[avar]

One reason screens don't break as easily as they used to on modern phones is because they tend to have a sturdy metal frame that the screen and backside are glued onto under tension.

This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.

I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.

Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50.

You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great.

Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.

[qes]

> I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.

It's much easier to find the replacement part for the phone - as long as it's not more than maybe 5 years old - then it is to find the replacement part for the washing machine.

That's been my experience, anyway. Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.. but I don't have much problem finding anything else I ever want to buy on the internet.

[dragonwriter]

> Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.

Usually the manufacturer has them, though they may optimize for selling to service professionals, and these days there tend to be third-party sellers more focussed on consumers, as well (and you can often get parts on Amazon.)

IME, getting the right part number is often the hardest thing, though usually docs available from the manufacturer (even for units no longer sold) can be downloaded that provide this, and lots of time searching by description and appliance model can find the part, too.

[avar]

> Usually the manufacturer has them

My experience with this has been terrible for e.g. circular saws & power drills, to name one example.

I had a part I needed for a Makita circular saw & Black & decker power drill. In both cases buying every replacement part would easily cost 10-20x of the retail price of a new saw or power drill, compared to maybe 1.5-2x in the case of a modern phone. The aftermarket for OEM car parts is similarly brutal for most manufacturers, but for some happy reason phones are the exception.

[sudosysgen]

That happy reason is Chinese knock-off factories, which can make anything from knock-off screens to main boards, sometimes recycling some chips. If you were to go to China, you would often be able to buy every replacement part for more or less the going price of the phone.

[avar]

Yes, that's what I'm saying. That you're not going to easily find replacement parts for your washing machine, but you will for your phone.

[obmelvin]

> I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.

Can I ask what phone(s) you are talking about? I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 recently, and maybe it was just early in the evolution of these designs, but putting the screen back on with the sealant ring was the easiest part. Personally found it much harder to break the adhesive - definitely the longest step, but this was my first modern phone battery replacement.

[avar]

I repaired a Nokia 8.1 and a Xiaomi Mi A2 recently. I used the (commonly used) B-7000 glue for both. It takes up to 48hrs (or more) to fully dry, I didn't wait enough so I think it dried pretty loosely on the Nokia 8.1. As a result the screen broke soon thereafter. Went better on my second try.

[ses1984]

I think 70s-90s appliances are a lot easier to repair than phones, you usually can source the parts from a local electronics shop, and they don't require the dexterity of a surgeon to work on.

[avar]

How do you source those parts? Figure out which part of the main board of your TV amplifier burned itself out with an electric meter, oscilloscope etc., and know enough about electronic repair to source a replacement resistor, capacitor etc.?

Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.

My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.

Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.

[ses1984]

I had a phone with a broken part, I went through two $45 parts before giving up and writing off the phone as a total loss. The part had a ribbon cable that you needed to thread through a hole in the case and I ripped the cable on both parts.

Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.

[fsflover]

> I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.

Do you also think that Fairphone is “a lot more bulky” and “missing the mark”?

https://fairphone.com

I think that Apple simply designs their devices with planned obsolescence for more profit.

[samatman]

I don't think that's true at all.

My mother inherited my late-2014 iPhone 6. It still gets security updates, although it won't run the current iOS.

The battery started to swell, so she took it in for a new one. They replaced it with a refurb, since they aren't authorized to do replacements of swollen batteries on-site. It cost her as much as a replacement battery would. Presumably, the original has been refurbished and someone else is using it.

If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.

[boogies]

> If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.

I don’t think that’s true at all. The Fairphone 2 came out the year after your mothers’s iPhone and got an OS update this year, and if she had it then she would be authorized and likely capable of replacing the battery herself.