[mossTechnician]

Which flagship phones with replaceable batteries can customers buy?

Samsung was the last major brand in the US to have one, and they made the choice to remove it.

[lightedman]

"Which flagship phones with replaceable batteries can customers buy?"

Most of the Kyocera Duraforce line has this ability.

[ben-schaaf]

Their latest and greatest PRO 3 runs a chip that was mid-range when it releases 4 years ago and only 6 GB of RAM. That is decidedly not a flagship.

[lightedman]

My Kyocera will work in orbit and withstand intense radiation. In fact, this very moment my new Duraforce Pro 3 is having fun in a launch-testing thermal/vac chamber.

Kyocera's 'flagship' is high-reliability phones in absolute garbage environments.

Samsung's 'flagship' overheats and earns them class-action lawsuits.

Motorola's 'flagship' is a hinged throwback to the 90s.

Apple's 'flagship' is an overpriced piece of vendor lock-in.

Meanwhile my phone takes serious abuse and laughs at it. I've dropped it and watched it go more than 700 feet down the side of a mountain (Chambless Skarn) and BARELY chip the screen protector. Waterproofing still intact. Case barely scratched.

What you consider a flagship phone is a brittle piece of junk in my hands.

[ben-schaaf]

How does any of that prevent the phone from having the latest chip and copious ram?

[anonymars]

Radiation hardening would do that

[ben-schaaf]

That's not a radiation hardened chip, it's regular off-the-shelf consumer electronics. The "solar radiation" test they advertise is part of MIL-STD-810H. It tests whether the electronics survive regular sunlight on earth. The only ionizing radiation this phone is rated for is UV light.

At least if it had registered memory there might be an argument that it has some radiation resistance, but no it's plain old LPDDR4x.

Ulefone Armor 29 Ultra has the same MIL-STD-810H conformance with "radiation hardening", 16GB of RAM and a flagship Dimensity 9300+. Just not a removable battery.

[matchbok3]

Not sure. But there are plenty of flip phones with removable batteries.

[anonymars]

So you're suggesting we all just need to buy exclusively flip phones for a few years to send the market a signal that it wants replaceable batteries. Then the free market will do its thing and keep the engine of innovation running

Speaking of which, does anyone want to do a list of "features added to smartphones over the last 10 years" vs "features removed from smartphones over the last 10 years" so we can see just what innovations are at risk?

[matchbok3]

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm simply offering the reality of the smartphone market. What you are suggesting is a contrived, exaggerated take of how markets function.

People generally like small, thin phones, as evidenced by the billions sold. It really isn't much more complicated than that.

[anonymars]

That's an interesting assertion given that phones have gotten progressively larger and the iPhone Mini was phased out

Maybe it is more complicated than that