With the sharp rise in iPhone theft from gangs shipping them to China, I’m not in favour of forced policies that make it easier for thieves and the criminal gangs to replace components. Who is this really inconveniencing anyway? Portable charging bricks are now affordable and slimline, the worries of losing battery and the phone dying are not what they used to be.
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Report: Apple Planning to Debut New Battery Replacement Method With iPhone 16
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Even disabling all of those extra functions leaves a phone that can’t last a fraction of the time a Nokia could go.
Good luck finding yourself in the middle of nowhere with a smart phone these days. Send a message via satellite before the battery goes.
well, don’t drop it in the toilet. I’ve never dropped anything in the toilet except for what it’s meant for.
Why would you be handling a spare battery over the toilet anyway 🤔
A bit bizarre
Isn’t it interesting how much better the battery suddenly got when it helps Apple?
I'll believe it when I see it from Apple. Apple is probably planning on some new method that will require you to buy a $100 one-time use tool to do the replacement. Yes, they will conform as long as the user has to pay twice the money for the conformance. When did apple become so user un-friendly?
You should realize this isn't about swappable batteries, but easier to replace batteries when your battery starts to go bad.
The iPhone has never been user serviceable. In fact, the first iPhone had the most difficult to change battery since you had to solder it to the mainboard. That and the case was ridiculously difficult to remove.
It wasn’t even that long ago that we had easily replaceable batteries in smartphones. Then all these companies realized they could gouge more money out of us by making it as difficult as possible for the average person to do it so we’d have to send the devices in to have it done.
The fact that one person equated piecing together IKEA knock-down furniture with repairing a smartphone, clearly demonstrates that at least one person should not attempt to repair a smartphone.
I know this is a hard concept maybe a panel in the back that swings open and you put double A batteries inside
I wonder why Apple isnt putting solid state batteries on iPhones? Wouldnt it double (or maybe even triple) the battery life???
Because nobody has the ability to actually manufacture them close to the scale that is needed for flagship smartphone quantities, let alone iPhone quantities, for a profitable business line.
That is, until maybe now with some of the breakthroughs Apple battery partners are touting…
Pretty much never is old tech better than new tech. All you folks that want old tech should just stay with the old stuff.
Get real. Bizarre is wanting to go back to Nokia days. I have used cell phones since the first huge ones. Each generation has been better, period.
And all those came with tradeoffs of their own, namely structural integrity, plus batteries had to be smaller.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to individual rights vs collective rights.
Yes, Apple could make every phone modular and repairable, but if only a very small percentage of users actually wind up making use of that opportunity, this just means that the rest of their user base is basically paying extra and taking on all the drawbacks of all the additional tooling, supply chain etc needed to enable this. It's like saying that maybe 1% of smartphone users will actually need removable batteries, which means that 99% of users have to deal with the downsides of smaller batteries (and consequently, less battery life), vs simply putting a bigger battery inside the device and calling it a day.
Even if I belonged to that small group of users who may want such a feature, I would take a good look around me, and decide that it's simply not worth it for the cost of a global increase in cost, energy use, pollution and so on. Yes, I am disadvantaging myself, and that's what it means to live in a society where I do not view myself as the centre of the universe. Not everything is about me.
Apple's position right now seems to be to remove as many moving parts from their devices as possible, thus minimising the number of things that can go wrong with them and drive that repair need to as close to zero as possible. It has been their focus for well over a decade, and it also means that it may not be worth worth it to support global repair efforts on a societal level.
It's also no surprise that the criticism Apple has received comes mainly from people whose financial and ideological goals are at odds with that of Apple's (namely iFixit and Louis Rossmann). It does mean the latter is wrong, but I also kinda see why Apple is trying to go with all of this, and I am not really opposed to it.
This is also why I have always had issues with the whole "You don't have to use X feature if you don't need it" argument, because it assumes that every new feature does not have its share of tradeoffs and opportunity costs. It's the case for expandable storage, it's the case for third party app stores, it's the case for running macOS on the iPad. Engineering simply does not work the way you think it does.
Like I said at the start - individual vs the collective.
Amen. Thank you for pointing this out.
I've had my macrumors account suspended for less than this.
You do realize this was a joke and you are taking this far far too seriously.
But people do appreciate those older phones and dumb phones are actually getting popular again.
Because nobody has the ability to actually manufacture them close to the scale that is needed for flagship smartphone quantities, let alone iPhone quantities, for a profitable business line.
That is, until maybe now with some of the breakthroughs Apple battery partners are touting…
So they can produce enough of them for cars but not for iPhones? An EV probably uses 1.000x more battery cells when compared to a phone.. maybe 10.000x??
Sorry, I saw no lol or /s tags. I seemed to me an argument was being made for old-style removable batteries, which I oppose for engineering reasons.
As to your claim that "people do appreciate those older phones and dumb phones are actually getting popular again," then a market should develop for them. But from me no thank you. If I need more battery capacity I will choose an add-on battery pack from the hundreds available.
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EV battery cells an entirely different form factor, let alone not solid state….do you understand anything about the battery manufacturing industry or process?
Why do people assume you can just have or throw a **** ton of money at something and that magically overcomes chemistry, logistics, engineering?
These breakthroughs are coming…as soon as it can be done for profit at a scale that makes the capital expense worth it.
Wrong. Today's builds developed for engineering reasons such as the below [first written many years ago in response to similar wrong-headed thinking then]:
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Y'all need to do some engineering homework before assuming. User-removable batteries are flat stupid from a cell phone design engineering standpoint. There are reasons that iPhones dumped that idea long ago:
-dirt, water entry;
-tolerances to suit the inevitable 3rd-party battery suppliers;
-repairs needed thanks to the inevitable crap 3rd-party battery suppliers;
-safety issues thanks to the inevitable crap 3rd-party battery suppliers;
-extra volume and weight needed for modular battery access, and needed in a single large rectangular spot;
-added expense/weight building a module to accept removable batteries and the necessary complex electrical connection;
-existence of readily available third-party add-ons for those customers who need additional battery without forcing all customers to accpet the downsides of removable batteries.
Bottom line is that user-removable batteries are simply less-good design.