Removing a battery attached with previous type of adhesive is torture - the elastic tab frequently tears off, and I ended up a few times having to bend the old battery a lot, to get it out (very unsafe, it starts heating).

So, to me, this is a huge progress. Plus, don’t you normally have 9v battery and some connectors for it already?

Don’t forget that first you need to remove the back glass, which requires:

Torque driver (blue, 0.65 kgf cm) (923-0448)

Torque driver (green, 0.45 kgf cm) (923-00105)

Security bit (923-0247)

Micro stix bit (923-01290)

Nylon probe (black stick) (922-5065)

ESD-safe tweezers

Adhesive removal tool (923-09176)

Adhesive cutter (923-01092)

Ethanol wipes or isopropyl alcohol (IPA) wipes

6.1-inch repair tray (923-10712)

Camera cap (923-10716)

Display press (661-08916)

Cut-resistant gloves. Gloves may vary by region.

Heat-resistant gloves. Gloves may vary by region.

Safety glasses with side shields

https://support.apple.com/en-us/120638

No one is stopping you from using a Treo 650.

In contrast, the Treo 650 battery was considerably smaller in terms of capacity and significantly bigger in terms of physical size, leading to a bulkier device that had a significantly lower resolution, colour and physically sized screen. Lets not pretend the state of the art has not moved on.

The last few are just for your safety and can obviously be skipped if you feel like being a cowboy. And to me, “zero tools” makes it sound like that’s your preferred approach. So why count them against one phone but not the other?

It's almost like Apple is maliciously complying by overcomplicating the procedure, which is not surprising.

Was the Treo 650 waterproof? :)

Oh, give me a break.

You can still do all the same shit with iFixit tools. These are just the genuine tools aimed at repair shops.

These are basic items, much of it safety gear.

This is a state of the art micro computer. Of course it will require tools to handle correctly.

That is significantly easier than trying to remove a glued-on battery.

And removable batteries require far more internal space which is why they fell out of favour.

"every tool you need" sounds like basic stuff for a repair shop

Nobody is going and buying the Apple 9v battery or "Apple sand"

consumers, and the EU

> This is great, and most of the comments here seem to either miss the days of the StarTAC _or_ would gladly enjoy a physically bigger device.

If HN had its way, iPhones would be made from through-hole components and 7400 logic. The battery would last all of approximately 13 minutes… so it would be not just possible, but actually necessary to swap the battery in seconds.

Ideally, the phone would be slightly unreliable (MTBF of no more than 200 hours) so that every user could experience the joy of troubleshooting the bad component and soldering in a replacement themselves.

Maybe Apple could even include a sacrificial capacitor in the power supply that is just slightly under-spec’d. That would also give users the opportunity to “soup up” their iPhones by installing a better capacitor in that one location.

It would be illegal to sell them without including (in the box with the phone) a 3000 page printed service manual containing not just schematics, but a detailed theory of operations and full source listing. Nobody would actually look that these, of course, but it’s the principle of costing the manufacturer money that matters.

Such a device would be not small. After all, you need to have room to work inside the engine bay^H^H iPhone and you don’t want the components packed in too tight to support easy maintenance. That space would also promote airflow from the three fans necessary to cool all those 7400 ICs.

No good deed goes unpunished

This is also true of early smartphones. They were made to have easily replaceable batteries, and I assume you could buy those batteries too.

But that turned out to be irrelevant because of the replacement schedule. It seems clear that the frequency with which people replace their phones is what drove the decisions to make maintaining them difficult. If nobody ever needs to maintain the phone, why would you put any effort into helping them hypothetically do so?

The analog of Moore's Law for smartphones is already dying and there was a lot of news coverage a while ago of how people seem to be keeping their phones. That may drive the development of phones that can last longer than two years.

Something that every PocketPC user rapidly learned to be adept at because without the boosted Chinese batteries the thing didn't last that long. Amazing for the time, but looking back, what a primitive device. And you had to pay for OS upgrades!

In just about any other situation in life, you will have to make some investment in tools with the understanding that you can use them multiple times.

For example, I bought the iFixit repair kit nearly a decade ago and I have used it for any minor work for all that time. $80 spent once and I’ve never once needed to fish for some strange bit or tool no matter what device I’ve opened. In fact, the iFixit kit will still be sufficient for this entire repair plus the 9 volt battery of course.

Unless you’re saying all these are one time use tools but I didn’t see that from the parts lists.

The Apple provided tools are the ones used at first party Apple stores to perform authorized repairs. At some point, some bean counter tabulated the cost of building X000 machines and shipping them across the globe for a marginal increase in repair quality and deemed it a worthy tradeoff.

If you want to repair phones to the equivalent quality of Apple stores, Apple makes it possible via their "overengineered" machines. There's nothing in Apple's ToS that forces you to make repairs this way, you're welcome to buy the Apple genuine part and use your own heat mats and press and whatever and knowingly make that tradeoff.

I was holding out for the EU DMA third party app store, but it's clear that Apple is not on a good trajectory. The fact that they slept on Siri for so long only to then finally add "Open"AI to it with limited availability is, but another dot in the pattern.

When MacOS was still called OSX and developers were the Macbooks greatest contributors and cheerleaders, things looked a lot different. A lot of the current framework components were copied from community components back then.

I'll miss the closed loop payment card support from iOS, but for everything else, I'll just say good riddance ...

If you think something like German automotive engineering or iPhone production can be substitute by a “simpler and more convenientional process”, you probably don’t understand how it works. These things have evolved and have been optimized to within parts of a percentage; almost everything is there for a good, time tested reason. (Except for ultra-novel stuff that has been around for a year or two - there they may pay with process inefficiencies for novelty)

The cost of the tools required to cut my lawn is far more than hiring someone to cut it.

Likewise for almost every home or car repair.

The whole point is that the tools are largely a once off purchase and repairing your phone is something you might do throughout your life. Therefore the initial costs should be spread over a longer period.

> but clearly that's not necessary

You are both wrong and contradicting yourself. If it isn't necessary, then complaining about the tools is moot since as you wrote yourself, it's not necessary.

But, if you design a portable consumer device and you know to what tolerance you need a battery to be adhered to the case to make it not come loose, you know what pressure, movement, adhesive etc. are needed to make that happen for the form factor the battery is going to fit in. You know who doesn't know that? Pretty much everyone who isn't an engineer, and for most people who are an engineer, they might know that these are parameters that exist, but they aren't going to know every variation for every device ever produced. So now that nonsense about it being "clearly" is not so clear anymore.

Engineering things to be safe and reliable is pretty difficult. Add in batteries and it's suddenly one or more orders of magnitudes more difficult. That much is definitely clear, because when you cut corners, just guess or think to yourself "it is just a battery and some adhesive, how hard can this be" you get phones self-igniting on airplanes.

If we take your full line as a quote:

> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.

Do you really think there are a bunch of people using manual hand tools mass producing every aspect of a phone? Sure, there might be a bunch of steps where manual labour was effective and efficient, but it's not like you show up at the factory with your suitcase of tools and go to work at your desk.

What they reproduced is the parameters. And that is exactly what you want. A repaired product should be as close to a freshly manufactured product as possible if you're going to be liable for it.

Sorry, but have you ever repaired anything? The number of things the price and complexity of a phone, that can be repaired for less than the replacement cost, when you include tools, is…very small.

I was gonna say, iPhones are way more reliable than German cars, it’s not a fair comparison! Then I thought about their respective depreciation curves…

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> It's like they just copy-pasted their production line processes, but clearly that's not necessary.

If they copy-pasted their production line processes the parts would cost less than $40 total.

I wonder if aliens exist, what technology they have for basics like transportation. Do they just load themselves into a cannon and shoot them to the destination? Just completely different ways of doing everything.