There's no "too." This is the (US) price to have Apple themselves replace your battery for you with a new OEM battery, inclusive of the battery and labor. It basically represents the highest available cost.
kirklennon
joined 2 years ago
they try to create a sense of urgency to sell people what they don’t need.
Do they? Yes, they certainly advertise what's new but they're not primarily targeting customers with last year's phone. I recall seeing previously that the average time to keep an iPhone is three years. On Apple's iPhone 15 product page, I found two spots where it called out direct comparisons to previous iPhones: "A17 Pro GPU is up to 70% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12 Pro" and "iPhone 15 Pro has up to 6 more hours video playback than iPhone 12 Pro." They're targeting upgrades to the newest flagship at people with the flagship from three years ago. Of course due to the long support for iPhones, that three year iPhone will inevitably end up in the hands of another user, where it will continue to live on, so there's nothing at all wasteful about upgrading. It's not even wasteful to upgrade every single year because those year-old phones are still used. It's only when the phone is irreparably broken or hopelessly, legitimately obsolete (due to still rapidly-improving technology) that it's then recycled (and Apple has developed special robots to make extracting the rare earth metals viable at large scale).
I wonder what the latest iPhone would look like if Apple were on a once every two years release schedule instead of annual.
I think it would look exactly the same as it does today except that it would include two years' of innovations and changes rather than one, but would also mean that if you needed a new phone before its release, your only option would be an increasingly dated model. Customer: Hi, I'd like the latest flagship. Store: Here's the best technology that was available 20 months ago.
I also think it's worth noting that Apple pretty much single-handedly slowed the release schedule for phones. Prior to the iPhone, Nokia was releasing roughly a dozen barely-differentiated models per year, spread throughout the year.
A battery replacement from Apple itself for an iPhone 8 is $69. You can get third-party replacements for less. They actually offer battery replacements going back to the 5s (released in 2013) and screen repairs going back to the iPhone 6.
A decade of first-party hardware support for the most likely to fail components in a phone is pretty hard to square with allegations of "planned obsolescence."
The phone has advantages in that it’s more secure (because you’re not giving the merchant your real card number so when they inevitably have a hack, you don’t need to get your card replaced), and that you can carry multiple cards without taking up any extra space. Also, most people are playing on their phones while they wait to check out so it’s already in their hand.
Of course you can. The iPhone never lost any of the basic features of the iPod and is perfectly capable of storing and playing DRM-free music in popular formats.
How is this relevant to anything at all? If you want a streaming music subscription, you can pay for one. If not, don't. You can use any service you want on an iPhone, and you can likewise use Apple Music on an Android phone. The availability of services is just a totally separate issue.
Tell me you’ve never shopped at the market without ever telling me you’ve never shopped at the market.
I've shopped at the market many times. The main market with the produce is on a narrow strip between Pike Place and Western Avenue. Due to the slope it's level with Pike Place and above Western Avenue, but that's what elevators are for. By actual walking distance the difference between parking on one side versus the other is trivial.
Pretty disingenuous to say a person that can’t carry $400 worth of groceries shouldn’t be able to drive.
I'm saying they should drive on a street for cars, not a street for people, which is what Pike Place is. We're literally talking about parking only the western side of the market rather than the eastern side. It isn't some distant hinterland.
It will cease to be a market is my point
This is just ridiculous. It's a huge market with tons of people who walk there and tons of other people who park at the easily accessible parking garage. Telling a handful of people they can't load their purchases on a street with negligible available parking and hordes of people walking between shops (because it's a busy market) will not harm the market in any capacity.
just fill in that space with more corpo restaurants
What are you on about? Do you just want to rant about corporations? The issue is that it's in practice a pedestrian street and already filled with pedestrians, so cars should be restricted. If you ban the cars, it's still full. That's the whole point of banning the cars.
absolutely do drive through to get loaded up after shopping. Many of those customers are retirees that absolutely could not carry their purchases down to the parking garage.
Maybe we shouldn't be encouraging elderly citizens to drive through a street that is crowded with pedestrians? If you can walk through the market, you can take an elevator to Western.
The market is a very unique place and if it caters only to the tourists it will kill what makes it a tourist destination in the first place. It would become even more hollowed out as it drives away locals.
Locals are also walking on Pike Place, dodging cars that don't belong there. Making the market safer isn't going to drive people away.
It baffles me that there's even a discussion about this. Customers do not drive down Pike Place to access the market. It's already functionally a pedestrian space where occasionally some person takes a wrong turn and accidentally drives through. Vendors use it, but they arrive early in the morning before customers. It should be closed to regular traffic during normal shopping hours.
It is the literal exact opposite of planned obsolescence. Apple introduced a new feature, still present in all of their phones, to extend the useful life of old phones. Batteries degrade with time and use and, after a certain extent, are not able to maintain the sufficient and stable current levels for a phone to operate, particularly during moments of peak power draw. If this happens (and this applies to every Android phone as well), the phone will just shut itself down. Specifically it will shut down right in the middle of you trying to actually do something, since that’s what’s going to cause a spike in power demand. Apple added additional power management to iOS to dynamically throttle power use only when and to the extent needed. On a phone with a perfectly healthy battery, it’s not in use at all. On a phone that’s had years of hard use, it might still only barely be noticeable with some high-demand tasks running slightly slower or the screen slightly dimming. The worse health the battery is in, the lower its current charge level, and the greater the temporary spike in usage, the greater the throttling. Recharge it or resume less intense use and the throttling stops.
So after release (unplanned), they gave new life to what were otherwise obsolete batteries so you could wait longer to upgrade.