Honestly, with Apple making it incredibly fucking hard to take out their batteries with excessive amounts of glue, I’m okay with this.
They do, but they’re incredibly prone to breaking when you pull and sometimes they’re just hard as shit to grip so you have to use a screwdriver to twist and pull.
I don’t think I need to explain why that’s so dangerous.
As someone who has changed hundreds of iphone batteries, the adhesive sucks. At least they changed to a different adhesive around iphone 8 because alcohol does wonders on it. I don’t even attempt to pull the tabs on those anymore.
Uhhhhh
Don’t use a screwdriver. Use a plastic card if at all possible. I can’t say I’ve repaired any iPhones so maybe you can’t fit something like that in, but I’ve done plenty of Macbooks and label remover w/ plastic card = battery out in no time, with no fire.
If you can’t use a card, use a plastic spudger, like the one you get with iFixit toolkits.
Fingers crossed that this will be implemented well, im tired of having sleek electronics be irrelevant in 2 years when the silicon could go for 5 or six
The silicon could go on for decades if both the modem and processor were fully documented hardware that the community can access and support in the Linux kernel.
I can run a secure and current form of Linux on 30+ year old hardware if I want to, because the hardware documentation was expected by everyone at the time even if some end users were oblivious to what this meant. The whole reason google pushes Android is because they provide a base Linux kernel that hardware manufacturers can easily slip their proprietary junk into without requiring them to add the kind of open source code needed for mainline kernel support by the community. This is the mechanism that depreciates your device. It is totally artificial and an end user exploitation by design.
It’s usually not silicon on the PCB that fails, but the other electronic components (usually the capacitors) that fails first, and since they are surface mounted devices it’s really difficult to solder them by hand.
There are no electrolytics in phones, and most newer phones don’t even have tantalums. So long as there are no flexing stresses induced, which is nearly impossible with the way phones are constructed now, the all MLC capacitors construction has the potential to outlast any PC motherboard or laptop by a large margin.
The most critical issue is board connectors and moisture ingress. The USB-C connector or any other high pin density micro sized connector with a tiny pin pitch, and large electrical potential will fail from charge cycling and a resistance forming between pins. USB-C is particularly bad because reversing the connector doubles the number of pins on the board in a ridiculous amount of space. Just using a standard USB-C connector when ordering a prototype to be fabed at any common board house will double the price. The USB-C pin pitch is too tight for the most common fab process resolution.
Hooray! Younger generations will finally be able to experience the joy of dropping their phone and having to pick up three to four different pieces! /s
(I’m all for this change, by the way)
I was 12, I think, when I got my first phone. A Nokia. I was mortified the first time it happened. Then clack-clack-clack I was taught to put it together again.
Happened many more times afterwards.
Phones are getting more expensive so people are holding on to them longer, so it’s a nice quality of life improvement to remove the barriers to battery replacement so less people have to go down to a phone repair store to get it changed. The more of a hassle battery replacement is seen the more likely people are to just upgrade and create e-waste.
The problem here is that in order for most people to be able to replace the battery themselves safely they need to be really idiot proof. We’d need to return to back covers with latches or big screws and batteries in cases and contacts. This shit is bulky, heavy and hardly waterproof.
New iPhones use lipo pouch with a ZIF connector straight to the motherboard with a “pull to release” adhesive strip hidden under a panel with a single use sticky seal and two small screws. There is no black magic in replacing the battery yourself and the solution is small, lightweight and waterproof. However most people wouldn’t even know which way to turn the screws to loosen them and probably wouldn’t be bothered by throwing the phone away and getting the one with a better camera AI and more emojis.
@riodoro1 @NightOwl I dunno, if you compare capacities of say, iPhone 14 Pro (12.38Wh) to Fairphone 4 (15.03Wh) and then the product dimensions of the two. There’s not a huge amount in it. Adding the 14 Pro Max (16.68Wh) for additional comparisons.
The Fairphone is 2.6mm thicker than the iPhones. (Yes the screen bezels are chonk too lol) But the fairphone is also making allowance to make every single component swappable, and has an IPS display (switching to OLED would save 1+ millimeter)
Nah, the og motorola defy had removable battery, ip67 rating, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. It was a tiny phone and it was brilliant.
@Know_not_Scotty_does @riodoro1 for some reason when I was 16 I really wanted the Defy Mini (XT320)
Though it wasn’t ever cheap enough for my allowance 🤣 probably for the best, my first android smartphone came a couple years later in the Vodafone Smart 4 Turbo. (snapdragon 410 version)
Yeah, I wish there was some advancements made when it came to trying to create swappable battery devices that retain water proofing. That area has just stalled since expensive disposable tech is more lucrative. Average person should just get a new one like you said as long as the process is still more difficult than changing a light bulb.
Yeah, I wish there was some advancements made when it came to trying to create swappable battery devices that retain water proofing.
If nothing else, regulations like the one described in here will do just that. So far the tech giants haven’t had any incentive to design sleek, waterproof devices with replaceable batteries. But you’ve gotta believe that if they’re required to have replaceable batteries, they’re not going to say “OK, back to chonky non-waterproof devices for us!”. They’re going to spend some of their R&D budgets to innovate ways that makes it more realistic to do all three.
The original Moto Defy got it right the first time with ip67 rated, removable battery, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. The next major improvement came with the xperia z(or z3) and they got waterproof charge ports and headphone jacks (no port plug required) but ditched the removable battery. Every other phone since seems to have stripped away some useful feature since. The new defy 2 is going to have satelite messaging but is huge and no removabpe battery or headphone jack iirc.
[edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can’t have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].
The difference is that most of the people isn’t expected to own a mechanical watch, but having a smartphone is pretty much expected. You cannot treat a basic commodity as if it were a luxury item.
Excellent! Batteries in modern phones are surprisingly definitely removable and replaceable. I’ve done it multiple times. However, the unfriendly barrier to entry is glue and clips that require careful prying with spugers. It’s quite clear manufacturers are happy blocking you getting in; plenty people just buy new phones when the battery gets too old.
Worst was when the batteries were glued to the screen so you could break the entire phone apart trying to change it yourself.
