this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Gaskets, o-rings, and screws exist. The waterproof argument is a weak one that doesn't hold water. There's no reason why it needs to be glued together and past phones have had waterproofing with a removable back and replaceable battery.
I've had a waterproof phone with a removable battery. It's not crazy. Within the last 6 years or so even
Samsung galaxy s5 👍
Yeah I’m sure you’re more informed of the engineering trade-offs with regard to smartphone manufacturing than literally every major smartphone manufacturer.
Yeah I'm sure phone companies communicate engineering truth to us, and not what their marketing departments find most in their interest.
Of course they don’t, I’m not saying anything about what phone companies communicate, I’m talking about what they do.
The smartphone market is extremely competitive, they are very highly motivated to find the most efficient way to engineer a device that maximizes consumers’ purchasing preferences.
A world class product team produces a design that matches customers’ preferences according to world class market research. World class engineers figure out how to maximize features that satisfy those preferences. That virtually always involves trade-offs.
When one company does a better job of maximizing features that match consumer demands, their market share goes up.
When a company focuses on maximizing features that a vocal minority of users want, they struggle to move units.
It’s not some conspiracy to provide inferior products, it’s just capitalism being capitalism. Companies make what people will buy.
Marketers do not just passively give users what they already want. They also manipulate what users want. This isn't some conspiracy theory, the marketing discipline is quite open about this. When something is in the interest of the company making more profit, they convince users that it is in their own interest. This is just capitalism being capitalism. Not being able to easily replace your battery is as clear an example of such a thing as you could ask for.
Except it’s not, you just live in an echo chamber where people endlessly repeat the misconception that the average consumer as any interest in replacing their own battery. They don’t. Marketers aren’t manipulating millions of people into thinking they don’t, either.
If companies like Apple wanted to force people to upgrade, all they would have to do is stoop to the level of the competition by not offering 6 years of OS upgrades on new phones. Or they could not offer first-party, warrantied battery replacements for ~90 dollars. Honestly, apple constantly goes out of their way to make their devices last longer than the competition, and still the bigbrains on Internet forums walk around with their heads in the sand.
You go ahead and do you homie, nobody is going to be able to change your mind from something you’re so desperate to believe.
Implying manufacturers want us to be able to repair our devices more easily yet can't design them that way because of some impossible feat of engineering required to add an o-ring and some screws? Give me a break dude. None of this is groundbreaking territory.
That’s not what I’m implying at all.
Manufacturers want to give consumers a device that meets consumers’ purchasing requirements better than their competitors’ products do.
They only want us to be able to repair our phones inasmuch as consumers will buy more easily repairable phones instead of more tightly sealed phones, which is absolutely not the case. Sealed phones consistently sell waaay more than non-sealed phones, likely because they can be slightly thinner with marginally larger batteries. Every once in a while an OEM will release a phone that has a hot-swappable battery, but nobody outside of niche online electronics communities cares.
What I’m debating is the idea that there’s some nefarious conspiracy to withhold hot-swappable batteries from consumers to force them to upgrade their phones. That’s ridiculous. OEMs make sealed phones instead of easily disassemblable phones because consumers buy sealed phones instead of disassemblable ones when given the choice.
And it’s not that hard to figure out why, honestly. Personally, I would rather take my phone to an Apple Store and have them swap the battery for what I can be certain is an OEM replacement for $90 than spend $50 on eBay on a probably fake battery, take time out of my day to swap it myself, and assume the liability in the event of an improper seal. And consumer purchasing patterns show that I’m in the company of the majority of phone buyers in the US.
Give some examples of the phones you're referring to here because I'd bet you're referring to recent phones like the XCover Pro which use ancient hardware that appeals to nobody.
For 30 years, manufacturers sold phones with replaceable batteries and consumers gobbled them all up with nobody demanding that they instead glue phones together.
You claim phones are thinner when glued yet my Note 4 from 2014 is thinner than my current Galaxy S21 Ultra even though the former had a removable back and replacable battery.
The reason why they've all gone to sealed phones is because they ran out of innovative ideas years ago with the yearly release cycle and have now resorted to raising revenue by making phones harder to repair yourself, removing accessories, locking down firmware, and building them with more fragile materials. It's the same enshittification that we're now seeing in social media and streaming services. Don't fall for the marketing propaganda that these companies are pushing because it's all bullshit.
My guy, you’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and it’s embarrassing.
Manufacturers used to sell phones that you had to have plugged into the wall at your house, and consumers gobbled them up. The market has innovated, and now consumers expect something different. How is “consumers used to buy x when it was all that was available so obviously they must prefer it over y” anywhere close to a rational argument?
My claim was that phones are thinner with bigger batteries. Your s21 ultra has a 5000 mAh battery, the note 4 had 3200 mAh battery. The s21 ultra has a much bigger battery in a smaller footprint.
The smartphone market is insanely competitive, if any manufacturer were deliberately making their phones worse, other manufacturers would be capitalizing on that and taking their market share. Phones are easier to repair today than they were 3-5 years ago, you can check out the ifixit repairability scores if you want. Phone firmware is no more locked down now than it has been in the past, unless you’re specifically talking about how much worst modern pixels are than they and nexus’s were in the past. I don’t know about Androids since 2020, since that’s when I switched, but the steel bezels and flat glass on iPhones since the 12 pro make them FAR more durable than any phone I’ve used. Haven’t had my phone in a case for 3 years, and there have been a handful of times it’s fallen out of my pocket while getting into my truck. The stainless bezel doesn’t deform like aluminum, so side impacts aren’t transferred to the glass. Countless drop tests corroborate this.
You think phones are getting worse because you want to think that, despite the objective reality. You personally want a feature set that’s not widely popular, and you’re mad about it. Which I actually totally get.
So your argument is that consumers expect their batteries to be glued inside the phone because it's "something different?" That doesn't make much sense.
That's the argument you made in your previous comment, that people are buying up phones with sealed batteries because that's what they want even though that's the only option available. I'm still waiting for your examples of two comparable phones being sold at the same time, one with a sealed battery and one without and the sealed phone selling better. I suppose you skipped over that because it's never happened.
You claimed that phones are thinner now because they're sealed. The S21 Ultra is larger than the Note 4 in every dimension. It has a larger footprint to accommodate the larger battery.
Based on what? There is barely any competition these days. Two companies control a majority of the market.
So what? Phones were much easier to repair 5+ years ago. Why did you choose 2018 as your cutoff when smartphones existed for an entire decade prior to that?
False. Most phones can't be rooted these days when it used to be a common thing.
Well based on your prior comments, I'm assuming you're fairly young and didn't have a smartphone prior to sometime around 2018. I've had smartphones since the original Android on the HTC G1 and it wasn't until getting my S21 Ultra that I've had to buy a case since Samsung and Apple decided to encase their phones in glass. I'd hate to break it to you but glass is not in fact a durable substance. I still have my 9 year old plastic and aluminum Note 4 running with zero damage and it never once lived in a case and has been dropped hard enough to leave gouges in the aluminum. That isn't possible with glass encased phones regardless of how much you want it to be true. Deformed aluminum was an issue with the iPhone because they cheaped out on the materials and made them so thin that you could fold the phone in half with your fingers.
I think smartphones are getting worse because I've been using them for 16 years and can tell the difference. I'm sure if all you use your phone for is checking social media and snapping photos of your lunch for Instagram, you wouldn't notice the difference, but some of us actually want more out of a $1500 computer.
Consumers used to expect their phones to be attached to the wall with a wire, the market innovated, now their expectations are different.
… which is exactly what I just said, but you’re apparently dead set on interpreting every bit of information you run into in a way that supports your worldview, which honestly is consistent with your whole argument here.
You presumably have access to the internet, you’re capable of doing 10 minutes of research for yourself to find the numerous phones released in the past 5 years that have easily serviceable batteries. I could not care less if you do so or not. I’ve had this exact conversation half a dozen times, I already know what that list will look like. If you want to know what the list looks like, you can do the work yourself, I don’t care either way.
The s21 ultra has more mAh per cubic mm of phone, which is a more explicit way to say more battery in a smaller size. Regardless of that, the fact that you’re resorting to pedantry shows me that you know that you can’t respond to my point in a meaningful way. I claimed that sealing smartphone internals allows manufacturers to fit larger batteries in smaller form factors, the fact that a phone with a 30% larger battery is 5% bigger than another phone isn’t a refutation if that.
There’s plenty of competition globally, but less so in the US. Regardless, there was a ton of competition when smartphones first started having sealed internals. Interestingly, the two manufacturers that leaned the hardest into sealing the biggest possible battery in the smallest possible footprint are the two manufacturers that currently dominate the market, which is another point against you.
5 years was an arbitrary number highlighting the fact that manufactures are trying to make phones more repairable within the same dimensional constraints, which would not be the case if they had an agenda to force people to upgrade by making phones less repairable. Again, your only response to my argument is pedantry.
And finally, thanks for yet another wildly off-base assumption. I’m a 32 year old SWE who works in mobile app development. I’ve had probably a dozen android phones over the past 15 years. I could enthrall you with anecdotes about how much more durable a modern iPhone is than any flagship android phone that’s been made, but I don’t have to. There are plenty of reasonably high quality drop tests that paint an objective picture.
Smartphones are immeasurably better than they were in the past. They’re faster, have multiple days of battery life, have incredible displays, and vastly better software.
I am certain that you don’t use smartphones in any way that’s more demanding than the way I use smartphones, so you can take that whole condescending monologue and shove it right back where it came from.