice as thick, so that you could repair it? I don't know, but that's not for me to mandate. If people are willing to buy what is being offered, why put a requirement that they build something different, by law? Let people/companies build what they think people will want, and have the market decide whether it survives. Nothing is stopping you from offering that product.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
Companies don't want to offer that product because then you wouldn't have to replace it as often. For example, point me to the iPad with the replaceable battery. How can the market decide if the product isn't available? More people would buy it, but then they wouldn't have to buy it as often, so the overall number of sales would go down, so companies stop offering that. In theory in a competitive market you would then expect someone to defect and gain that business, but that doesn't work in highly concentrated markets. Apple and Samsung together have more than 70% of the US market. So you can either have right to repair, or you can do some trust busting. Or both.
- donor20 6y ago
  It's much easier to do battery replacements on apple products then almost any of their competitors. Seriously - you can go in and just pay them to do it. It's something like $99 for parts and labor all included for ipads. What other tablet provider even offers this as a service? I'm serious - can you provide some names and examples with this level of convience? I ask because my parents used an ipad for something like 7 years, and it got updates FAR longer than ANY competitor out there, and they got the battery updated. One of the reasons apple gets to charge a premium is BECAUSE their items hold value for so long relative to the competition. Look at used prices for tablets (or phones). Some android phones ship with a 2 year old OS and NEVER get an update. The value of these phones after 2 years is basically zero.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Well you can pretty much take products made by anyone else to any town repair shop (in UK) and have it replaced for far less than £80 (~$100). That Apple repair probably costs them a tenner, and they're presumably primarily bringing you in to market new products to you. Apple offer battery repair as part of their anti-competitive practices - they legally hassle other companies who offer repairs, because they want to make it hard and costly to drive the idea of disposability and sell more new products.
    - donor20 6y ago
      Can you name a single one of these tablet makers that you can go into any town repair shop to get repaired?
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Apple and Samsung are both repaired at the "phone shop" I used to pass on my way to work (I don't work in town now). Can't imagine a MS Surface, or a LG/Huawei/whatever device is much different if they can get an aftermarket battery.
        donor20 6y ago
        Fair point - checking the local repair places to me - they all actually lead with apple repairs in terms of being able to give a price / in stock etc. LG I guess they need to order LG Tab 10.1 - they were not actually stocking parts for at least that brand.
  - thomastjeffery 6y ago
    > It's much easier to do battery replacements on apple products > just pay them...$99...to do it [for you]. That's not doing the replacement, that's paying a significant amount of money to have a specialist do it for you. Having the specialist available does not remove the original problem, it solves it with the side effect of cost and inconvenience. Just because the side effects don't bother you doesn't mean everyone should be subjected to them. Replacing a battery should not require a specialist in the first place. Most people consider $99 a very expensive repair. OS updates are orthogonal. We are talking about hardware.
- scarface74 6y ago
  There are plenty of ways that you can get batteries replaced. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 6s before batteryGate and my son kept it until earlier this year - 5 years.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    Yet I have a PC laptop from 2009 that still runs the latest version of Windows and Linux and has a battery that I can replace in three point four seconds which costs less than $30.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Yes and I have a Dell E6500 laptop that was my work laptop in 2010. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/ It was my Plex server until earlier this year. It’s thick, it weighs over six pounds, it runs hot and even with a new battery it wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours. What’s the point?
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > What’s the point? That it was still useful to you until it was ten years old, and it should be the same for phones.
        scarface74 6y ago
        My iPhone 6s was useful to me for five years. Apple just released a bug fix update for the 2011 iPhone 4s, June of last year. How many Android phones got security patch/bug fix releases for a 9 year old phone? Yes you can still get the battery replaced for it. Have you tried using a ten year old Android phone?
        jpttsn 6y ago
        And for fruit. I hate having to throw out apples every week, when my canned tuna keeps for ages.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Apple and Samsung, offering laptops and tablets that people buy voluntarily, and have plenty of competitors who offer such products at lower price, are trusts that need to be busted?
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
    People "voluntarily" buy things from trusts all the time. They "voluntarily" subscribe to Comcast.
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      They "voluntarily" subscribe to Comcast. Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house. Your claim is that Apple offers its products at a lower price? Than who? I never made such a claim. Please read.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        So then your claim is that Apple has market power because they can charge higher prices than "competitors" and still do more business. I was confused, I thought you meant to be arguing that they weren't a trust? > Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house. And yet people still "voluntarily" subscribe to them rather than some slower services like DSL or Satellite.
        scarface74 6y ago
        Products that can charge a premium because they offer something others don’t, aren’t a trust. Is Nike a “trust” because they can charge more for Air Jordans?
donor20 6y ago
Economies of scale normally mean to sell variants that people want (thicker / more modular / easier to repair) the price may be substantially higher. You've got to generate a full supply chain, from design, mfg, qualification, qc, parts, diagnoses / repair / maint etc. Just sell version with normal sim cards (old complaint). Then it was I'll never buy an apple product if it doesn't have a headphone jack. Then it was I think the move in progress to get away from nano sims to things like esims. I know galaxy and others have been making fun of apple for not having a headphone jack (I'm one of the folks who really misses it because it worked great for making music / audio pass thru stuff with low latency). But do I think there is enough demand to justify the headphone jack vs pushing forward with things like airpods? I don't think so - proof should be in the pudding. Either airpods are making apple big bucks or without headphone jacks apple should be crushed by samsung galaxy phones. I've seen a lot of airpods in ears.
- scarface74 6y ago
  You know you can buy other Bluetooth headphones besides AirPods and iPhones come with lightning headphones.
  - donor20 6y ago
    Sure - but apple has pushed forward and at least in my use cases airpods work really really well. The pairing speed / battery life / distance etc are all very nice. So apple has done something with airpods that the old bluetooth headsets didn't have (yes, I used to use a jabra bluetooth on my old cell phone). So they have done something to dial up the experience? Does my old jabra work as well - no - the audio quality was terrible (and doing bluetooth to my car speakers - also terrible). I can do a facetime audio call with airpods - they sound great. I do a facetime audio call on my cars speaker - it sounds horrible (and the car costs 30K+!)
    - scarface74 6y ago
      I agree. I like my AirPods also. People act as if Apple forces you to buy AirPods. It supports the standard Bluetooth spec as well as it can and added extra features to its own products. The post I was replying to acts as if removal of the headphone jack forces people to buy AirPods. As if I would want to use wired headphones on my watch or AppleTV.
Arainach 6y ago
The market is incapable of deciding such things. No one has perfect informations and everyone has a finite amount of attention span. People couldn't even be bothered to think of the long-term cost savings of different light bulbs.
- hervature 6y ago
  My dad was? Sometimes people would rather pay for not having to think about it. There's a whole industry of tax filing when filing taxes is "easy" for the majority of people.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  First, I don't agree with your statement that the market / consumers are unable to decide. Second, you should have a real think about where you want regulation to have ability to dictate what people can do. Energy efficiency is an area where people both 1) don't have clear info from manufacturers, and 2) it leaves a mess for others to clean up. Owning something that is designed in a way that causes it to have a lower resale price later is not such an area.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    > Energy efficiency is an area where people both 1) don't have clear info from manufacturers, and 2) it leaves a mess for others to clean up. Isn't that very similar to repairability? Certainly the second point, and I've never seen a display in a shop give information on how phone batteries might be replaced.
- kortilla 6y ago
  The market has decided. You just don’t like the decision. The market has the same downsides as direct democracy (tyranny of the majority) but the votes aren’t 1:1 with people.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Only a competitive market with low barriers to entry. That does not apply to electronics (not outside Shenzhen street markets anyway). With high-end hardware, the vendors dictate the trends (based on guessing what they can market the easiest), and customers have little to no voice.
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
Except it's more like 5% thicker, and BOM cost of a few cents. People are happy to throw their rubbish (trash) on the ground wherever they are, but that's not a sustainable system. Mandating a tiny degree of greater sustainability seems reasonable to me.
ssivark 6y ago
Water generated from obsolescence & irreparability is an “externality” for market mechanisms, and therefore needs an alternative approach to fix (Eg: government regulation, recycling taxes, etc) since prices will not reflect that naturally.
znpy 6y ago
> Would you buy an iPad that cost say $100 more, and was twice as thick, so that you could repair it? I don't know, but that's not for me to mandate. Ironically, Apple products pioneered the "glue everything, fix nothing" mantra AND costed the $100 more that you're talking about. AFAIK, before the iphone all phones had a swappable battery.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  > AFAIK, before the iphone all phones had a swappable battery. they also had wildly lower power demands.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

Companies don't want to offer that product because then you wouldn't have to replace it as often. For example, point me to the iPad with the replaceable battery. How can the market decide if the product isn't available? More people would buy it, but then they wouldn't have to buy it as often, so the overall number of sales would go down, so companies stop offering that. In theory in a competitive market you would then expect someone to defect and gain that business, but that doesn't work in highly concentrated markets. Apple and Samsung together have more than 70% of the US market. So you can either have right to repair, or you can do some trust busting. Or both.

donor20 6y ago
It's much easier to do battery replacements on apple products then almost any of their competitors. Seriously - you can go in and just pay them to do it. It's something like $99 for parts and labor all included for ipads. What other tablet provider even offers this as a service? I'm serious - can you provide some names and examples with this level of convience? I ask because my parents used an ipad for something like 7 years, and it got updates FAR longer than ANY competitor out there, and they got the battery updated. One of the reasons apple gets to charge a premium is BECAUSE their items hold value for so long relative to the competition. Look at used prices for tablets (or phones). Some android phones ship with a 2 year old OS and NEVER get an update. The value of these phones after 2 years is basically zero.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Well you can pretty much take products made by anyone else to any town repair shop (in UK) and have it replaced for far less than £80 (~$100). That Apple repair probably costs them a tenner, and they're presumably primarily bringing you in to market new products to you. Apple offer battery repair as part of their anti-competitive practices - they legally hassle other companies who offer repairs, because they want to make it hard and costly to drive the idea of disposability and sell more new products.
  - donor20 6y ago
    Can you name a single one of these tablet makers that you can go into any town repair shop to get repaired?
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Apple and Samsung are both repaired at the "phone shop" I used to pass on my way to work (I don't work in town now). Can't imagine a MS Surface, or a LG/Huawei/whatever device is much different if they can get an aftermarket battery.
      - donor20 6y ago
        Fair point - checking the local repair places to me - they all actually lead with apple repairs in terms of being able to give a price / in stock etc. LG I guess they need to order LG Tab 10.1 - they were not actually stocking parts for at least that brand.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  > It's much easier to do battery replacements on apple products > just pay them...$99...to do it [for you]. That's not doing the replacement, that's paying a significant amount of money to have a specialist do it for you. Having the specialist available does not remove the original problem, it solves it with the side effect of cost and inconvenience. Just because the side effects don't bother you doesn't mean everyone should be subjected to them. Replacing a battery should not require a specialist in the first place. Most people consider $99 a very expensive repair. OS updates are orthogonal. We are talking about hardware.
scarface74 6y ago
There are plenty of ways that you can get batteries replaced. I replaced the battery in my iPhone 6s before batteryGate and my son kept it until earlier this year - 5 years.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  Yet I have a PC laptop from 2009 that still runs the latest version of Windows and Linux and has a battery that I can replace in three point four seconds which costs less than $30.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Yes and I have a Dell E6500 laptop that was my work laptop in 2010. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/ https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/ It was my Plex server until earlier this year. It’s thick, it weighs over six pounds, it runs hot and even with a new battery it wouldn’t last more than a couple of hours. What’s the point?
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      > What’s the point? That it was still useful to you until it was ten years old, and it should be the same for phones.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        My iPhone 6s was useful to me for five years. Apple just released a bug fix update for the 2011 iPhone 4s, June of last year. How many Android phones got security patch/bug fix releases for a 9 year old phone? Yes you can still get the battery replaced for it. Have you tried using a ten year old Android phone?
      - jpttsn 6y ago
        And for fruit. I hate having to throw out apples every week, when my canned tuna keeps for ages.
supernova87a 6y ago
Apple and Samsung, offering laptops and tablets that people buy voluntarily, and have plenty of competitors who offer such products at lower price, are trusts that need to be busted?
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  People "voluntarily" buy things from trusts all the time. They "voluntarily" subscribe to Comcast.
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    They "voluntarily" subscribe to Comcast. Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house. Your claim is that Apple offers its products at a lower price? Than who? I never made such a claim. Please read.
    - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
      So then your claim is that Apple has market power because they can charge higher prices than "competitors" and still do more business. I was confused, I thought you meant to be arguing that they weren't a trust? > Comcast is a clear physical monopoly, the only ones allowed to build and sell internet/cable access to your house. And yet people still "voluntarily" subscribe to them rather than some slower services like DSL or Satellite.
      - scarface74 6y ago
        Products that can charge a premium because they offer something others don’t, aren’t a trust. Is Nike a “trust” because they can charge more for Air Jordans?

donor20 6y ago

Economies of scale normally mean to sell variants that people want (thicker / more modular / easier to repair) the price may be substantially higher. You've got to generate a full supply chain, from design, mfg, qualification, qc, parts, diagnoses / repair / maint etc. Just sell version with normal sim cards (old complaint). Then it was I'll never buy an apple product if it doesn't have a headphone jack. Then it was I think the move in progress to get away from nano sims to things like esims. I know galaxy and others have been making fun of apple for not having a headphone jack (I'm one of the folks who really misses it because it worked great for making music / audio pass thru stuff with low latency). But do I think there is enough demand to justify the headphone jack vs pushing forward with things like airpods? I don't think so - proof should be in the pudding. Either airpods are making apple big bucks or without headphone jacks apple should be crushed by samsung galaxy phones. I've seen a lot of airpods in ears.

scarface74 6y ago
You know you can buy other Bluetooth headphones besides AirPods and iPhones come with lightning headphones.
- donor20 6y ago
  Sure - but apple has pushed forward and at least in my use cases airpods work really really well. The pairing speed / battery life / distance etc are all very nice. So apple has done something with airpods that the old bluetooth headsets didn't have (yes, I used to use a jabra bluetooth on my old cell phone). So they have done something to dial up the experience? Does my old jabra work as well - no - the audio quality was terrible (and doing bluetooth to my car speakers - also terrible). I can do a facetime audio call with airpods - they sound great. I do a facetime audio call on my cars speaker - it sounds horrible (and the car costs 30K+!)
  - scarface74 6y ago
    I agree. I like my AirPods also. People act as if Apple forces you to buy AirPods. It supports the standard Bluetooth spec as well as it can and added extra features to its own products. The post I was replying to acts as if removal of the headphone jack forces people to buy AirPods. As if I would want to use wired headphones on my watch or AppleTV.

Arainach 6y ago

The market is incapable of deciding such things. No one has perfect informations and everyone has a finite amount of attention span. People couldn't even be bothered to think of the long-term cost savings of different light bulbs.

hervature 6y ago
My dad was? Sometimes people would rather pay for not having to think about it. There's a whole industry of tax filing when filing taxes is "easy" for the majority of people.
supernova87a 6y ago
First, I don't agree with your statement that the market / consumers are unable to decide. Second, you should have a real think about where you want regulation to have ability to dictate what people can do. Energy efficiency is an area where people both 1) don't have clear info from manufacturers, and 2) it leaves a mess for others to clean up. Owning something that is designed in a way that causes it to have a lower resale price later is not such an area.
- Symbiote 6y ago
  > Energy efficiency is an area where people both 1) don't have clear info from manufacturers, and 2) it leaves a mess for others to clean up. Isn't that very similar to repairability? Certainly the second point, and I've never seen a display in a shop give information on how phone batteries might be replaced.
kortilla 6y ago
The market has decided. You just don’t like the decision. The market has the same downsides as direct democracy (tyranny of the majority) but the votes aren’t 1:1 with people.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Only a competitive market with low barriers to entry. That does not apply to electronics (not outside Shenzhen street markets anyway). With high-end hardware, the vendors dictate the trends (based on guessing what they can market the easiest), and customers have little to no voice.

pbhjpbhj 6y ago

Except it's more like 5% thicker, and BOM cost of a few cents. People are happy to throw their rubbish (trash) on the ground wherever they are, but that's not a sustainable system. Mandating a tiny degree of greater sustainability seems reasonable to me.

ssivark 6y ago

Water generated from obsolescence & irreparability is an “externality” for market mechanisms, and therefore needs an alternative approach to fix (Eg: government regulation, recycling taxes, etc) since prices will not reflect that naturally.

znpy 6y ago

> Would you buy an iPad that cost say $100 more, and was twice as thick, so that you could repair it? I don't know, but that's not for me to mandate. Ironically, Apple products pioneered the "glue everything, fix nothing" mantra AND costed the $100 more that you're talking about. AFAIK, before the iphone all phones had a swappable battery.

sigstoat 6y ago
> AFAIK, before the iphone all phones had a swappable battery. they also had wildly lower power demands.