They are replacable. It’s cheap to replace them. They just don’t have a user accessible hatch.
I wouldn’t want to have a battery hatch and perhaps worse water sealing, just so I could change a battery myself instead of paying $20 for it once in the lifetime of a phone that is maybe $500 to $1500 to buy!
Sure if it came at no cost in terms of size, weight, price, waterproofing etc then sure. But otherwise I’d rather just pay the cheap replacement once after 2-3 years.
If people throw away their phones because the battery has gone bad, I think it’s because they think it’ll be expensive or impossible to change it.
I just replaced the battery in my iPhone a couple months ago. I ended up paying Apple over $300 because the glass on the bezel had a small crack on it and they wouldn’t touch it unless I replaced the entire screen too. It’s not “just $20” to replace an iPhone battery.
Especially considering that a battery replacement at Apple is around 75€. While thats a lot cheaper than buying a new phone as soon as the battery goes bad, its a lot more expensive than opening up the cover of your phone and simply swapping the battery.
A few years ago I had a LG G3 with a removable back. It was a great phone, but had quite a few problems. One of them was a non-oled QHD panel that drew the battery like crazy. I just bought another battery for 15€ and swapped them when necessary. That was a lot more convienient than carrying around a bulky USB powerbank.
Of course, that is a very specific problem to have. But having a user-removable battery is still one of the things I miss the most from older Android phones.
Apple might be stingy about conditions vs warranties (understandably). But you can always go to a third party. Your warranty isn't much good anyway if you have damaged it I'd assume.
I meant the work portion of the cost, (at a third party if required e.g. because apple don't want to touch it) is probably around €20.
Honestly surprised that Louis Rossman hasn't been mentioned yet. If you need an iDevice repaired, he's a good guy to handle them, and some of your proceeds will likely be spent fighting for right to repair legislation.
It depends on the store and the device. Some stores—especially the smaller ones—don’t necessarily enforce every policy. Bigger stores, stores with stricter management, and stores that have encountered problems in the past are likely to give you a hard time.
That’s parts and labor. I think GP is talking about labor.
And I remember having a feature phone with a replaceable battery. Often became difficult to find a new battery after they stopped selling the phone. So if you think the lack of a battery is the only reason you’ll stop using your old phone? You’re probably only gonna get another year.
Yeah I want to use it 1-2 years more, I’m not a power user and it’s still a perfectly fine phone, runs really fast and gets updates, so why throw it out?
Also as I said below if you replace the battery yourself TouchID will stop working as the security chip thinks the phone has been tampered with, so if you wanna keep using that there’s only the official route I think. Not sure about FaceID but it might have the same problem.
What I’m saying is that you’ll probably only get one year, because at some point before you’re done, you’ll get a new battery, that gives you two more years, but then the battery will Be discontinued in the interim. If you’re anything like me, your battery starts getting janky you’ll look half heartedly because you have time, and by the time to you really have to have it you can’t find them. So then you’ll limp along for a little while on the old one and give up. And batteries don’t have a good shelf life like say your favorite discontinued keyboard so you can’t just stockpile.
(Which is a whole other story that lead me to now own three of them even though I can only use one at present.)
My 13-year-old did it on his iPhone SE with a little help from me. Hardest part was getting the old battery free of the adhesive gluing it to the case. He wouldn't use the hair dryer long enough to make the adhesive more pliant and ended up twisting and yanking the battery free.
I put the old battery in a bucket on concrete overnight because he thought he might have punctured the envelope and I was worried about it catching on fire. No problem recycling it.
It was about $20 for an Amazon battery kit that came complete with tools. Had 20% more charging capacity than the original (when it was new) and my son is very happy with the result. Earphones worked fine, screen worked fine, etc.
I bet that was a learning experience for him. The first time I ever opened an electronic device, I broke the digitiser cable on my friend's 3DS after it got dunked in the river. But since then I've opened up stuff loads of times to repair it, without issue. Sometimes because I'm just curious.
Beacause then you know that the battery is actually good, not some refurbished old battery with patched firmware, or a cheap knock off that’s going to lose half of the capacity in a month, if not outright explode on you.
DO you mean "why get an official battery" or "why do it at a certified store"?
For me I'd do it at the store because it's the only way to make sure you get a good battery. Most cheap batteries are crap (or at least you won't know if it's crap until it's too late).
If it was possible to get a battery that was 100% known to be original, and I could save a few $ by taking it to a corner shop to have the work done, I'd definitely do that for a phone out of warranty. But in my experience this just isn't possible (which is perhaps a better complaint to direct towards apple than the battery hatch complaint: I want to be able to buy original parts in any shop anywhere).
I don’t know if there are any user-visible side effects, but the phone does knows the difference between official and unofficial batteries. Here’s a photo I took of my iPhone 7 showing the internal battery stats immediately after an official replacement during the discount program a couple years ago: https://i.imgur.com/Wo5fSFj.jpg
Thanks. I am not looking to jailbreak yet, so I will have to forgo acquiring these stats for now. I have Lirium Lite, which also does not show the internal stats past iOS 10, due to restricted API.
Because the phone itself is still fine and works really well, just the battery doesn’t hold a full charge and doesn’t deliver the full output current anymore.
Now I can use the phone for another 1-2 years which is great. I love the form factor as well and right now Apple doesn’t have anything comparable, but I hope they’ll make a small phone again.
Also, the unofficial replacement is not that much cheaper, you get a no-name Chinese battery (which is often worse than the original and more dangerous) and it might break things like FaceID/TouchID because the security chip will be reset and the non-official repair shops don’t have any means to reprogram it (as far as I know).
I don’t think so, I think the battery might have a one year warranty but it’s considered a “wear part” like a tire so I don’t think you can get a free replacement if it wears out in an expected way.
It's utterly trivial to engineer a waterproof phone with a user-removable battery. It's not remotely difficult. I have about a dozen watches that are seriously waterproof; I can change the battery in any of them in 5 minutes.
There's only one reason Apple batteries are not user-replaceable: Apple makes more money this way because it encourages people to buy new phones.
If a phone would be 1mm thicker when having user replacable battery, that means the manufacturer has given up the opportunity to use that 1mm extra thickness for battery capacity. Which is the same as standby time, or performance.
Watches usually don't have a problem with cpu performance/standby time so it's perhaps not a good comparison.
They make the phones thinner presumably because people want thinner phones.
They want to be as thin as the competition. And as fast. And have as long battery time. And they are all related obviously.
They kind of are, but the relationship is the wrong way around. Thinness is inversely correlated with battery life, a thicker phone has room for a bigger battery. Thinness also constrains your heat dissipation options, making it more difficult to drive the CPU/GPU at high clock speeds.
My phone lives, alone, in my left front pocket. I'd much rather have the benefits of a thicc phone than maximize thinness.
Vehemently disagree. A $700 phone should not be thrown out or need a paid repair when a battery, hopefully cheaper than the vendor's battery can be used to replace. You don't need an ugly hatch, you just need a removable back.
You can use a third party battery in your iPhone. Thats what you get when you get a $30 replacement.
My point is this: the cost of the repair is smaller than the cost of the battery regardless of whether you use Apple or a third party for both labor and parts.
If you aren’t looking for a big waterproof hatch with a cartridge behind it then I too agree that if the number of steps would be smaller then that would be great. I have tried it but I still rather pay $10 or $20 for someone else to do it.
Your prefernce is fine. This is about rights -- the right to not need the vendor to repair your own property. They intentionally made them very hard to repair so you need them, you need their stores.
I was trying to say I would rather pay 5x more to do it myself. And if it was not for their intentional sabotage,there is no way having them repair it would be cheaper. There will always be cheaper lower quality batteries from china,not needing specialized tools also means $0 labor cost!
This is one of the main reasons I hate(and I don't mean that casually) apple as a company. How dare they tell you what you can and cannot do with your own property? How dare they sabotage their products so that customizing it in any way or in this case even repairing it becomes difficult,it's your property now,not theirs! Imagine getting takeout food where adding salt would ruin or poison the food because the chef wants to control your ability to customize the food to your taste! Intentional sabotage should carry a severe legal penalty. Property rights matter, the right to sell a product to consumers however is not a right but a privilege companies like apple enjoy by the good will of the governments that represent the people.
Not sure if we are discussing different things: I absolutely think people should have a right to repair their things. I don’t think that means manufacturers should be required to make it easy. I don’t buy that Apple has deliberately made it difficult to repair. It seems to be pretty similar designs across many smartphones from multiple manufacturers. I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, I think it’s the design you end up with if you weigh all parameters (cost, durability, performance, thickness, battery capacity, repairability ..) and simply rank ease of repair last. It’s what customers want, I guess.
Apple should repair devices (including replacing batteries) for free within the warranty. When the warranty period has ended Apple should a) ensure people can get original parts if they want, so they can repair whereever they want and b) make sure that people can repair their devices in any way they want, forever, without it behaving worse than if Apple themselves repairs it.
Those are really independent of whether or not these replacements involve 4 screws and 3 steps (great) or 20 screws and 44 steps (bad). I don’t want to pay a penalty of even 1% performance weight, durability or cost to get the simpler repair, so long as it’s a $20 job, that’s all I’m saying.
99% of users of course wouldn’t repair the phone regardless of whether the procedure uses 4 tiny standard screws or 40 screws requiring standard tools. The former would just let their unofficial repair guy do it for $5 instead of $20. This is why I think it’s not a very important question.
There are a many other more important questions in the area, such as for example the stance on third party batteries, and whether it’s acceptable that some features are disabled when repairing (e.g touchID).
If the battery is bad while there is still warranty then Apple should replace it for free. If it deteriorates later than that (much more common) then you have no warranty anyway!
Things that can be actual issues:
- Apple not providing batteries and making the use of third party parts a worse experience
- Third party repairs having side effects such as touch-ID not working.
It’s fair to argue that Apple should make products that can will be serviced for free by them during the warranty period and then they should be serviceable by anyone and keep full functionality.
If having a user-removable battery makes my phone not water resistant, then I don't want that. I have never had an issue with an iPhone battery. As things are, the battery is replaceable by any skilled technician so the cost of having it done is low. Perhaps they could enforce a standard battery form factor, if that.
The Samsung S5 is rated IP67, resistant to 1 meter of water for 30 minutes. The iPhone 11 Pro is rated IP68, resistant to 4 meters of water for 30 minutes.
They're also four to five years apart, and IP67 was more or less top-of-the-line during the time when most smartphones still had replaceable batteries.
Also, this entire argument feels like it's getting way too much significance. It's definitely doable, even with IP68, there are tons of replaceable-battery-operated waterproof devices out there, this shouldn't be a reason.
> even with IP68, there are tons of replaceable-battery-operated waterproof devices out there.
Buyers would also rather keep the solid slab with no hatch form factor, than see the phone be 2mm thicker I assume. A lot of other devices don't have a size budget that is as extreme as a modern smartphone.
Put the other way: a slightly bigger phone (because of some separating compartment, gaskets, battery in a plastic cartridge and so on) could instead have been a solid slab with a slightly larger battery, so several hours extra battery time or higher performance at the same battery time.
Personally, I just want water resistance for protection against accidents. I'm careful, but I've spilled a drink on my phone. I know people who've bent over and had their phone fall out of their pocket into water.
I don't trust water resistance well enough to intentionally get the phone wet. But I do think it's probably good enough to greatly reduce the odds of damage in case of an accident.
AFAIK, the key difference is that Apple did it depending on the age of the battery, and not the amount of charge left in the battery as is done in the cases you describe.
That, and also that they were denying it, yes.
EDIT: And since the battery is non-replaceable, basically that also means with age of phone it just gets slowed done. Did/Does Apple kill the throttling if the phone is on the charger?
Yep, but I spent $79 three times before they admitted the problem after threats of a class action lawsuit. I was not refunded the difference and expect future problems to continue to require threats to rectify with little hope of refunds.
Just like the $29 aren't really the true costs, that was a marketing scheme to soften the blow from the negative publicity of battery throttling.
Point is: It costs Apple more than $29 to replace a battery and not make a loss while doing it.
So ok, a battery won't cost $6, but a technician's replacement usually won't cost $29, either.
That means, the true costs are more likely to be $20 vs. $50. (And those $50 are brutally cheap, what are they paying their technicians?)
EDIT: FWIW, a "sketchy" replacement battery for the Samsung Galaxy S5 costs between 7-15€ on the German eBay. That was my reference, I don't use Apple products.
Are there "even" any examples of Android phones with user replaceable batteries that are comparable to current iPhones. I.e, with same/similar IP-ratings, similar battery capacity, similar ish power consumption, similar weight/thickness, similar screen size etc.
I think a smarter legislative move would be to enforce cost and accessibility measures for replacements, then manufactures could decide on the trade-off between design and cost.
E.g if EU said that all (new) phones could have their battery replaced for 30€/3% of purchase price/something else, within $arbitrary days, Apple could do that instead of making their phones (in my view) worse, while lower-end Android vendors without service infrastructure could make their phones thicker or less waterproof with an old school battery.
There are no high end phones with removable batteries.
Today, the closest would the new Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro, but they it is in a completely different market. The iPhone is a high end consumer product while the XCover Pro is a mid range rugged smartphone.
For a more relevant comparison, we have to go back to the Galaxy S5 (2014). It was a flagship and IMHO, a very good one. It had a removable battery, IP67 rating, and was on par with iPhones specs-wise. The main downside was its look, and it is probably the reason why Samsung switched to an all glass design.
I agree. Legislate the requirements, not the implementation choice.
Otherwise, you unnecessarily constrain people from coming up with the best solution. Product engineers then basically have to follow a design concept created by people who aren't trained in that.
Though I do understand how legislators might fear that if they only specify requirements, industry might act like the proverbial genie who grants wishes exactly as asked or even intentionally in the worst possible way.
So if the EU is so worried about planned obsolescence, are they going to force Android OEMs to match Apple’s support when it comes to iOS upgrades on older phones and security patches on even older phones?
The iPhone 6S released in 2015 is still running the latest version of iOS. I can replace the battery and still get a fully supported phone.
The fact that Apple releasing new phones every year is considered “planned obsolescence”, when they’re still providing support for them 5 years down the road, for free, when android phones are shipped without even the current OS let alone any updates is absurd.
Are they also going to do something about planned obsolescence in cars? New models of those are released every year, they stop getting free service after a year...
Actually it’s longer, not only does the latest iOS run on the 2015 iPhone 6S, Apple released an update to fix some bugs July of last year to devices that go back to the 2011 iPhone 4s.
Maybe this is yet another example of why it’s crazy to want government intervention of tech when politicians don’t understand the issues.
While I fully support right to repair, hack and alter - I really think this is design decision that should be owned by designers and not politicians. There are N number of devices without removable batteries and there are M reasons why designer might not want them. Politicians should just ensure that manufacturers must respect the right of customer to open the device and alter it in anyway they see fit.
design decisions come from marketing, not designers. Replaceable batteries are as much a business/product strategy decision as it is a design decision.
I wish people who want to design iPhones would apply for jobs with Apple, supplying a design portfolio showing relevant competence, like normal sane & polite people – instead of attempting to use state power to impose their product preferences on others.
A user-removable battery imposes a significant cost. As devices get smaller the cost is correspondingly higher. Adding a compartment means extra weight to strengthen the device. Plus a cover strong enough to keep out water.
Then the battery itself needs to be encased to protect it, lest putting it in your pocket causes a key puncture that sets your pants on fire.
Those costs are mostly fixed and would be a larger proportion of the overall thickness and weight in a modern phone.
It also means you can't use a split battery, L-shapes battery, or exploit any other spatial dimensions to pack in more battery... at least not to the same degree.
Is having half the battery life, or a phone 60% thicker worth it?
I don’t really want a user removable battery and make it less water proof. The devices are pretty good and last several years if the batteries are well taken care of. I’m also fine with Apple replacing the batteries with its own certified batteries where I don’t have to worry (much) about the quality or longevity or even stability of the power source.
The bigger issue with all lithium batteries on devices is that even third party replacements are available only for a limited number of years. I’d rather have Apple and similar companies be forced to provide paid battery replacements for longer than their self-defined device obsolescence cycles (which are quite short for phones, tablets, and even for laptops). That’s how you can make sure that devices remain (kinda) usable for the long term, even if they’re handed down to someone else.
If Apple is indeed forced to do something, I’d rather have a better way to load apps outside of the App Store and increase competition for Apple.
Please keep in mind E911 "pinging" is being abused and even being sold as a service. There have been malware that turn off the screen when you hit power and simulate a shutdown/startup routine. So long as the battery is plugged in a mobile phone, regardless of the OS, is a device that can be used to listen in on conversations,record video,location data and much more from gyroscope,accelerometer,wifi and more.
Please don't say to yourself that you would never care. If you don't care for others who have a legitimate need to fear for this then don't you complain a word when they come for you and you are forcibly put in a situation where either the authorities or someone with money is using your phones against you.
I hope all countries that call themselves free pass legislature to force user accesible battery removal or hardware kill switches.
Five eyes wont like it to be so easy to disable your tracking device. Removing the battery or other kinds of signal blocking is the only way to know it's off / not transmitting
Possible for short periods, but unreasonable for all of life. Also privacy is a right and I shouldnt have to discontinue the legal use of something in order to avoid tracking.
Some people's job requires them to have a phone on them, should they have to choose between a job and privacy?
>Some people's job requires them to have a phone on them, should they have to choose between a job and privacy?
How would being able to take out the battery help? I don't think your boss would be pleased if you were on-call and your work phone's batteries were taken out.
With Note 4 battery replacement took 10s and involved popping the plastick back off the phone.
Tangentially, changing a H7 lightbulb in my Ford involves taking out the front harness and the whole reflector - meaning light realignmen at the shop is needed. Replacing the car battery is even worse, cant imagine doing it myself. At some point some manager must have invented a user story "as a user I want to spend €500 in car service to change the battery instead of the usual €0".
An original battery change (at an apple store) in expensive Sweden is €77 and that's for the new/more expensive models. Previous models are even cheaper than that. Buying an original apple iphone 11 battery is almost that much for the battery alone (if you can find one). Quick googling shows they are around €70 though it's hard to say how "original" a battery really is online.
So you really aren't paying much for the replacement work itself and that's what matters. One needs to factor the battery cost out of the cost of battery+replacement to discuss the benefit of user replacement. You can buy third party batteries for as low as €30 for some models and you then have to replace it or find someone to do it. No matter how you do, you'll likely never be paying more than say €30 for the replacement (work). and this replacement service is something that is needed either zero times or once for a product that costs around €1000 new.
I had a tailight go out, it's new enough to be led, with a built in circuit board, so as it was extensively corroded, the whole module had to be replaced for about $200...but also lots of interior trim had to be taken apart to get access which the dealer would have charged me hundreds for. I think the 12V battery is probably not hard to physically replace, but I believe the electronics are locked to genuine batteries in some way.
I was recently reminded how in the US, car headlights used to be standardized. When I was a kid, even though I was fascinated with cars, I never really noticed it. But then we gave it up, and now there's tremendous flexibility in styling, but at a large cost. It really is valuable for government to force standards on people, even if there is a tradeoff and they can overdo it.
You can replace the battery on your iPhone. It's just not user serviceable.
And Apple has for the last few years been focusing on improving the performance and stability of older phones in order to sell services. So your planned obsolescence remark doesn't really apply any more.
Tricky question. As an extreme example, Is it as morally wrong for a homeless mother to steal baby food from a convenience to feed her starving baby vs a rich kid stealing from a store to impress his friends?
That’s a wide difference. The other phone companies aren’t equivalent to a homeless mother wanting to feed her baby. Or any one who is homeless.
If you had done something of a middle class vs rich person. Or a homeless vs in debt and barely living paycheck to paycheck person then those would make more sense. And in those cases. The morals are close to the same for both scenarios.
By that weird logic, better their battery than their entire phone battery included.
In France any store selling electronic products is mandated by law to accept your used batteries and electronics, and I'm sure most of europe has a similar thing. So this is neither better or worse in any way on that front.
Yeah, its the EU Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive. For any item covered by it made after 2005 it's the producer or distributor's responsibility to recycle it.
> In France any store selling electronic products is mandated by law to accept your used batteries and electronics, and I'm sure most of europe has a similar thing.
So what do they do with the batteries and electronics afterwards? Do they ship them to a developing country to dismantle and dispose of properly?
Yes. If you have a used phone with a dead and non-replaceable battery, you're gonna invest at least half of the amount of money to make it operational again compared to buying the cheapest new smartphone available (assuming your average Joe goes to a shop to service his phone).
If all batteries can be replaced by the consumer, all that's left is the cost of a new battery itself, which makes that used phone very much an attractive option again, since it now would cost only a fraction of a new phone to make operational again.
A new battery is $40-80, say. If the phone would have a hatch your cost of the replacment operation itself would be $0, and for a current iphone the cost of the replacement is maybe $20. I don't see how the $20 makes the difference between very attractive to keep and not.
Replacing the battery for a phone here in Germany would set you back about 50-100€. A somewhat usable smartphone costs 85-115€. Hm... I'd rather get a new phone.
If I could replace it myself, I'm quite sure I'd find a no-name replacement part for a maximum of 20€ on eBay. Hm, I'm sticking with the old phone for now.
A replacement at an apple store in Germany is €55 [1]. That will get you an original battery that is probably at least €35. So they are probably charging around €20 for the work alone.
A guy in the street will sell you a third party battery and insert it for you for maybe €30 or €35 total. Depending on how much you could buy the third party battery for yourself, you are paying maybe €10 or €15 for the work there.
So what we are discussing is really this: is it worth changing the design maybe making phones bulkier, less waterproof etc, in order to save a €10-15 (third party) to €20 (original) expense that happens once?
> A replacement at an apple store in Germany is €55
Yes, for the older models (pre iPhone X). Every upcoming iPhone is likely to fall into the 75€ category.
The main drawback however is the availability of the Apple stores. In Germany in total, there are only 15 Apple stores. For me, the closest store is 300km away. So, driving is not really an option just to get my battery replaced, if I'd send it in for repair, this can take up to 5 working days, so at worst, thats 7 working days without my phone (assuming shipping takes one day).
I usually do it via my carrier which has stores in every shopping mall. They'll lend me a phone while they send mine away for repair. It's a hassle but it's better than nothing.
For my old phones (which are still in the pre-X category) I just get a repair at an unofficial store at €30 or €35.
The battery is removable, you just need a screwdriver.
This seems like a bad thing, any changes to make battery replacements significantly easier will almost certainly come at a significant cost. And in any case, it’s already really easy to replace the battery if you can get your hands on one.
This guide suggests 44 steps. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+11+Battery+Replacement/1... I think one could use a/the screwdriver as opener or instead of the tweezers lately but replacing the battery is not something everybody can do. Compared to how easy it was 10 years ago to swap a battery.
Everybody who buys a $500-1500 phone can pay $20 at a corner shop to change a battery. A battery hatch to make it completely "end user replacable" won't make any difference.
At least here in Australia, corner shops doing repairs are a dying breed - there's no money in it once you factor in rent and electricity and wages. An online search replacing a popular Samsung was $AU99.
My current 3 year old phone is also a dying breed where when the time comes, I can buy a genuine Moto battery for $AU16 delivered and replace it myself in under 30 seconds.
It’s not easy at all. While I successfully managed to replace the battery in my 7+, it was a total pain in the proverbial.
You need three different, weird, screwdrivers, have to keep track of many different tiny almost-identical screws (say goodbye to your motherboard if you get them mixed up), and prise off a very fragile connector.
That’s aside from the fact the battery is glued so firmly that there’s a good chance it’ll go up like a firework while trying to get it unstuck.
I think you kind of hint at interesting point: given how last few generation of iPhones are constructed (and that most current android phones take similar approach) it would be actually not that hard to make battery truly user replacable without any form factor compromises. Just replace the two screw-like pins with something that can be removed with some sane tool (think SIM ejector) and not glue the battery in place inside...
Or just ship the screwdriver with the phones? Unfortunately users performing their own battery swaps will tend to lead to compromised waterproofing, which doesn’t seem great.
Instead of forcing companies to make removable batteries. Slap on a 20% tax to companies that have batteries that don't retain 80% charge after 4 years. If the device is to new to have real world testing, company can forgo the tax by allowing free battery changes for 4 years.
Batteries retaining 80% capacity after 4 years of use is defying the law of physics? I am pretty sure battery longevity isn't constrained by physics. Lithium batteries in the Tesla last more cycles than the ones in your phone. Why because, Tesla warranties the battery for 8 years. Cell phone manufacturers just need the battery to last 1 year so they don't care.
And for people who downvote me, the reason we removed mercury/cadmium from batteries was during 90s government threatened to heavily tax batteries. Car industry in EU is also heavily influenced by penalties around gas mileage.
The difference is that Teslas are much much larger than a phone which gives ample room for advanced cooling systems which prevent the heat buildup that kills lithium ion batteries.
The only way to get a similar number of cycles with a phone battery would be to put a large heat sink and possibly a fan on the phone’s SoC and battery or to permanently throttle the SoC so that it never gets hot, even when all cores are maxed out. Essentially, the choice would be a brick-like phone or a phone that runs like it‘s a decade old. Neither seems like the sort of compromise consumers outside of a small niche would buy.
Of course in the future we may see battery chemistries that aren’t so sensitive to heat, but no such battery is on the market currently.
Well, I imagine you can always improve that statistic by simply making the battery, say, twice as large and not using most of the capacity. I recall reading that Toyota did that to make the Prius reliable and long-lived.
It would be a valid objection to ask if that is really advancing environmental goals, I suppose.
I wouldn’t want to have a battery hatch and perhaps worse water sealing, just so I could change a battery myself instead of paying $20 for it once in the lifetime of a phone that is maybe $500 to $1500 to buy!
Sure if it came at no cost in terms of size, weight, price, waterproofing etc then sure. But otherwise I’d rather just pay the cheap replacement once after 2-3 years.
If people throw away their phones because the battery has gone bad, I think it’s because they think it’ll be expensive or impossible to change it.