[saagarjha]

Have you looked inside an iPhone? There’s barely any extra space at all for anything. Adding slots for people to take things apart, put in new commodity parts, and then seal the device up so it’s waterproof again are not zero-cost.

[smoldesu]

Sure, but mind you Apple's phones have gotten thicker over the past 5 years (as have their laptops), and that certainly hasn't impacted sales in any meaningful capacity. People don't really care, and I don't buy the arguement that it's impossible for Apple to design things to be more repair-friendly. Simple changes like socketing the battery or limiting OEM component DRM would make all the difference, but Apple actively fights against any changes that would threaten their authority over the iPhone and it's aftermarket profitability. Maybe there is a technical limitation here, but I'm not convinced the world's largest engineering team can't fix it with their 100 billion dollars in liquid R&D funding.

[throwaway894345]

Can you provide a source for "gotten thicker"? I'm looking at https://www.knowyourmobile.com/user-guides/iphone-size-compa... and the iphone x (2017) was 7.7mm and the iphones 12 and 13 were both 7.3-7.4mm. Only the iPhone 11 increased thickness and even then only by a fraction of a millimeter.

[jchw]

Yes exactly. So Apple can't just do it, otherwise it puts them at a disadvantage. That's why it needs to be industry wide.

I think people will survive the terrifying hardship of phones with slightly less sex appeal...

[throwaway894345]

This seems like the worst kind of regulation. Not only is the goal not one worth pursuing (subsidizing the handful of people who want to repair their own phone, among whom I'm included), but it also approaches it in the worst way--forcing everyone to accept awful tradeoffs in the form of a bulky phone. If you insist on subsidizing the few at the expense of the many, a more intelligent approach would be to buy fewer public tool sets that can be checked out from a public library or similar. Of course, the market already solves this kind of problem all the time (and very well) in the forms of tool shares, rentals, and maker spaces--this is a solution in search of a problem.

[jchw]

No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time. It would also be great if they were more robust in general. Even with the correct tools, and decent skills, repairing a lot of common issues on modern phones is really expensive and complex. After a couple years of value depreciation, it is often questionable whether it's even worth it.

The problem is that today, the incentives are all fucked up. Everyone's just trying to make phones with increasingly greater sex appeal every year so that they can convince consumers to throw out their perfectly working phones. Granted, there was obviously rapid progress for quite a while, but it has slowed down a considerable amount; it's hard to argue that this year's phone line ups offers something significantly game changing versus last year's. People have been saying this for a while, but it just gets truer every year. At best, real meaningful differences occur around every three years or so now.

I really don't think corporations will magically decide to all agree to stop this completely unsustainable and pointless madness. It seems like the perfect place for regulation, because it puts everyone on a level playing field.

I also think people are imagining that the result will be phones that all look and feel like the PinePhone (which, BTW, feels pretty nice in my opinion) but honestly, I seriously doubt that's the case. The degree of corner cutting going on today to get the smallest possible footprint is insane (and yes, I've opened up a reasonably modern phone; the latest being an iPhone XS.) We were perfectly happy with significantly more repairable phones that were not much bulkier...

In my opinion, the concerns are much ado about nothing.

[throwaway894345]

> No, it's about making the phones themselves more repairable so that it makes financial sense to have them repaired versus buying new ones all the time.

I'm strongly biased in favor of fixing stuff versus replacing stuff--I don't like our consumerist, disposability culture. But "making phones repairable" has virtually nothing to do with this, because "my phone broke" is not a major driver behind replacing phones. Rather, people replace phones because new models offer compelling features, because new software runs slowly on their older phone, or because their old phone is no longer supported by the software they want/need.

Making phones repairable isn't going to fix this problem.

[WhyNotHugo]

It's not just about making it easier to repair for end-users, it's about making it repairable at all.

A easy to repair phone isn't just repairable by end-users, but also by your neighbourhood repair shop.

And repairable devices aren't necessarily bulkier. Look at the Framework laptop vs a MacBook, for example.

[throwaway894345]

You're deluding yourself if you think there aren't significant tradeoffs in making a device serviceable without specialty tools. "Bulkier" is a common one, but you could keep the size down by sacrificing performance (in order to keep the heat down and/or to make do with a smaller battery). I'm not sure exactly what kinds of tradeoffs are being made, but (for example) according to Tom's Hardware, the Framework laptop has half the battery life of the MacBook Air.

[_carbyau_]

Edit: Unwelcome comment deleted.

[throwaway894345]

Ideally we don't debate/decide public policy based on one person's preferences, and clearly a solid majority of people want a thinner phone, or else companies wouldn't waste the effort competing on thinness.