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A new smartphone again? Rethink unhealthy culture of frequent upgrades
(www.straitstimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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its not some conspiracy. the more complex, durable and water proof a phone is, the harder its going to be to repair or replace a component or battery. the nice thing is that now that the technology is mature and basically good enough to do anything fairly well, people won't need to upgrade for tech or feature reasons anymore. Now it will just be a trade-off between durability and water/dirt resistance, and repairability.
Also, people have no clue how to care for batteries. phones get left in hot cars at 100% charge, left in the sun at the beach at 100%. There is no BMS or hardware battery protection mechanism that can protect against that. Those batteries are fucked and will need to be replaced. And replacement means breaking the water seal around the phone, so it's annoying and expensive. it's just the way it is. you are responsible for your battery, and the better you treat it, the longer it will last.
That waterproof/durability argument doesn't really hold up. We had waterproof, durable Android phones with user replaceable batteries a decade ago. They were made primarily of plastic, and had a nice thick gasket around the battery cover.
That's part of the problem with all these phones made of "premium" materials like glass and titanium. They serve no functional purpose, they only make the phone more expensive and less repairable. And of course, both of those things are great for manufacturers that want to sell you a new phone when you drop it ONE time and the glass front and back crack.
Back when I had a plastic phone I didn't even use a case, I beat the hell out of it and it never broke, and I replaced the battery myself in thirty seconds.
I laugh at the stupid titanium thing on the iPhone. It's such a stupid marketing ploy by Apple. Like, it's impressive of course, from a manufacturing and engineering point of view, working with titanium is always difficult and challenging. But Jerry Rig Everything disassembled the thing and the titanium is a 1mm veneer around the border of the phone. It has absolutely no structural or protective function at all. The frame is cheap and reliable old aluminum. And the titanium is covered in a disgusting plastic coat that peels and scratches just as easily as any paint over aluminum or plastic. It's such an obvious scam made to justify overcharging for a boring, dull and standard phone.
We have had watertight user serviceable with external batteries handheld amateur radios for decades. Your arguments are baloney. Phones are only this way because manufacturers want them to be this way.
but they are nowhere close to as thin, and nowhere close to the same complexity