I think the real problem is the battery was itself sealed with an airtight plastic wrapping. If consumers could just pull out the lithium plates, patch new electrolytic material over wherever they were shorting, then zip the battery back up, then they'd be fine.
And another thing! Back in my day, if you had a transistor go bad in a discrete logic unit, you could just pop out the card and solder on a new one. But kids these days with their fancy integrated circuits...
But I've seen many old and even ancient computers where only –you guessed it– the (CMOS memory/clock) batteries went bad. Basically all of them go dead after a few decades, exchange them for new ones, and the puppy will boot up again.
For more modern devices: I'm now on my third battery of my private notebook (6 year old HP Probook), third battery on a Galaxy SII (!) which still is OK for random tests and to leave around as a music player even running Android 6.0(!). If I had to send them to a shop to have the (internal, glued down) battery exchanged, I would have stopped using both devices already a few years ago.
But just buying the battery for a few (few 10) bucks is cheap enough to risk the investment in an otherwise paid off machine.
I don't think the same holds true for more involved repairs where a mobile phone made of (a few hundred million…) discrete and easily repairable transistors would be handy ;-).
>I don't think the same holds true for more involved repairs where a mobile phone made of (a few hundred million…) discrete and easily repairable transistors would be handy ;-)
Yes, but the phone you are describing would be much easier to repair than an modern phone, with several orders of magnitude more transistors.
Processor (Samsung Note 7 - Exynos 8890) Transistors - ~1 Billion (I couldn't find a good number for this, so I used a conservative estimate [1]).
DRAM - 4GB = 8bits/byte * 4 billion bytes * 1 transistor per bit = ~32 billion
Flash 64 GB = 8 bits/byte * 64 billion bytes * 0.5 transistors per bit (i.e. two bits per transistor with floating gate NAND Flash) = 256 billion transistors
I 300% do not trust consumers to perform surgery on batteries. It feels even more likely that it would trigger an uinpleasant and dangerous chain reaction than the current situation provides.
And another thing! Back in my day, if you had a transistor go bad in a discrete logic unit, you could just pop out the card and solder on a new one. But kids these days with their fancy integrated circuits...