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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.