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> 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 t
by 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 agoThis 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.