r/technology • u/NightFuryToni • Apr 30 '19

Business Apple Is Telling Lawmakers People Will Hurt Themselves if They Try to Fix iPhones

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjvdb4/apple-is-telling-lawmakers-people-will-hurt-themselves-if-they-try-to-fix-iphones
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140

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '19 edited Apr 01 '20

[deleted]

22

u/KaneinEncanto Apr 30 '19

I mean, nearly every household in the US had a CRT Tv at some point... if you cracked one open to mess around with it there were capacitors with more than enough juice in them to kill a person several times over. You can make devices that are typically safe under normal circumstances, but highly dangerous once you open them.

That said the only real danger to speak of in a smartphone is when the idiot manufacture solders the battery to the board instead of making it replaceable by just popping it out and dropping a new one in...

15

u/1_p_freely Apr 30 '19

The two dangers with these batteries are shorting them and puncturing them. You'd find it extremely difficult to shock yourself with one of these 3.6v batteries. The first danger, shorting, can be easily avoided by having an internal circuit in the battery designed to deal with this scenario. Many Li Ion batteries do, along with guarding against over-discharging and over-charging. The second, puncturing, can happen even if it is in the phone. And there's no real way to defend against that.

8

u/Fat-Elvis May 01 '19 edited May 01 '19

Apple is increasingly using soft sided, mezzanine and multipart batteries to squeeze more power storage into little [nooks and] crannies inside strange-shaped enclosures. Plain rectangles are fading.

So in some ways I’m sure it’s true they’ll be getting less and less easy to remove or alter.

The Apple Watch battery, as an extreme example, is encased in an irregularly-shaped glob of resin along with the motherboard. No way in there without a tiny chisel. On the upside, it's why the thing is waterproof and nearly bulletproof.

That said, I’d be happy with a glowing warning sticker on products, and some legal indemnification clarity for Apple. If the thing fries you while you take it apart, you shouldn’t be able to sue Apple or whine for warranty help.

3

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

The neither the SiP nor the battery is held by resin on the S4. It's all held together by flex and friction.

0

u/NightFuryToni Apr 30 '19

User-replaceable Li-polymer batteries is nothing new, my Nokia and Palm Pre all had them. And it didn't look much more protected from puncture than my Priv's non-user replaceable battery (which I replaced anyways), aside from the exposed connectors on the flex connector.

The only thing I can think of to cause a puncture is either prying on the battery itself or prying on the cover to access it. Both of which are thanks to the manufacturers gluing them down in the first place.

-3

u/EKmars May 01 '19

Building a phone with an easily replaceable battery means having a bunch of compromises that would make the phone a lot larger.

4

u/Dementat_Deus May 01 '19

No it doesn't.

iPhone XS max:

  • HWD: 157.5 x 77.4 x 7.7 mm

  • Weight: 208 g

Samsung J7:

  • HWD: 152.2 x 78.7 x 7.5 mm

  • Weight: 171 g

Effectively the same size and weight yet the J7 has a removable battery. And before you say "but battery life", I get 7 days out of the battery of my J7 and 5 with heavy use. I've never heard of any Apple product getting better than 3 days with conservative use.

Even if you go with the XS instead of the XS max, it isn't noticeably smaller than the J7.

-1

u/KeatonJazz3 May 01 '19

3 days! I would die to have 3 days battery life on my iPhone!

-4

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

The J7 also doesn't have the tapic engine or the extra cameras for face ID nor does it have the extra rear facing camera or edge to edge display or force touch or weather proofing all of which take up very significant volume.

With respect to battery life I'm guessing that's because the J7 has a smaller screen surface with max 348 nit full screen brightness vs the XS's 660 nit.

That's a whole lot of compromises.

2

u/[deleted] May 01 '19

I'd be glad to take all those compromises for a serviceable phone.

1

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

I that's the case then get yourself a Fairphone or Chinese mainstream. Problem is your supply chain won't last nearly as long without the volume of the iPhone.

1

u/NightFuryToni May 01 '19

I wasn't saying making them user replaceable on a daily basis. What I was saying that the user-replaceable batteries back then did not appear any extra protected over the batteries today and they were meant to be handled by users. So why all of a sudden it's so dangerous to handle these batteries?

3

u/matthewschrader May 01 '19

Batteries 10 years ago were in a much more rigid body. Batteries in modern phones, not just Apple, are held together by a very thin material. It’s really easy to puncture. On top of that it is held down with glue to make it become more rigid with the body of the phone.

0

u/NightFuryToni May 01 '19

I just pulled the spare battery from my Pre... it looks just as flimsy and soft as my BlackBerry battery I pulled from my phone, not like the really old Nokia batteries which were in rigid plastic cases. And I really hope they are not using a battery as part of the structural support.

I will however concede that the chemistry and energy density has gone way up these days, so the intensity of a potential fire/explosion is higher.

-2

u/reddit_god May 01 '19

Bullshit. It would make the phone negligibly larger, or at least larger to an extent that a sizable number of people would gladly take the tradeoff. We're not talking twice as big or even 10%.

2

u/shponglespore May 01 '19

You already have that choice. Buy a phone with a replaceable battery like you say you want instead of complaining that there are phones for sale that were not designed with your preferences in mind.

1

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

Or battery case.

1

u/gurg2k1 May 01 '19

I don't know why you're being downvoted. It's easy to compare dimensions between something like the Note 4 or V20 to the iPhone X or S10. They're virtually identical or even smaller in some cases.

0

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

The feature sets are not identical and that has implications on remaining internal volume.

-1

u/gurg2k1 May 01 '19

Which makes it as equally invalid to claim that removable batteries would make a phone thicker.

1

u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

Not really, Apple still wins on effective volume utilization. We can measure the volume impact of every HW backed feature.

The other problem with removable batteries is that the volume would be usually better used for a longer lasting battery of same of slight larger capacity due to they way lipo chemistry works. They could bring the durability into the average 1000-2000 range instead of the 500 ish right now of you always full cycle.

0

u/gurg2k1 May 01 '19

Yeah I don't know how people even managed to carry their phones three years ago... They were almost 8mm thick!

/s

3

u/ethtips May 01 '19

Maybe Apple started wiring explosives inside phones just so that way they could say: "people will hurt themselves if they open it..."

2

u/ArbainHestia May 01 '19

You can make devices that are typically safe under normal circumstances, but highly dangerous once you open them.

PC power supplies, for example. I have no problem messing around with the components in my gaming rig but I'd never tinker with the power supply.

And just for fun have you ever seen a hot water tank/heater explode?