7 ms·

You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill and exactly what is

You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill and exactly what is wrong with the current state of self repairs. Never mind the DRM on the battery so that the phone won’t recognize even a genuine battery as genuine without involving the 3PL to marry the parts together… It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet? I can (with a bit of a stretch) understand why they would not accept just any OEM part, but making extra difficult to even use an Apple bruine battery with the rest of the Apple hardware, that’s also very unnecessarily self repair hostile.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools? Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. The fact that people are rushing to criticize the move suggests more that people like to find reasons to complain about everything. It’s surreal to read HN threads where people are floating ideas about making laws to prevent companies from designing better hardware products just because they want to replace batteries with a screwdriver. I guarantee if you put a screwdriver-repairable phone and a modern iPhone in front of average consumers, 99% or more would choose the modern iPhone without a second question. The obsession with easy battery replacement seems limited to a very narrow set of people while the rest of the population has moved on to appreciate the benefits of modern sealed phones such as impressive resistance to water damage.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  What people want is a low cost third party shop to replace batteries
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    People have had that for years (including a sub-$100 device to copy the TrueTone ID for the screen and battery info for the battery). Every small mall I can think of had a kiosk that would do it in an hour while you shopped. (Eastern MA, US.) I’m just a consumer and have replaced 3 iPhone batteries myself and am doing a 4th later today.
  - marvin 4y ago
    Maybe you could create one, by failing to return the repair kit and forfeiting your $1200 deposit?
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  People can just buy a Fairphone if they want one with a detachable battery. It is however bulkier, heavier and not waterproof.
  - dTal 4y ago
    Swappable with the aid of a screwdriver != detachable
    - mmastrac 4y ago
      My fairphone battery is removable with no screwdrivers whatsoever.
      - dTal 4y ago
        Of course, I was obviously unclear. My point was it is also possible to design a phone which is waterproof, thin etc and also has a battery which is replaceable with a screwdriver. There is a wide margin between "field swappable battery" (which I do actually like, but accept it comes with some compromise) and glued shut like iPhones are. My (unpopular) comment was merely an attempt to point out the false dichotomy; you don't need to buy a FairPhone just to avoid this practice - my Unihertz Titan, an obscure Chinese phone with IP67 waterproofing, has four magnificently large philips-head screws up the edges.
  - thg 4y ago
    I guess it's only bulkier because it's made up of several user-replaceable components. The Fairphone 2 is a lot smaller and lighter than the FP3, though. My boss has a FP2 and my FP3 is really quite a monster compared to his. Regarding buying one: Only us Europeans can actually do that since it's not available anywhere else.
  - speeder 4y ago
    No they can't just buy a fair phone. I want one and they are not allowed in my country.
- turbinerneiter 4y ago
  Completely made up and false conundrum. You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek. This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    So if the market already produces that kind of phone (and I assume has good aspects in variables you didn’t mention like reliability, battery life, performance, production costs, etc…) why do we need to force Apple to produce the same? Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      > Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants? It sounds straightforward but actually isn't. In a perfect world with unlimited resources and no dangers of pollution etc it would undoubtedly be a clear yes, but in reality the consequences of all sides have to be evaluated to decide this.
      - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
        I’m actually suspicious that the phone doesn’t really exist, that some compromise was made by Apple or the other vendor to achieve their design goals. Saving people from themselves is reasonable given socialized environmental costs, but given that the battery makes up much of the phone these days (and Apple thankfully requires them to be returned for proper recycling), what we are trying to save are the higher value but less environmentally expensive components (eg screen, semiconductors).
    - turbinerneiter 4y ago
      We don't need to force them. Where did I say I want to force them? I pointed out that the conundrum of repairability vs. quality is made up, or at least dramatically overstated. There is currently only one company that I know of that focused on repairability in their phones (Fairphone) and they have a hard time competing on other factors due to the fact that they are tiny. Now your are going to say that them being tiny means nobody wants repairability. Then I'm going to say that people do, but it's just one aspect and that the phone is lacking in others. Then you are going say that this means you can't build good repairable phones. To which I will say that you can but nobody but one small company is trying. At which point we will be stick in an endless loop. Truth is, if Apple really wanted the could design their phones in such a way that you could open the back with a couple of screws go replace the battery, but they have no motivation to do so and instead prioritize other aspects. 99% of the industry does the same.
- jjulius 4y ago
  >You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? Ah, yes. That's the way it's always been done, let's not rock the boat, shall we? >And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools? Wouldn't it be nice if the official mfg'er was a bit more helpful for some subsets of it's customers, though? >Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. Praise Apple, how generous of them! Their profits have really been struggling and they didn't have to take this loss, but they did. Stellar folk.
- NicoJuicy 4y ago
  > Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. Apple is no saint. Right to repair became popular and it's getting law. If it's at a loss, it's a consequence because they made repair hard.
  - nobodyandproud 4y ago
    Yup. In this case, let the law prevent a certain outcome. Let the market figure out how to cope.
- ornornor 4y ago
  Not having easily replaceable batteries (and pardon me but I don’t consider requiring 79 lbs of equipment and a 1200$ deposit “easy”) in modern phones is akin to selling cars with the tires welded on. It is ridiculous, consumer hostile, and wasteful. Batteries are consumable, they should not be a reason to throw the phone away once they stopped working. You don’t throw your house away when the garbage bag is full or when the tap starts leaking. These are things you’re expected to replace and it can easily be done with simple tools. Phones shouldn’t be any different when it comes to their parts, especially consumable ones.
  - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    If my house was 90% garbage bag, I’m not sure. Houses get razed and rebuilt all the time, especially in Japan. They are not as modular as we’d like them to be, as I’m finding out in planning a kitchen renovation.
    - cesaref 4y ago
      Around by us in a city in the UK i'm unaware of any house that has been knocked down and rebuilt except for situations where a large house is knocked down and replaced by flats. For someone to knock down their own house to re-use the plot for a new (single occupancy) house is just not how we do things here. But saying that, we do tend to build houses with materials like bricks which are designed to last hundreds of years, and this is not necessarily how it's done elsewhere. We tend to renovate rather that demolish and rebuild. Our home for example is 110 years old, and is in a street of similar age houses. There are some missing ones down a neighbouring street, but I believe these were destroyed by bombing in WW2.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    Whoa whoa hold on. You can pay Apple to replace your battery. That’s been true for years. I’ve done it with multiple phones. We just had Apple replace the battery in my wife’s iPhone SE (the original version) and it’s working great. The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery. But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Right. It’s the same here with hacker news people toting how proud they are of their website that only uses 2KB of JavaScript. A lot of us ignore these people and happy produce websites that use jQuery and have 10MB of JavaScript and have iPhones that are hard to self repair, and live very happy and fulfilling lives.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    Some things are still smarter than others. Before the appearance of the iPhone, regular cellphones had always been consumer-friendly enough so that no maker would ever consider not having an instantly user-replacable battery. Any further migration toward the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach so strongly embraced in digital tech by companies like Microsoft would have been immediately rejected. A battery without user access would be recognized as disposable electronics by design. People knew that something like that would be a stupid phone, certainly not a smart one. What made a smart phone smart at the time was its PC-compatibiliy, with regular removable user storage like memory sticks which you can pull out of the phone and plug into your PC to read & write directly. So there was functionally no limit to the internal storage to begin with. And advanced free PC software to owners so they could interface to the phone through its often-unique USB cable or alternatively by Bluetooth, or even earlier IR. The phone couldn't actually be used as a hotspot itself, but it would get one PC on the internet and the PC could do the rest. And that was everywhere you could get a simple cell signal, before data plans existed and for years while less-smart phones dependent on data plans were still waiting for the data roll-out nationwide to reach their neck of the woods.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> It shouldn’t be so complicated. It's not - it's Apple's way of scaring people away from repair. These tools most likely make it more convenient if you have to open hundreds of phones per day, but for a one-off repair you can get away with a hair dryer and cheap iFixit tools just fine.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Just as the Porsche/Mercedes/BMW service manual is not shy about defining a service procedure that uses the best available tools, I’d expect the Apple service process to spot themselves the best available tools as well. Shade tree mechanics find a workaround in both cases. If you make a mistake with the shade tree tools, it’s on you, not the manufacturer, which feels fair enough to me.
lr1970 4y ago
> It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet? Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. Dying battery (every three years or sooner) is a powerful force making a customer consider their options including buying a new phone. This alone makes companies design their products deliberately introducing friction to the repair process (even if it their own repair process). Marketing allure is just too tempting to pass by.
- ornornor 4y ago
  > Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. This is exactly why we need laws to prevent this kind of behavior. It’s against the greedy nature of companies and their desire to externalize social costs, the only way to stop this is by making it illegal.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is a rather narrow view. Nobody markets the difficulty of repair, they market waterproof phones, that survive being dropped in the sink or toilet or pool, or whatever. When it comes time to buy a new battery, and the option is a $70 replacement service or 10x that for a new phone, will a $45 manual repair with a screwdriver really drive more people to replace the battery instead of buy a new phone? The idea that these processes are all driven to make people buy new phones instead of replacing batteries doesn't make much sense to me. The numbers don't really show that. And when we consider the value of being able to drop a phone in water and not have to replace it, that's pretty damn high and probably saves a ton of phones early compared to the people that were willing to do a $45 battery replacement but not a $70 replacement and instead opt for a new phone entirely.
mmcnl 4y ago
It's not complicated. - Go to an Apple Store and have them replace it for you. - Go to a third party repair store at your own risk - Do it yourself in the official Apple recommended way I'm not sure what people want. It used to be easier until the iPhone 6S, starting from the iPhone 7 in 2017 Apple started gluing the screens to make them waterproof. That's the complicating part. I'm pretty sure 99% of the customers would rather have the phone to be waterproof then easier to repair. Apple can't win here it seems.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> You have to admit that requiring 79 lbs of equipment, a 1200$ deposit, and so much effort just to swap a friggin’ battery is a tad overkill You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools? Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. The fact that people are rushing to criticize the move suggests more that people like to find reasons to complain about everything. It’s surreal to read HN threads where people are floating ideas about making laws to prevent companies from designing better hardware products just because they want to replace batteries with a screwdriver. I guarantee if you put a screwdriver-repairable phone and a modern iPhone in front of average consumers, 99% or more would choose the modern iPhone without a second question. The obsession with easy battery replacement seems limited to a very narrow set of people while the rest of the population has moved on to appreciate the benefits of modern sealed phones such as impressive resistance to water damage.

oneoff786 4y ago
What people want is a low cost third party shop to replace batteries
- sokoloff 4y ago
  People have had that for years (including a sub-$100 device to copy the TrueTone ID for the screen and battery info for the battery). Every small mall I can think of had a kiosk that would do it in an hour while you shopped. (Eastern MA, US.) I’m just a consumer and have replaced 3 iPhone batteries myself and am doing a 4th later today.
- marvin 4y ago
  Maybe you could create one, by failing to return the repair kit and forfeiting your $1200 deposit?
tinus_hn 4y ago
People can just buy a Fairphone if they want one with a detachable battery. It is however bulkier, heavier and not waterproof.
- dTal 4y ago
  Swappable with the aid of a screwdriver != detachable
  - mmastrac 4y ago
    My fairphone battery is removable with no screwdrivers whatsoever.
    - dTal 4y ago
      Of course, I was obviously unclear. My point was it is also possible to design a phone which is waterproof, thin etc and also has a battery which is replaceable with a screwdriver. There is a wide margin between "field swappable battery" (which I do actually like, but accept it comes with some compromise) and glued shut like iPhones are. My (unpopular) comment was merely an attempt to point out the false dichotomy; you don't need to buy a FairPhone just to avoid this practice - my Unihertz Titan, an obscure Chinese phone with IP67 waterproofing, has four magnificently large philips-head screws up the edges.
- thg 4y ago
  I guess it's only bulkier because it's made up of several user-replaceable components. The Fairphone 2 is a lot smaller and lighter than the FP3, though. My boss has a FP2 and my FP3 is really quite a monster compared to his. Regarding buying one: Only us Europeans can actually do that since it's not available anywhere else.
- speeder 4y ago
  No they can't just buy a fair phone. I want one and they are not allowed in my country.
turbinerneiter 4y ago
Completely made up and false conundrum. You can design devices that are easy to repair and still waterproof and sleek. This is a made up target-conflict that is easily resolved by any trained industrial designer and engineer.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  So if the market already produces that kind of phone (and I assume has good aspects in variables you didn’t mention like reliability, battery life, performance, production costs, etc…) why do we need to force Apple to produce the same? Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants?
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    > Can’t consumers just buy the phone on the market that already suits their wants? It sounds straightforward but actually isn't. In a perfect world with unlimited resources and no dangers of pollution etc it would undoubtedly be a clear yes, but in reality the consequences of all sides have to be evaluated to decide this.
    - seanmcdirmid 4y ago
      I’m actually suspicious that the phone doesn’t really exist, that some compromise was made by Apple or the other vendor to achieve their design goals. Saving people from themselves is reasonable given socialized environmental costs, but given that the battery makes up much of the phone these days (and Apple thankfully requires them to be returned for proper recycling), what we are trying to save are the higher value but less environmentally expensive components (eg screen, semiconductors).
  - turbinerneiter 4y ago
    We don't need to force them. Where did I say I want to force them? I pointed out that the conundrum of repairability vs. quality is made up, or at least dramatically overstated. There is currently only one company that I know of that focused on repairability in their phones (Fairphone) and they have a hard time competing on other factors due to the fact that they are tiny. Now your are going to say that them being tiny means nobody wants repairability. Then I'm going to say that people do, but it's just one aspect and that the phone is lacking in others. Then you are going say that this means you can't build good repairable phones. To which I will say that you can but nobody but one small company is trying. At which point we will be stick in an endless loop. Truth is, if Apple really wanted the could design their phones in such a way that you could open the back with a couple of screws go replace the battery, but they have no motivation to do so and instead prioritize other aspects. 99% of the industry does the same.
jjulius 4y ago
>You know people were swapping batteries long before this was available, right? Ah, yes. That's the way it's always been done, let's not rock the boat, shall we? >And that you don’t have to rent the official factory tools? Wouldn't it be nice if the official mfg'er was a bit more helpful for some subsets of it's customers, though? >Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. Praise Apple, how generous of them! Their profits have really been struggling and they didn't have to take this loss, but they did. Stellar folk.
NicoJuicy 4y ago
> Apple did a great thing by providing this option at a loss to themselves. Apple is no saint. Right to repair became popular and it's getting law. If it's at a loss, it's a consequence because they made repair hard.
- nobodyandproud 4y ago
  Yup. In this case, let the law prevent a certain outcome. Let the market figure out how to cope.
ornornor 4y ago
Not having easily replaceable batteries (and pardon me but I don’t consider requiring 79 lbs of equipment and a 1200$ deposit “easy”) in modern phones is akin to selling cars with the tires welded on. It is ridiculous, consumer hostile, and wasteful. Batteries are consumable, they should not be a reason to throw the phone away once they stopped working. You don’t throw your house away when the garbage bag is full or when the tap starts leaking. These are things you’re expected to replace and it can easily be done with simple tools. Phones shouldn’t be any different when it comes to their parts, especially consumable ones.
- seanmcdirmid 4y ago
  If my house was 90% garbage bag, I’m not sure. Houses get razed and rebuilt all the time, especially in Japan. They are not as modular as we’d like them to be, as I’m finding out in planning a kitchen renovation.
  - cesaref 4y ago
    Around by us in a city in the UK i'm unaware of any house that has been knocked down and rebuilt except for situations where a large house is knocked down and replaced by flats. For someone to knock down their own house to re-use the plot for a new (single occupancy) house is just not how we do things here. But saying that, we do tend to build houses with materials like bricks which are designed to last hundreds of years, and this is not necessarily how it's done elsewhere. We tend to renovate rather that demolish and rebuild. Our home for example is 110 years old, and is in a street of similar age houses. There are some missing ones down a neighbouring street, but I believe these were destroyed by bombing in WW2.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Whoa whoa hold on. You can pay Apple to replace your battery. That’s been true for years. I’ve done it with multiple phones. We just had Apple replace the battery in my wife’s iPhone SE (the original version) and it’s working great. The metaphorical tires are not welded on; you can keep an old phone going with a new battery. But just like tires, if you insist on doing the work yourself, you’re going to need some special equipment.
brianwawok 4y ago
Right. It’s the same here with hacker news people toting how proud they are of their website that only uses 2KB of JavaScript. A lot of us ignore these people and happy produce websites that use jQuery and have 10MB of JavaScript and have iPhones that are hard to self repair, and live very happy and fulfilling lives.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Some things are still smarter than others. Before the appearance of the iPhone, regular cellphones had always been consumer-friendly enough so that no maker would ever consider not having an instantly user-replacable battery. Any further migration toward the anti-reuse/anti-recycling approach so strongly embraced in digital tech by companies like Microsoft would have been immediately rejected. A battery without user access would be recognized as disposable electronics by design. People knew that something like that would be a stupid phone, certainly not a smart one. What made a smart phone smart at the time was its PC-compatibiliy, with regular removable user storage like memory sticks which you can pull out of the phone and plug into your PC to read & write directly. So there was functionally no limit to the internal storage to begin with. And advanced free PC software to owners so they could interface to the phone through its often-unique USB cable or alternatively by Bluetooth, or even earlier IR. The phone couldn't actually be used as a hotspot itself, but it would get one PC on the internet and the PC could do the rest. And that was everywhere you could get a simple cell signal, before data plans existed and for years while less-smart phones dependent on data plans were still waiting for the data roll-out nationwide to reach their neck of the woods.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> It shouldn’t be so complicated. It's not - it's Apple's way of scaring people away from repair. These tools most likely make it more convenient if you have to open hundreds of phones per day, but for a one-off repair you can get away with a hair dryer and cheap iFixit tools just fine.

sokoloff 4y ago
Just as the Porsche/Mercedes/BMW service manual is not shy about defining a service procedure that uses the best available tools, I’d expect the Apple service process to spot themselves the best available tools as well. Shade tree mechanics find a workaround in both cases. If you make a mistake with the shade tree tools, it’s on you, not the manufacturer, which feels fair enough to me.

lr1970 4y ago

> It shouldn’t be so complicated. If it makes the phone one mm thicker but you can swap the battery easily without requiring all this equipment, why aren’t we there yet? Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. Dying battery (every three years or sooner) is a powerful force making a customer consider their options including buying a new phone. This alone makes companies design their products deliberately introducing friction to the repair process (even if it their own repair process). Marketing allure is just too tempting to pass by.

ornornor 4y ago
> Because a non-replaceable battery is a great marketing tool. This is exactly why we need laws to prevent this kind of behavior. It’s against the greedy nature of companies and their desire to externalize social costs, the only way to stop this is by making it illegal.
epistasis 4y ago
This is a rather narrow view. Nobody markets the difficulty of repair, they market waterproof phones, that survive being dropped in the sink or toilet or pool, or whatever. When it comes time to buy a new battery, and the option is a $70 replacement service or 10x that for a new phone, will a $45 manual repair with a screwdriver really drive more people to replace the battery instead of buy a new phone? The idea that these processes are all driven to make people buy new phones instead of replacing batteries doesn't make much sense to me. The numbers don't really show that. And when we consider the value of being able to drop a phone in water and not have to replace it, that's pretty damn high and probably saves a ton of phones early compared to the people that were willing to do a $45 battery replacement but not a $70 replacement and instead opt for a new phone entirely.

mmcnl 4y ago

It's not complicated. - Go to an Apple Store and have them replace it for you. - Go to a third party repair store at your own risk - Do it yourself in the official Apple recommended way I'm not sure what people want. It used to be easier until the iPhone 6S, starting from the iPhone 7 in 2017 Apple started gluing the screens to make them waterproof. That's the complicating part. I'm pretty sure 99% of the customers would rather have the phone to be waterproof then easier to repair. Apple can't win here it seems.