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by dperrin 632 days ago
> Do you expect your iPhone 16 battery press tool to still be useful in 2 phone generations ? How many times do you see yourself replacing the iPhone 16's battery ?

Lots of my bike tools I have will take over a decade to get my money back on my stuff alone. But I get to do something I mostly enjoy. I can also help out friends/acquaintances when they need it. The same goes for this.

3 comments

What seems to be lost here:

- Bikes will last decades with good maintenance. An iPhone wont, even if the device hardware was somewhat kept alive most standard software functionalities will be lost.

- Bikes don't mandate fancy tools for regular maintenance. Regular people won't need your super pricey tools to replace brakes or tires. You can use them if you want to, but that's your hobby, not what the maker mandates.

You can enjoy nice tools, but that's orthogonal to the issue here IMHO.

> Bikes don't mandate fancy tools for regular maintenance.

Phone batteries need replacing every few years. The kind of maintenance that a bike used daily will need on that schedule is absolutely stuff that requires fancy tools.

Current iPhone batteries are rated 1000 cycles. That's many years if you mostly leave your phone in standby, that will be less than a year before it significantly degrades if you're using it daily and not just for web/SNS browsing.

That's my home's experience, if you listen to The Vergecast that's the hosts' experiences as well.

> Lots of my bike tools I have will take over a decade to get my money back

That's... a bit surprising. Maybe one or two I could see, like a truing stand or some one-off equally proprietary thing for one brand of part, but what else?

Edit: nvm, there seems to be plenty of Park Tools brand niche reamers and so on that are many hundreds of dollars. I would think they'd remain viable for much longer than a battery replacement press though, since you'd adapt it to a particular bike's repair needs with different bits.

Hey do you have any recommendations on a small kit to bring for long bike trips?
Blackburn switch tool with chain press, tire levers, patch kit, spare tube. For anything not fixable with those, you visit a shop.