Yeah, that's what I did. Found an unofficial repair and replaced the battery for less that $100. Anyway, I don't think it should be so hard to replace a battery. And I still remember times when I was able to replace battery manually at home.
Because the design choices are pretty easily argued to have been made for reasons other than reducing user access, but have the side effect of reducing user access. Both size/weight constraints and case integrity drive you to the same sort of thing.
To be clear, I think it's fine to call out a company for planned obsolescence, and I think it's fine to call them out for emphasizing size, etc. over user serviceability. I just don't think it's useful to pretend they are the same thing.
For many devices the devices themselves are glued making the process of just opening the case interesting and then require near complete disassembly to remove the battery.
At minimum when a device opens up and swapping the battery takes 10 seconds near everyone does it themselves. As difficulty increases the propensity of users able to afford to do so trends towards zero. Imagine if a battery costs $200 and requires $100 in labor. If the cost at purchase is 400 and the value at end of warranty is $200 zero people will ever make use of this service and every device becomes trash after the battery wears out.
Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.
> Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.
It could, but nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this, and their business strategy is openly stated to involve increasing the lifetime of their devices, so that they can deliver services to more users, so this is just innuendo.
