> If the iPhone would have true user-swappable batteries, their business would collapse.
Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That's the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.
An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.
My thing is the battery timeline matches pretty closely to when I’m just ready for something new. I go bare, no case, so by 3-4 years my screen is scratched and scuffed enough to just do full replacement. I usually notice the speed leap too and how certain apps were severely unoptimized for my older device. So that’s nice too. But it’s not ever felt like a “upgrade” in a very long time because I don’t have any new features unlocked (not any that I use), so I’m my mind it’s a “replacement”.
The one consumable much harder to replace is the oleophobic coating. There are drops you can buy and apply, they seem to work alright, but don't last nearly as long as the factory coating.
By year two, the screen just gets grubbier and grubbier. By year three its just plan nasty.
If you get AppleCare+ the screen replacement is $29. I usually get it replaced right before I can hand it off to my family. It's not as good a deal obviously if you don't plan on getting AppleCare+ anyways.
I buy them in packs of 3-5 on ebay for $5-10. (no need to buy the really expensive brands) They are quick to replace, have a nice oleophobic coating on them, and can be replaced as frequently as desired.
I’ve gone back to no case since the Ceramic Shield and it’s been great. Excited for the improvements in the next model. I hate cases and will no go back.
I tried that for a while, but I find my iPhone 13 Pro Max to be easier to operate with one hand when it has a case. The iPhone is a bit too slippery for me without it.
I used to hate the cases until I recently got one that can hold my ID and credit cards. This allowed me to retire my wallet which was very much worth it. Do you still use a wallet?
That sounds good and convenient until you loose or a thief robs you of your phone and wallet at the same time in one go. I need to use a wallet because I live in a cash first country but even of otherwise I'd still carry a wallet because I don't want a single point of failure. Like what else am I gonna do with an now empty pocket if I give up on the wallet?
The other pocket usually has my car keys. For theft, I in fact rarely use my phone to pay but usually my watch. I can do pretty much anything with the watch except CarPlay and taking photos. It has its own cel connection as well.
Aside from what the sibling says regarding theft, I still use a wallet and what I hate most about the combined wallet + phone combo is the thickness of it.
My iPhone barely fits in my jeans pocket as is. Piling 3-4 credit cards and some cash on top of that is way too much.
Not surprising because only the edges of the back glass are glued for iPhone 15 so most of the surface is just floating there without support. On prior generations the entire panel is glued.
Not sure what the justification for the change would be, if anything it does make changing the back glass much faster as there is no need to scrape or laser blast the entire surface to remove all the adhesive. It would be interesting to see if this is also the case for the 16th gen.
I’ve had the 15 Pro since launch day, and it is incredibly durable. No case, no screen protector. The screen is slightly scratched around the edges, there are a couple ~1mm^2 dings in the titanium, but aside from that, no problems. I’ve dropped it probably a hundred times, including probably a dozen or two on concrete or tile. The titanium (and whatever they’re doing with screens these days) really makes a difference.
My phone has a couple (literal 2) scratches slightly under the notch bubble, that I am fairly certain were caused by laying the phone face-first on a desk that had some kind of dirt on it, and removing the phone by sliding it off the desk (rubbing the dirt against the screen, causing the scratches). The rest of the main screen surface is pretty much scratch-free, and only the corners and edges have notable scratches (from inserting and removing the phone from my pocket - the corners pretty much always catch on the metal rivets on my jeans). I don’t keep anything in the same pocket as my phone though.
The reason screens scratch more now than in the past is the tradeoff between shatter resistance and scratch resistance. Generally speaking, it’s very hard to make glass that is both resistant to scratching and shattering at the same time - you can trade off one for the other, but you can’t have both. (Of course as material science progresses the baseline improves - I’m talking about a given point in time at a given price point). In general, it’s much easier to live with light scratches in a screen than with a shattered screen, so the majority of mid-to-high-end phones make the trade off to favour shatter resistance over scratch resistance.
Next time you’re on public transit, or in line at a restaurant, or somewhere else people frequently use phones, take note of how many have cracked screens. Compare that to a decade+ ago where it was fairly common (for me at least) to see broken phone screens. Obviously anecdotal, and could be due to a number of compounding factors, but I very rarely see broken phone screens these days.
> Next time you’re on public transit, or in line at a restaurant, or somewhere else people frequently use phones, take note of how many have cracked screens
Cool anecdotal evidence, it does actually seem to be correct based on my experiences as well.
Though imo a screen protector is very little price (in terms of losing out on stuff, not monetary wise) to pay to have that scratched instead of the screen.
I think it depends a lot on how you handle your phone. I used to have screen protectors, which would always end up scratched, coming off, etc. It was a total PITA to replace them. The last one I had was on my iPhone 7. Took it off for the last 4 years of use I've got out of that phone. The screen is still like new. For mew new phone, I didn't bother with a screen protector. It's a year and a half old now, and no scratch to report.
Weird. I get no scratches either. I do try and keep my keeps in an opposite pocket, but not always and this year as my place has been under construction, the phone has shared the pocket with all sorts of metal screws, bolts, junk, etc. still nothing.
Obviously anecdotal but yeah, this is by far the most durable phone I’ve owned. My 11 was the first I went caseless with, and it got pretty beat up in the first year. My 13 Pro was better, but still worse for wear after a year. The 15 Pro is probably in similar shape compared to the 11 after 3-4 months, and I have not been careful at all with this phone whereas with the 11 I most certainly was.
A few years ago I cracked my iPhone7+ screen in several places (dangerous to use any swipe features) but I wanted to wait the few months until the next iPhone revision so I just put a screen protector on it and honestly, it was quite usable. I even skipped the next refresh because you could hardly tell it was cracked with the screen protector and using the phone through that - it felt almost new.
Interestingly i felt like my last replacement was actually a downgrade.
Had the X (10) for years and it was great and compact but the face-id broke, upgraded to the 13 (because i didn't need anything in the 14/15) and now i have a phone that's too bulky, and not as comfortable to hold.
The X was simply thinner, more rounded and a way better experience, also i feel almost no difference doing day to day stuff.
I too prefer the more rounded exteriors. It feels better in the hand. I think it's just a cyclical fashion choice, was an adjustment period when it was iPhone 3 (rounded) to iPhone 4 (squared) too and it more noticeable when not cased.
It's interesting that you perceive the X to have been thinner. It's actually very slightly thicker (by 0.05mm) than the 13. The 13 is longer (by 3.1mm) and wider (by 0.6mm) though.
Same and totally agree with the timeline. This is the first time I have gone 3 years though and the screen hasn’t cracked, the back hasn’t cracked, the battery life is decent. These features the last 3 years haven’t sold me. I’m not spending over 1k, at least on launch day… for the first time in a very long time
Agreed. Apple phones are quite repairable (just not DIY-able), no one is dropping 1000 dollars on a new phone because their current one has a cracked back glass.
Watching their live feed, one of Apple's selling points on such an expensive phone is that it will last a long time and have a higher re-sale value than other phones. It's not a case of planned obsolescence.
There are absolutely cases where they have artificially gated features to new devices, even when the hardware is capable (I'm thinking around Handoff/Continuity, etc.). Where the initial reaction is "maybe it's a new BT chip or ..." but it can be shown that the functionality is perfect when some trickery is done to fool the OS its running on more modern hardware.
This is a consequence of Apple’s deeply ingrained (and hugely successful) product design culture.
When you’re trying to develop a vertically integrated feature across a synchronized release requiring potentially new silicon, a new device, new OS frameworks, new app code… you have to express your requirements precisely. Either the M1 is being designed to support three displays or it’s being designed to support two. Not “as much display support as we can squeeze in where performance is still OK end-to-end”. By the time you know if end-to-end looks good for all the features you built up depending on lower layers in the stack, it’s too late.
You’re also likely not to trust “hey, seems like our tolerances were excessive and it works great on older hardware”. And building up that trust is time-consuming and difficult, so they rarely go back to do it without a strong market justification. Stage Manager being the most recent—somewhat odd—example.
They originally claimed it was going to be supported only on the most recent SoC’s, then backtracked.
Which is weird because who really cared about stage manager? I guess they decided the media kerfuffle was making owners of unsupported recent hardware feel put down.
There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.
There are cases, but credit where its due, I think they are generally very generous in bringing new features to older devices, compared to plenty other companies that basically forget about they ever released another device the moment a new one drops.
E.g. the apple watches really “inherited” a good chunk of all the new features to the point that there are several versions that are basically identical. Like, I have the 6, and besides the on-screen keyboard (for which I guess the screen was too small based on their testings) and temperature-sensor reliant features, it does almost everything the new 10 will be able to do.
Eh, sometimes. Other times, a newer piece of internal hardware has no new “feature” but just works better and has fewer failures. This is particularly true with every kind of wireless networking, including Bluetooth. It may work, but not have hit the quality bar.
Almost anything can kinda work on older devices. But lots of little details make the difference between a good experience and a poor one. Which simd instructions did it support. What’s the battery impact on that BT chipset. Did the ANE support NN layer style X?
Apple has a great track record of brining new features to old hardware. I don’t see example here or elsewhere that I think were purely greed and not quality driven.
Unless I'm mistaken, stage manager requires running 5 apps simultaneously when iPads were previously limited to 1 or 2? That includes 5 render pipelines (way more pixels to push than exist on the physical display). There would be hardware load on pretty much every key piece of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory, caches, disk), and by a non trivial factor.
Same reason. Rendering more apps at full screen in real time takes a ton of GPU. Adds ~5x the pixels, and 5x screen scale transforms+effect. All the optimizations for “that’s hidden”/“that’s background” go out the door.
Apple also has to develop technology at their own pace. I used to get an iPhone every year. Eventually it stopped making sense and I just now had to check to see which one I had .(14 Pro)I remember noticing a big difference when I bought this iPhone with the camera.
I know whenever I upgrade it will always be to a current state of Apple”s art because of these incremental consistent upgrades.
I”m very tempted to buy a new one. The last time I waited till it broke to upgrade.
Having replaced the screen, battery and home button on my 1st gen iPhone SE myself I can confidently say that Apple do not make these easy to repair yourself, and arguably make it more difficult to drive business for their own repair service. Lots of tiny screws requiring particular tools of different lengths that can't be mixed up, lest you permanently damage the phone. Glue that needs to be carefully removed or you risk dangerously damaging the battery. Just look at their repairability scores on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... .
Repairability was bad but has gone up a lot, they did a big internals redesign for iPhone 15 to make it easier to swap batteries and replace screens. Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved. Most people struggle fixing big things, let alone sub-mm precision things. But this helps the 3rd party repair shops a lot.
And at the time they were comparable to a flashlight in terms of complexity, not running AAA games with raytracing and a camera pipeline of untold complexity. It’s almost like having anything this complex working requires insane engineering and miniaturization, this is not due to “planned obsolescence”, especially if you take a look at the second hand market. No other brand has even remotely similar resell value.
Assuming those prices are correct and the procedure is that convenient, it doesn't practically exist if most people aren't aware of it. From my casual observations most people suffer with bad batteries until buying a new model.
At what point are people responsible for their own actions or ignorance? Apple hardly makes the battery replacement option a secret, and there are plenty of 3rd party retailers that advertise them too. Anyone who bought a new iPhone because they didn't realize they could get the battery replaced has failed to do even the most cursory research into what options are out there for solving their problem. It would be one thing if we were talking the 1st generation iPhone days, when the "battery replacement" option was the usually "out of warranty" device replacement that was effectively Apple's entire repair process for the phone at the time. Then your "battery replacement" costs were ~50% of the cost of a new phone, and that definitely gets into the "buy a new phone instead of replacing the battery" territory. But the ~$100 battery replacement option has been around since at least 2010[1], now 14 years later there's no excuse for not being aware, or becoming aware when you need it.
My SE battery will cost $80 to replace, but since I only paid $120 for the phone it's not a good deal. I'll just wait a bit and get another used SE for $120 when the battery life gets too annoying. I doubt that many other customers are ignorant or irresponsible.
You can google it, go to the website, go to any of their stores or authorized dealers, or click the link the phone gives you in the battery health view.
Short of apple beating down your door, what more do you expect
It's a psychological game. People are primed to want new things, and more investment into something old is hard to justify even if it's financially right. Also OS's lose supprt, softwares bloat, and bundled offers from carriers are toward replacement. You'd have to be really disciplined to not succumb to upgrade pressure when you go into an Apple Store of all places where the entire setup is to generate sales.
An Apple Store is one of the least sales oriented retail environments. You can go in and play with stuff for hours, chat with people who work there who can’t even make sales, and drop things off for them to repair. They don’t even have cash registers in most of them.
Most of the time I go into an Apple Store I don’t buy anything, and I’ve never gone in and bought something that I didn’t plan on buying before I arrived.
Of course they gross more money than a jewelry store. That sounds impressive, but really isn't if you think about it. They sell very popular items that almost everyone in any mall in the country owns some version of that people WANT to buy every few years at most(computer, phone, headphones). Jewelry stores sell items that a lot of people will never own, and they sell items that people might buy every 5 years if they are really good customers.
The phones and software don't stop working when they aren't supported anymore. They just don't get more free updates. You can keep using the device in perpetuity with the same software that you have on it right now. Its a relatively recent phenomenon that the OS and all updates are free.
You used to have to pay for the OS on your hardware at each update. If I wanted to go from OSx Tiger to OSX leopard on my first Macbook, it cost me $99 at the time. That computer still works fine with Leopard. It does everything Apple said it would do when they sold it to me. Why would I be entitled for it to do the things that the latest macbook does?
Again, the phone won't stop working. It will still do everything that it did the day you bought, and in many cases more. It will connect to any 2g/3g network that you subscribe to, and connect to any server that operates on the same protocols that existed on the last day it was supported.
You can't blame Apple that network and site providers don't continue to provide service, anymore than model T drivers can be upset that their local tire store doesn't stock tires for their car.
How is any company supposed to provide updates in perpetuity for technology advances that wasn't even planned at the time of purchase.
The fact that Apple has teams of developers providing free seamless updates to my iphone 11 from 6 years ago is a modern miracle. What other item in the market can you expect the maker to provide free maintenance and functional improvements for years after purchase?
I am not blaming Apple. But I am saying that older phones will stop functioning as phones eventually.
Apple isn’t supporting older phones out of the goodness of their hearts. The larger the installed based, the more they can sell you. There biggest revenue increases are coming from Services
I agree with you, the fact that they are providing security updates for a phone that came out in 2015 as a recently as two months ago is remarkable
Were you around during the first 17 years of personal computers?
A computer from 1986 would be useless in 1996. A computer from 1996 would be useless in 2006.
Computers were getting so much faster so fast back then, that obsolescence was really a big deal.
There is physically no hardware support for 32 bit software on modern iPhones. Do you suggest that Apple still supports 32 bit iPhones and 64 bit iPhones?
Would third party developers want to support phones back to the iPhone 6 that is 6x slower and has 1/8 the RAM of a modern iPhone?
Should Apple support phones like the 3GS that doesn’t support LTE and has 256KB of RAM?
They do. You're notified when battery health is either unknown or reaching EOL. It points you towards replacement, not upgrade.
"If battery health has degraded significantly, the below message will also appear:
Your battery’s health is significantly degraded. An Apple Authorized Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity. More about service options…"
Apple provides a warning and a link to battery replacement options from the Battery Health screen when it detects that it's been degraded too much. So... they do provide this?
The battery gets bad after 4 years. That’s usually the moment I want to buy a new phone already, why invest $99 in a phone that I won’t be using in a year? Better deal with a bad battery for a few months or a year, then already go on and buy a new one.
I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery
>I never heard of someone who bought a new phone _solely_ for a new battery
I did.
I had a Samsung Galaxy s10e, and I have an s23 now, which I got on its launch. The only reason I got a new phone is because they don't have legit batteries to replace my shitty s10e battery in my country of residence (very shitty European country). No Samsung support, no iFixIt (they don't ship here), nothing. Just shady shops selling shady batteries.
I preferred the smaller size of the s10e, and software-wise it did everything I needed it to do. Plus I didn't have to rely on Bluetooth earbuds when I need(ed) to wear some earbuds.
Oh, and the battery has gotten noticeably worse in the past year and a half, and the _only_ reason why I will buy a new phone in a year, year and a half is that I know for a fact the battery life will become (even more) unbearable, and there aren't any official/legit channels through which I could replace the battery.
I know I'm talking about Samsung, but the same would apply to Apple here, and any other brand.
If this wasn't an issue for me, I could see myself using the same phone for 5-6 years, probably even longer if set up lineageOS on it -- but after +5 years I imagine I would like to use some new phone with its "new" features... which I will likely never really use in the first place
One problem with extending life of your phone with lineageOS is trouble using banking apps on a rooted device. If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko or similar but sometimes there will be some stubborn apps
> If you are lucky you could get it working with Magisk/Shamiko
It's a lot more nowadays. Magisk, lsposed, play integrity fork, shamiko, trickystore, custom keybox.xml, zygisk next... and with news of google now forcing certain apps (eg. chatgpt) to be installed from the Play Store + the device being of at least DEVICE integrity it's slowly all falling apart.
I don't understand this. Why not trying the "shady battery" for cheap before buying a whole new phone? Even if you somehow don't trust their batteries, I see s10e batteries on ebay for ~10€. Just buy one of those and have them install it?
Every device I've ever wanted to keep after its battery started degrading (mostly laptops, but has happened with a phone too) I've either ordered one from ebay and replaced myself or went to a cheap local shop.
I've had friends take their phones in for a battery replacement, and let's say the results were not better than before they took their phones in.
As with buying a battery from ebay, it's still not gonna be an OEM battery (or am I wrong?). OEM stuff is more important for phones than for laptops, I have found
$16 doesn't sound huge to you because you are living in a bubble.
It is for everyone that has is bank account in the red for half of their month. Which is a lot of people regardless if they live in a developing country or not. And those that can save money do not necessarily save money for a smartphone. They do it for their own financial safety. Even the streaming accounts are usually shared accross friends and families and said services don't crack down on them because they know they would simply lose their customers completely anyway. They would rather keep money in case their home need a reparation or their car they are using to go to work break down.
So when the time comes that their phone has issue, many of them are faced with a non scheduled financial issue. They will definitely repair their phone if it is more affordable than buying a new one. No wonder their are lots of repairing phones shops in every city. Where I live you can literally see a queue on the sidewalk during the opening hours. The alternative would be buying a second hand cell phone with the risk of ending up with one whose battery is already in average conditions.
> That's $16 per month. Easily affordable for most of developing world.
This argument sounds a lot like a used car salesman.
I think focusing on the monthly payment is deceptive. Especially with a device like a phone which could easily meet its doom before the 5.2 years used in your calculation are up.
It's reasonable to compare the total cost of ownership or the up front price. Your choice is a $1000 phone or (say) a $600 phone (new iPhone 14, no tax). There's $400 difference there. That's your money making the choice.
The question of whether it's worth it is something else.
$16 a month is close to the cost of financing a basic motorbike over its expected lifetime. People in developing world mostly drive 125/150 cc and expected lifetime is ~10 years
If you look up battery health and it shows as degraded (or you follow the notification to get there), it gives you support options to schedule an appointment or send it in for repair.
I’ve never seen a literal “this product sucks because I refuse to learn about it” given as an explicit argument before, usually it’s just implicit, thank you for this
The issue is probably chips or cracks on the back glass or sometimes the front.
They almost didn’t work on my daughter’s phone because of a tiny nick on front corner for fear of it spiderwebbing when they opened it. And some phones broken back glass is game over since it’s all glued to that surface.
Most people will refuse to go to the doctor when they have serious symptoms themselves. I don’t think stupid/lazy human behavior can be blamed on apple.
The Pixel 6 was one of those awful designs where you have to go in from the front and risk damaging the screen in order to get to the battery, it's no wonder getting it replaced was expensive. That price has to factor in a potential screen replacement if they mess it up. Thankfully later Pixels can be opened from the back instead.
> An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
I've done four or five battery replacements on various Pixel phones, each time battery was 15$ max. I've done the replacement myself, but I know that in an (unauthorized, obviously) repair shop the work costs maybe 10-15$ and takes twenty minutes. The math is the same for iPhones, maybe 10$ more.
I really don’t like this “unauthorised” language - when you change light, washing machine or the whole kitchen in your house, so we cal it ‘unauthorised?’ Both are your property
And sometimes they rip the display cable while they’re trying to swap out the battery, and you end up with an entirely new SE2 in the end. Happened to us about 1-2 months ago.
Last couple of times I have done this, I used Apple’s online system to schedule the battery replace at a locally owned Apple dealer or at the nearest Best Buy. Same price and warranty as at the Apple Store. Turn around time was 2 hours.
Lucky you. I would need to drive to another country for an Apple store... And I don't live in Third World either (theoretically), but in Central Europe.
> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.
Apple's business model partially depends on selling people a new phone every few years. If people switch to battery replacements in place of new phones in large quantities, that is going to significantly hurt their business model.
That’s not an accident, they spent a lot of effort building up their portfolio when this trend was obviously unavoidable. They’d love it if you buy a new phone every year but they’re almost as happy if you keep the same phone for 5 years, buy apps, and subscribe to Apple One. One of the really big questions is what impact the EU DMA will have on this strategy: a lot of what’s kept them ahead of Android on things like CPUs is the geyser of App Store cash stabilizing revenue for long-term commitments.
Interestingly, it was recently revealed that 22% of their services income is comprised of payments from Google to keep their search engine as the default in iOS / Safari. Soon to disappear given the antitrust case.
If this becomes the dominant source of revenues, it makes sense for them to make the phone more repairable and to have a longer lifetime - but then this dominance have to really show, otherwise it is a future revenue instead of a present one.
To note, that's a regional thing. It seems to stop at gen2 for Asian countries for ex.
> Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years
iPhone batteries become subpar way faster than that, especially the older models who get more strained as they bear the heavier OS. Once every year and a half looks more realistic to me.
FWIW I got a launch iPhone X I gave to my dad with original battery now at 73% health, OLED screen burn in, and a broken charging port (wireless charging still works), and he’s still using it as a daily driver lol.
So while batteries certainly can go subpar faster, they can and do last much longer sometimes.
I also babied it and rarely charged above 80 or fell below 25, which may have played a part but who knows.
Most batteries are made in China (or even cheaper places) now, so they simply do not last. I have iPad 2s that still last for MONTHs without charging. Nowdays iPhone batteries start heavy degradation about 2 years in. That 20-25% loss means all day battery to needing to charge at least once before going to bed for many.
Source: I replace more batteries now than screens.
To go for the official rating, up to the iPhone 14 it was 80% of the original charge after 500 cycles [0] and got improved (1000 !) later.
500 cycles can be a lot if you mostly keep it as a standby device to stay reachable, but not that much if you actually use the phone everyday.
That's less than 2 years if you completely drain the phone at least once a day. Our kid easily goes through two full charges in a day, especially on weekends. It really depends on what you use your phone for.
Also I think some people live with a < 70% battery without really minding it much. That's IMO only viable if you don't have a winter, where the battery efficiency becomes so worse. That's the combination of weak battery + poor weather that triggered the phone shutdown for me when BatteryGate was the rage.
I use an iPhone SE2 that I got refurbished in the past 6 months by Apple. I couldn't replace just the battery, because the rear glass had a crack in it. This thing is a mess, refurbishing it feels like a waste of money. It runs out of battery almost daily, has terrible multi-second camera lag when I open the camera app from the lockscreen. Often the phone will just have like a quarter second of UI lag for no obvious reason. The experience is overall very slow and frustrating, an enormous degradation from when I got it as a gift 4 years ago (part of why I'm still using it).
It's a shame, because I like the phone a lot otherwise.
On the battery thing, that might depend how much games are run on it. We hand down devices, and replace the battery if its life is below the 70% mark so to somewhat refresh the device. The SE 2nd gen we handed down already had two battery replacements at this point and I'll probably ask for a third before it falls off the support list.
On third party repairs...it's sure getting better, hopefully in other regions as well.
You missed the user bit of what you're replying to.
There are android phones that have this ability, I have one. New batteries are ~20 bucks, and they take about 5 minutes to swap, most of which is shutdown/boot time. I can take my phone out innawoods and use offline GPS all day, and as a flashlight at night, by just bringing a pocketfull of batteries.
When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.
What that means is, I get a new phone when apps stop working, and I use very few apps, so, that's been 5+ years since I adopted this model. It'd certainly be better for the environment and better for the consumer if manufacturers were on-board with this idea, but, it'd be far worse for their margins, so, these devices only exist on the periphery.
That said, I do think that Apple could make this work for the masses. Simply pair the batteries with the phone, keep everyone in the walled garden, don't allow 3rd parties in willy nilly, and then charge more for new batteries. That that system and spin the hell out of it, make android/google/et al look like evil megacorps filling the earth with chemicals leached from 1-time use android phones, and call it a day.
"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about it.
The latest generation devices are mostly "don't have to think about it" on batteries.
> New batteries are ~20 bucks
Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
I want real ones from a real company spending real money on R&D, that I "know where they live" if it's a problem.
Speaking of quality, I can use current iPhone off grid with offline GPS all day, and use it again the next day — without taking any battery packs.
The new "max" devices clock effectively two day battery life if you are conscious of what you're using it for (say, camping out off grid instead of doomscrolling Insta, for instance). I find even 3 or 4 sometimes if you're not picking it up and are in low energy and low data mode. Definitely 3 - 4 if you shut it off while asleep. It's nuts.
> Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car.
You see sir, when manufacturers compete on price we call that free market, and when you try to stop that we call that overregulation or protectionism.
But when talking about apple we suddenly call it ‘counterfeit’
Regardless of safety/counterfeit, you do realise that the OP has like 2 weeks supply of batteries for camping or apocalypse, and if ‘off grid living’ is your use case, it’s a slam-dunk?
For camping and off grid living, recharging spare LiPo batteries via a ribbon cable or contact pins sounds like a massive pain in the ass. Give me a standard USB C based power bank, the thing that Solar Generators and many panels have supplied connections for, and can be used for any USB C device. Plus the phone never has to be opened and be vulnerable to ingress of moisture or debris.
And for apocalyptic scenarios your LiPos will naturally degrade collectively together in a few years even if they sit unused. An external battery with a more stable long term chemistry would be better.
Back when Samsung phones had user replaceable batteries they also sold separate battery chargers. This was super convenient because I could just grab a fresh battery from the charger on my way out the door. No need to carry a separate USB power bank. And moisture wasn't a problem, they had water resistant models. It's really a shame that phones have gone backwards in that area while advancing in most others.
I have little battery dock things, really dumb devices, but, USBC goes in, battery docks in, and it slow charges in about 8 hours. I've got 3 of them.
Also if you're talking about the world being dark for 3 years, not sure batteries are the thing to stock up on friend. We'd be well into mad-max mode after a few months I'd think, and after a year or so of that, well, nothing's going to come back for a good long time.
I'm much more concerned with making it, say, a week without being able to charge, which, I can easily do without thinking too much.
I can also go several weeks off grid with literally any phone, a moderately sized power bank and a 40w solar panel hanging off my pack or over a tent without thinking too much. It's far more versatile for powering other devices and I never have to reboot my phone. If you want to carefully buy stuff you can even get a fully IP65 rated or better setup, which makes it actually survivable to the elements.
I can't see how juggling internal batteries is anything but the worst possible option. I can upgrade or replace any one component without obsoleting the rest. How many future phones will accept your stockpile of batteries?
For the little bank, something like Anker Solix PS30 Solar Panel charges like a wall wart with just a couple hours' midday sun in northern U.S. or southern E.U.:
North of 40th, combo can get us through strings of rainy days off grid while not thinking about it.
To cost less, on Alibaba you can match case style, plug placements, and feature/functions to find the same OEM models as well-known portable power and solar brands for a fraction of price if one doesn't mind ship time.
* That said, this is all one's power eggs in one power basket. To your point, a bag full of batteries means one can fry half a dozen and still have a few juicy eggs to suck dry, but don't lose tools or phone bits and bobs on field replacements and one will still want a panel or two to top them off!
Sure sure, and I lose the ability to keep a phone going 6+ years because the battery is glued into the case. So I'm making 3x the e-waste for... really nothing honestly.
In terms of power banks, I'm currently hoarding my friend's disposable vapes which all have fairly high output LiPO batteries in them. All I need once I'm done harvesting is a few 3D printed parts, a aliexpress BMS, and some wiring, and I'll have way more capacity than I know what to do with for very, very cheap. BMS is the most expensive part really, the rest is a few bucks, and, if I kill a cell, well, there's an abundance of disposable vape batteries available.
>you do realise that the OP has like 2 weeks supply of batteries for camping or apocalypse, and if ‘off grid living’ is your use case, it’s a slam-dunk?
I will admit, the main bottleneck is that I only have 3 battery dock chargers. So unless I'm planning on needing it, half of those batteries are charging or dead at any given time.
I'd bet I could be camping for a month or so with the batteries I have if I really put my mind to it.
To others' point here, they even make solar topped rucksacks now. One of those, feeding a powerbank, and you top off your trailmap-photo-gps-emergency-sat-beacon gizmo on walkabout, no fiddling.
>"The masses" do not want to carry a bag of spare batteries. The masses don't want to have to think about it.
False, most people I know are already doing this, they're just doing it with a big lithium pouch cell coupled with a BMS/charge controller called a "battery bank"
>Gotta love those after-market or counterfeit high density inflammable energy packs crammed against your body or the bagful of 9 spares left in your car...
Never had one pop, never left anything lithium powered in a car. A black car on a very hot day in a very hot region can reach ~160f, which is hotter than the recommended storage temp of lithium batteries. Most places with a non-black car won't get hot enough to be a problem. Lithium batteries are fine to store up to ~140F. Do understand that the air in your car being 160f doesn't mean your batteries are, just that they will be eventually. How long is eventually? Ultra-situational. Put your batteries in a cooler, you're probably good forever. Put them loose on the dashboard, probably not good for very long. Same thing goes for your phone, or anything else with a lithium battery. They're not the boogyman, they're not magic, they're subject to the laws of thermodynamics just like everything else.
The reason for caution really is that you don't know the condition of your batteries. They could have been damaged but still function just fine until you put them into some marginal condition and then they're very not fine very quickly.
That's not specific to the batteries I carry in my backpack, that's the battery in your iphone too, and a quick google for "iphone battery fire" is proof of that enough.
That said, if your iphone sets your pants on fire, what're you realistically going to do? Sue apple? You know, the multibillion dollar a year company with so many lawyers that they have them setup in a huge building all their own? Good luck, you have exactly the same amount of recourse I do, ie, none. You also probably have auto insurance, and renters/homeowners insurance, so, it burning down your car/house/etc is well covered at least.
>effectively two day battery life if you are conscious
What people actually don't like doing is being forced to be 'conscious' of their devices. They don't really even like having to charge their devices. Throw a small standby battery in an iphone, have it pop the back off, swap in an iBattery that lives in your iBattery dock (which is also insulated and keeps your iBatteries charged up), and you're off to the races. Apple could make this a really good system.
They won't, because they exist to be as anti-consumer as possible while not pissing them off so much that they look elsewhere because that's what is profitable.
> most people I know are already doing this, they're just doing it with a big lithium pouch cell coupled with a BMS/charge controller called a "battery bank"
Precisely. That means you can "not think about it" 4x as much as without it. One of those with USB-C in and a solar charger has gotten us by off grid for years, as well as perfect for long haul travel. No five minutes replaceable mucking about needed.
It's one thing, not a bag of 10, it packs slim, won't slow you down on an all-day all-night "Midnight Madness" scavenger hunt in NYC, and won't get you pulled out of line at the aeroport.
I wouldn't want to backpack with it to be honest. In my car? Sure, why not have a cooler sized battery with some solar panels, perfect solution really.
Also never had trouble flying with batteries. They're always in a ziplock and tossed into a bin, then back into my carryon. You can't check anything with a lithium battery, or, you're not supposed to at least.
> When a battery goes bad, I toss it in the recycle bucket, and buy a new one. I currently have 10 of them and they're on rotation.
not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.
I’m sure it’s very convenient and granted everyone needs batteries, but still, “they fail and I throw them away and buy new ones, I currently have 10” is objectively insane and I have to think that buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
“I said it sounds like he’s just feeding e-waste to landfills and hackernews started crying”
maybe think about buying some 18650 batteries and a power bank or something, idk. You can get cold-weather 18650 cells which improve outdoors performance a lot, and good quality 18650s last a half decade or more.
Really disappointing how right to repair just turned out to be a fashion accessory for most people, and the actual boots-on-the-ground aspects like oem parts availability and not using disposable junk batteries didn’t sink in, people are literally happy to have a backpack full of 10 Amazon batteries they change out every 6 months if it means they get to bash apple and feel smug about it. The discussion around usb-c vs lightning went much the same way - people were exuberant at the prospect of filling the landfills full of discarded cables (on a port that's been around for a decade), as long as they were the right cables. People bashed the self-service/OEM parts availability for being some kind of plot or conspiracy. People bashed it because the OEM factory repair tools apple will rent or sell you are too big and clunky.
There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles, independently of some of the fandom and some of the actors involved with R2R with their own personal foibles and financial interests. Specifically thinking of component-level repair as not being in the interest of certain major backers of R2R, for example. There should be an accounting of what the actual cost is for that decision, vs the aspects of R2R increasing the churn on these essentially-disposable amazon batteries and other junk and so on. Those things need to be attributed in the total lifecycle cost too, if bunches of people keep doing the same thing you are that's a real social problem. Ten batteries, and I just swap them out when they fail and buy new ones to throw away. One of the most polluting and dangerous and toxic parts of the phone. Good lord.
I hope you are at least sending them for proper disposal, but even that is not currently even close to full recycling efficiency iirc.
>not to pick on you but it’s baffling the way some people clothe themselves in right to repair and then bust out some shit like this. this is absolutely insane from an e-waste and frankly just regular-waste perspective.
It's a lithium recycle bucket at my local library. I'll admit, I don't really know what the service is that they use, but I do assume that those batteries are getting turned into new batteries somewhere. They could end up landfilled though, your guess is as good as mine. I'm not really sure why you thought "recycle bucket" meant "where the aluminum cans go"...
>buying shitty non-oem batteries is a major part of why you churn batteries so much.
Funny enough, the OEM batteries are LION, and the replacements are LIPO, so, the replacements actually have a fair bit more capacity than the originals, at like half the cost. I've only replaced 3 of them in 5 years, and I bought 10 when I bought the phone. I do have a couple I have sharpie'd red because they are down on capacity but still usable, but they still get me a full day without any drama. That's my benchmark for replacement, if it doesn't make it a day, into the bucket it goes, and back to amazon for a new one.
Something you're missing though is, I can get aftermarket batteries for my phone, and, I have at least 3 different designs in my possession, so, there's good competition in that space. It's china-based competition, but, it seems to have yielded good results here.
Do understand that, I'm likely keeping this phone 2-3x as long as most people keep their phones, basically until an app I use stops working because the android version I have is too old. So maybe I go through a few batteries, but, I'd end up doing that regardless. What I don't go through is any of the other components, so far less waste there. Not why I do it, but, a nice side effect nonetheless.
>There really, really ought to be a real attempt to account and attribute some of these total lifecycles
I couldn't agree more honestly. I think the 2-3 year phone churn is absolutely abhorrent for many reasons. I also think $1000+ phones are equally abhorrent given their lifecycle, and how features continue to be stripped out of phones and sold as features. Sure, consumers are of middling intelligence (objectively), that doesn't mean companies aren't also a little evil. I also don't think that the current incentive structure is going to allow for any of that to change, no matter how well presented any argument to the contrary is. You effectively have zero competition in the phone space, because they've made it intentionally difficult to switch between flavors of phone. That alone should be a multi-billion dollar antitrust lawsuit against anyone who does it.
Then you can go after things like glued-in screens and soldered/glued in batteries and charging ports that are PCB mounted to the mainboard. Get rid of those things and you probably wind up with something that'll last a very, very long time. You also probably get rid of incremental tech improvements altogether because they won't be worth the R&D dollars. Hard to tell what the unintended consequences of that would be.
Battery replacement costs at Apple are $69-99 and offered all the way back to the iPhone SE 1st Generation. That's the all-in cost where you bring it in, they open it up, swap it out, and give your phone back to you.
An OEM battery for an Android phone is like $50.
Budgeting $69-99 once every 3-4 years hardly seems like it's going to nuke their business from orbit.