The battery will live much longer if you run it from 80% down to 50%. There are some clever plugs you can get off the shelf if your phone doesn’t support setting this in software.
I doubt the "design brief" for this involves ensuring it's got thousands or days worth of expected battery charging lifetime.
There's already people here discussing the best way to locate it. Sooner or later someone's gonna find a "free phone" and trade it for a point of meth somewhere just off 16th and Mission...
Samsung Galaxy S5 from 2014. Headphone jack, SD card slot, and swappable battery. IP67 water resistant. Almost everything since then has been a regression.
You can get a Nikonos V underwater film camera around $300 on ebay these days too. Designed by Jacques Cousteau in the 1960s, can shoot under 150+ feet of water, and is supposedly a good all-around rugged outdoor camera as well. I'd sort of want one but I haven't used any of my film camera gear in years.
>After every charge and boot sequence, the [Galaxy S5] reminds the user to preserve the IP67 rating by securing the back cover and making sure the USB flap is closed.
Nobody wants to faff around with this stuff just in case today's going to be the day that they drop their phone in a puddle.
No doubt, but we're 10 years on, if we'd carried on down the path of swappable storage we'd probably also have solved these minor ux things - no USB flaps on modern waterproof phones f.ex
MicroSD cards go into the same slot the SIM cards go into. Unless Apple stopped taking SIM cards, there's going to be a bit that takes a sliver of plastic and metal. Clearly, Apple has already solved this problem, they just choose not to add the design complexity (and frankly, damage to their popcorn pricing model) of a microSD slot.
Apple has stopped taking SIM cards in US devices. Only the iPhones sold in Europe still have sim slots, and I assume those do worse in immersion testing.
bold assumption to make without sources or testing. Rubber gaskets are a thing and last time I had a sim slot on my iphone, they had one there.
I know immersion testing is about depth and time, but 99% of the time phones are in danger of water damage, we are talking about a 6' pool or a 6 inch bathtub/sink/toilet for 15 seconds, not being submerged in 100' of seawater for 10 days while SCUBA diving. A rubber gasket on a SIM tray does perfectly fine in these normal situations.
I think it takes a pretty tortured interpretation of reality to not acknowledge that Apple hates SD cards for one reason only: So they can sell additional storage for $100 per 128GB (and secondarily, because when people underestimate their needs, they're likely to either pay for expensive iCloud storage to compensate, or upgrade their otherwise perfectly working phone in a short time in order to get a bigger SSD. Apple wins in all cases.)
They're protecting their legendary, industry-leading margins. Which they're free to do. And we customers are free to deride them for their extreme stinginess.
A compromise would be having a slot inside the case. But we all know why they don't have any option to increase the storage to begin with. "That'll be an additional $500 for the upgrade please."
They're in the same tray as the SIM card, you don't see people crying for esims because of waterproofing. And a simple gasket around the port is enough for the IP68 or whatever kind of rating the iphones and co have nowadays
When I go to replace wear items such as the battery the insides of my Apple products look like goopy garbage because of all the adhesive I have to melt and scrape through.
What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery without melting and scraping? They exist in real, observed reality.
What about the last 15 years of MacBook models that never claimed to be waterproof but still require heat guns and risk of catastrophic immolation to extend their life beyond 3-5 years?
But for some reason the internals of an iPhone 16 are still “gorgeous”…and merit a stage appearance and endorsement from Mother Earth herself!
in my experience from a few years ago: I commute by bicycle to shool (and in the meantime work) in a very rainy country. My entire childhood, I had to replace phones every few months jsut because they got soaked in the rain and I didn't close the protective case perfectly or whatever.
Then I started to buy waterproof phones, and my life was noticeably better. those still die from water damage, just slower. Every time you drop the phone and the case pops off, the water protection gets a bit worse, and after a year or so, the rubber gets hard, especially in winter, and its no longer waterproof. I wouldn't dare to put it in actual water.
Now I have had my smartphone for many years, and I had the previous one for many years. So yes please, glue it together, glue it shut, at least if you're serious about water damage and dust ingress
> What about the dozens (at this point hundreds) of phone models that are both rainproof and have a replaceable battery
If that's what you are looking for just get one. It may come even with spyware preinstalled. Then try it underwater, should be fine if it's in specs, right?
I just switched from Android for security primarily. The rest is a bonus. The problem is smartphone becomes a single point of failure. If it gets stolen I can't even work without authentication apps.
Sealing electrical stuff from water is literally 19th century tech. Plenty of underwater flashlights exist even today. If they just lose the obsession with thinness in phones, almost every other problem becomes trivial to solve. Instead they make the ultra thin, breakable phone, and then users put it in a protective case which eliminates the thinness anyway.
That's what Steve Jobs used to say and that's why Apple phones were 3.5 inches until he died. Who uses a 3.5 inch phone now? In fact small phones basically don't exist anymore. There were credit card or cigarette lighter sized phones that weighed under an ounce but they were 2G GSM, so now they are e-waste. There is nothing to replace them. Meanwhile the Unihertz Tank 2 weighs about a pound (22,000 mAH battery) and it's imho attractive, except too expensive.
I think it’s important especially because phones have gotten larger on the x and y axes that they remain light and small in the z axis in order to maintain pocketability. There are very thick phones with giant batteries out there for people who want that, but I think Apple has been striking the perfect balance.
They are not that fragile if you don't drop hard. Never used case for A50, it still looks almost new after years of active use. But for iphone I got a thin case, to protect popping out cameras and to make it look cool. Main concern is thieves if I travel somewhere, not the physical damage.
Unless you drop them very hard, cases are not needed anymore. Been using a Iphone 12 pro max for 4 years without a case, I don't even look twice and I drop it from the table.
A commenter complains that Apple uses a lot of adhesive inside their phones so they are not really a thing of beauty. Someone replies that it's because of water proofing. Another person points out that, no, actually plenty of companies make waterproof phones without using glue so Apple could. You tell them to go buy other another phone.
How is it in any way related to beautiful design, waterproofing and glue use in manufacturing?
Do you use a bank account? Or do you still trade using only the shells you can carry in your arms? Perhaps networked computers are secure enough to be useful after all.
I never claimed the Internet isn't useful. I just think people don't recognize how vulnerable computers are to attack. Search this very incomplete list for "bank": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
No, it's substantially more expensive. At least for anything too large to just cut out of HPHT chunks, just due to CVD at optical grade being pretty slow.
Why would a user-replaceable battery be better for the environment? Do you think that consumers are able to recycle hard-to-recycle lithium components like that _correctly_? Apple already offers battery replacements (comparatively) cheaply.
Beyond that there's huge issues with it such as third party batteries tainting the overall quality of the phone, having an entirely removable back plate would kill their water/dust resistance rating, it looking bad (Yes this is important to Apple) etc, god-knows-what other issues arise changing the internal structure of their components that drastically.
Don't assume they can't figure out an engineering problem because you're upset that phones aren't the same as they were 20 years ago.
The battery replacement service is not comparatively cheap. I just paid $90 for my iPhone 11. There is no world in which a cell phone battery of even the highest quality costs anywhere near that much. For example iFixIt offers a comparable battery for less than half that price, and generic sellers less than a quarter the price. You could argue that the labor required justifies the price but that makes the design all the more predatory.
The battery disposal is not really the point of the conversation, you could make the same argument about the whole phone. The point is that all of the components of the phone last a lot longer than two years, but the sealed in battery will barely make it that long. They obviously benefit financially from the current arrangement because they’ve shifted consumer decision from “should I pay $40 to increase my battery life by 25% on my 2 year old phone” to “should I invest $100 in this older phone or just throw it away and spend $200 (subsidized) on a new one?” The second one makes a lot more money for Apple and has a much larger negative impact on the planet.
As far as waterproof ratings, such phones exist, even in the thin form factor. This argument is a non-starter that doesn’t agree with observed reality. It’s an active choice they’re making because the incentives are misaligned.
As to the argument that users will use bad components, how is this any different than the myriad of bad Bluetooth headphones available that degrade user experience? Should Apple disallow those as well to protect their stupid users? What about cheap chargers? Cases that induce thermal throttling? Screen protectors that greatly degrade visual fidelity?
I’m not upset about phones being different than 20 years ago, I’m upset that the planet is being destroyed to slightly increase profits, all while Apple lies to our face and parades Mother Earth around the keynote stage.
You can never please everyone. Not sure if you realize, it’s trivial to get a new battery replaced once every 3 or 4 years. Apple store can do it, as well 3rd party repair shops in most cities. Takes 15-45 minutes, depends how busy the shop is.
Perhaps you’re more annoyed about right to repair in general? That’s a different story…
There are some actual benefits though, even if you choose to ignore them. The water resistance rating is much higher compared to phones with a battery cover, a modern iphone will have zero problems being accidentally dropped in the deep end of a pool, or in a lake.
Everything is a trade off, don’t forget that. You don’t like this trade off, which i completely understand. Not everyone cares about water resistance…
If a replaceable battery is a must for you, i’d buy an android with a battery cover. Gotta choose what’s right for you.
I just went through that process at an Apple Store less than 50 miles from Apple HQ. It took 4 and a half hours from my appointment time to having my repaired phone back. (And of course I couldn’t get work done because I didn’t have my phone, and I couldn’t warn the people who were expecting me of my delay, because I didn’t have my phone.) That’s completely unacceptable when it should only take 5-10 seconds.
Edit: To head off any doubt, no my phone was not damaged, and the repair went smoothly. They were having an inventory tracking system outage with absolutely zero fallback/continuity plan and absolutely refused to give me my phone back, repaired or not.
Even in the best case scenario is objectively worse in every way than a 10s at-home battery swap. Especially for the vast majority of human beings that don’t live within a reasonable distance of an Apple Store. Keep in mind that most older phones end up on secondary markets in less wealthy countries. They could live for years there except for the failed batteries.
The latest iPhones require the battery to be cryptographically paired to the phone and can only be done by Apple or a few approved vendors. You can’t just take them to a normal repair shop.
No user-replaceable battery even though that’s a consumable/wear item?
They even invited “Mother Earth” herself to their last presentation to talk about how much they care about the planet! Were they just lying to our faces then?
reply