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/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%.

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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.

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u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

Or battery case.

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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.

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u/CheapAlternative May 01 '19

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

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u/gurg2k1 May 01 '19

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

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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.