[microtonal]

...which is caused by making batteries irreplaceable to start with. If a phone's battery is user-repleacable, the user could buy it from Apple or any other reliable manufacturer. Now they have to go to either Apple or some third-party show who may use problematic batteries.

[rland]

If the battery was user replaceable, how would that improve the issue? If anything, it would make it worse from the standpoint of Apple’s customers getting a subpar product.

Batteries are the worst possible offender when it comes to counterfeits. If you’re not getting them straight from the source, it’s basically the wild west. I don’t order them online any more because it’s a 50/50 chance of getting a significantly worse product, even from reputable vendors (ahem amazon)

I think Apple is nudging their consumers towards getting an official replacement and honestly it makes perfect sense why they would do that in light of the market offerings.

Imagine an iPhone with a user replaceable battery. 30% of customers are gonna order the replacement from Apple anyway. 20% are going to order a mid high priced good battery from Anker. And 50% are gonna get swindled by an Alibaba drop shipper. The end result: the iPhone winds up behaving like a commodity android phone to the consumer.

[jyounker]

We in the geek community tend to forget that Apple is in the business of making reliable things with a long life cycle.

We tend to forget that Apple is the company that made the original mass-produced open platform. We forget that Apple's closed ecosystem is a response to the failures of that original experience.

Supporting the wide variety of hardware and software restricted the speed at which they could introduce new hardware and software features while simultaneously increasing their customer support costs and decreasing the perceived reliability of their products.

We forget that abandoning that open ethic is what allowed them to repeatedly capture the most lucrative portion of the consumer market for high technology products.