It doesn't though. It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste. This is the topic of the primary article, and therefore the context for this thread.
You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair.
But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.
>It fails when it comes to repairability, re-use and reduction of e-waste
Around 1.5 billion phones are sold a year. What percent of phones are thrown out due to breaking versus people want an upgrade? Then compare to the costs and waste of using inefficient assembly techniques.
It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts.
> I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills
I think this type of simplistic framing makes the discussion end, not pointing out that there are good engineering merits for using glue.
I've worked on enough hardware design that needs MIL-SPEC ratings that I know it is highly non-trivial to make things rugged. And that things like glue go a long way towards making it so.
How much increased waste would there be if phones were significantly easier to break?
>I think you vastly overestimate the number of phones that become waste due to using glue on parts.
Okay, this is your view, and we have a disagreement. We'll just have to agree to disagree :)
Also, its not just about glue vs nuts/bolts - Please consider the larger picture here about repair.
>It's also not hard or terribly expensive to get most broken phones fixed at plenty of repair shops.
That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops. They prevent replaced parts from working by employing DRM. In any case, you're missing the general point. Right to repair isn't just about phones. We're talking about a common movement across multiple industries - Agriculture, Appliances, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, etc, etc. You can find more information here - https://www.repair.org
People don't make their decisions in a vacuum. They know they can repair their laptop, their PC, their car, etc. They know this based on their experience and experience around them. We need to promote the same mindset for other consumer electronics.
In any case, any added change will force the companies to innovate their assembly technique to reduce costs - just like every industry does when there is a new environmental regulation. The reality is we are seeing piles and piles of electronics fill up the landfills, and we need to do more to address re-use, repair and extending the lifetime of devices - This is the just one component of an overall plan to reduce e-waste.
>Okay, this is your view, and we have a disagreement. We'll just have to agree to disagree :)
The number of phones wasted a year due to non-reparability is a fact, not an opinion like vanilla tasting better than chocolate.
US for example, spends around 80B annually for new phones, 3B annually for repairs, with 300M smartphone users. From this you can dig further or make reasonable estimates of a lot of behavior.
> That is not accurate, Apple for instance, chokes the supply chain by banning sale of components to repair shops.
I have family that both works at phone repair shops and that have iPhones, and they both repair them and get them repaired quite regularly. There is literally over a dozen iPhone repair shops in town, town size ~200k.
People generally don't throw out a phone because it's not repairable. They throw it out because there is a better, nicer, more featured one. And of those people I know that do get rid of them, they almost all sell to one of those places that pays you for scrap and then recycles the usable parts.
You can also weld an entire car together to make it cheaper, but this is not something we should celebrate or promote if it impacts the environment in terms of repair.
But yes, I value your opinion so don't want to shut you out of the discussion, I'm just saying there are more important things than making sure an executive at Apple or Google pockets a few more $100 bills.