The 'obscure' tools are like $5 on amazon/temu/alibaba and include exactly what you need to make the job easy for that specific model. Seems like this law is once again a step backwards.
No consideration at all of tradeoffs, IE how much dust/water proofing do we lose and how much bulk/weight it will add.
> The 'obscure' tools are like $5 on amazon/temu/alibaba and include exactly what you need to make the job easy for that specific model.
There are not enough reasons for every model to need a different specific set of tools. There's one common reason: to make service difficult.
> No consideration at all of tradeoffs, IE how much dust/water proofing do we lose and how much bulk/weight it will add.
Seems like it's all about tradeoffs. They're trading whatever hypothetical advances you're referring to here for less tech waste and lower consumer costs. They're deciding that it's an area in which manufacturers aren't allowed to innovate, because the innovations are trivial compared to the externalities that they impose.
> There are not enough reasons for every model to need a different specific set of tools. There's one common reason: to make service difficult.
Looking at the iPhone 14 iFixit kit, the tools are not particularly exotic... pentalobe/tripoint screwdrivers (kinda mandatory for super small screws) and just a bunch of things needed to work with small devices, spudger, tweezers, suction cup, clamp. Stuff that for the most part has been part of fixit kits going back many generations.
A generic toolkit for working w/ most Apple devices shouldn't have a particular high number of parts.
IME pentalobe is superior as far as wear to tooling without the sharp points.
I've stripped a handful of smaller torx heads due to worn bits over the years. Can't recall ever stripping a pentalobe.
I won't argue Apple came up with a new design for security purposes, at least initially. But that doesn't mean they didn't come up with a superior design for tiny bits at the same time.
- Consumers optimize for what looks nicest in the store, and it's easy for the store to bury the nonreplacability of the battery under a thick layer of tech mumbojumbo.
- Most consumers (at least here in Germany) get their phones from their phone plans, so they are limited by what the phone companies offer with their contracts.
You could turn the argument around: clearly consumers do want this tradeoff, because they have decided to vote in governments to legislate for it to be a requirement.
If you think that's an overly simplistic argument, then I invite you to re-evaluate yours.
Yeah, I always wondered why Apple didn't achieve this at the time and had to remove headphone port and home button to make it water resistant.
But that nomenclature is void if you ask me. I got water on the upper front part of my iPhone XS which is IP whatever and Face ID died. Apple said they wouldn't give me a new one because water resistant doesn't mean they have to replace your phone when something happens.
> I always wondered why Apple didn't achieve this at the time and had to remove headphone port and home button to make it water resistant.
They didn't do this for water proof iPhones - that were lame excuses. They removed e.g. the headphone jack early to increase incentives to adopot (the then future) Airpods.
>had to remove headphone port and home button to make it water resistant.
This was an outright lie; some Android manufacturers (I believe it was Samsung and Sony, but maybe others as well) had waterproof phones with headphone jacks and it didn't seem to negatively affect the phone in other ways.
I feel you - I had actually the same issue with my iphone XS few months ago - I was hiking for few hours inside humid cave. Even though I had phone in waterproof bag my TrueDepth sensor stopped working.
And you conveniently skip the little part about “only if you had the little rubber flap closed covering the jacks and only if you put the battery back in just right”.
And my galaxy s8 has usb-c and is waterproof, so a robust waterproof connector is a solved problem, they even have moisture detection by measuring resistance between a few pins.
No consideration at all of tradeoffs, IE how much dust/water proofing do we lose and how much bulk/weight it will add.