It helps that they are economically tied to their policy successes, as they are in the business of manufacturing and selling toolkits for DIY tech repairers.

The press seems to treat iFixit very favorably. I'm not quite sure why, as what they do is little different than Ford lobbying for truck-friendly policy or Smith & Wesson lobbying for gun-friendly policy. That said, they are nice enough folks and I wish them all the success in the world, especially as they are HQ'd here in my home town.

On seeing "12V for 60 seconds" in the video, I assumed it was just a heat thing - if the adhesive strip is a low-ish resistance, you could heat it up by applying current, with a more standard adhesive. Which makes me wonder if that simpler approach has been considered?

Lots of repairs are like that though. The sum of the replacement parts can vastly exceed the price of just buying a new one (which is often a newer model). We even have terminology for that in the auto world where you can “total” a car because it costs more to fix than replace.

There are other hidden costs to repairs too. One is you’ve “broken the seal” and now your device isn’t “stock” anymore. The water seal might not work as well. The display connector might be slightly loose and tweak out. The screws might not be factory torqued down.

For a car it’s similar too… maybe after that accident the frame is now just slightly off kilter. Maybe there was that proverbial “extra mystery bolt” left over.

Then there is opportunity costs. Is repairing it really the best use of your time and money? What other things could you have done instead of repair? I dunno…

All I’m saying is, repeatability isn’t the end all be all. It’s yet another set of trade offs factored into product design like security, user experience, quality, cost, time to market, size and weight, durability, etc.

I think the score is fine. But there is a second score not mentioned that is “is it worth repairing”?

> The difference is I can buy s23 display from third party manufacturer, apple you can't or you loose feature you paid for like true tone.

This iFixIt article made it fairly clear that the new version of iOS allows you to pair and calibrate first or third party parts after making a repair at home.

> it worked impressively smoothly on our vanilla iPhone 16: one click to pair and calibrate all components at once, and no bugs to be found.

Why would repairability and cost of parts have any relation?

Also, checking eBay, it looks like an oem display (not from apple) for the iPhone 15 is only $150-170. From apple directly it’s $235. By comparison, I can’t find any way to actually buy an OEM display for Samsung phones. They just offer repair services.

Strong agree; 7/10 is a ludicrous score for a device that takes a heat gun and a proprietary screwdriver to open.

It is my opinion that iFixit is starting to turn from being actually hacker friendly into something of a mouthpiece for too-little-too-late corporate-sponsored initiatives designed to curb right-to-repair efforts. The money coming into their business from corporate programs is evident, and it's evident they are strongly perusing that market. I'm not convinced it's going to be a win for consumers though.

I found the recent release of their soldering station at $300 to be particularly distasteful. If you want to spend that kind of money on soldering tools, go for Metcal. Otherwise a Pinecil and a USB-C power bank give you exactly the same quality and control for 1/4 the price.

The electro-release adhesive is cool as hell though; no denying that.

Regardless of oem display cost, the new parts pairing feature in iOS 18 means no more loss of True Tone etc.

Both have 120 hz, but iPhone has slightly higher pixel density, more nits, arguably better colors and stronger glass ("ceramic shield" vs guerilla glass).

The price of the phones is similar - good point there, but it's entirely possible that Apple has other components that are cheaper (especially electronics)

I did buy a cheap 3rd party iPhone X screen. It’s bad beyond redemption. Imprecise touch, worse colors, asymmetric bottom lip. You can also get even cheaper LCD to replace the OLED, that sticks out 2 mm out of front case.

Not worth it at all.

>price 350€, s23 108€.

S23 is way too cheap. I was expecting it to be 150. On the other hand Apple is way too expensive. Even accounting for their "tax" I was expecting 250.

Can we just be happy that Apple is slowly changing, and stop constantly moving on to the next thing to complain about? If you never look behind you you’ll lose sight of how much progress has been made.

I’d also disagree that they’re the same screen as another user pointed out, the iPhone has a better screen. Even if Apple decided to charge more for parts, that’s their choice. True Tone can now be used with 3rd party screens, so go buy the cheaper knockoff screen if you so choose.

Apple has done more to make this phone repairable in the last 3yrs than I think any OEM has done since waterproofing started and phones became sealed. The electrically released metal covered battery is going to be a huge thing for self repair. You or I might find it easy to just yank a battery out, but someone somewhere will follow the instructions and then puncture it and sue the OEM for the battery fire, and this hugely reduces that liability.

“mostly a good offering with a few omissions… a display assembly that’s too pricey to be an attractive repair option for most people.”

Not to mention Galaxy A55 which IMO offers superior value for money. I prefer it to even an S24 anyway.

I first realized that glue is the "glue" holding the world together when I read about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig_ceiling_collapse

It was caused by using the wrong glue to hold up a 26 ton slab of concrete - which immediately caused me to say "There is a right glue?"

> we don’t really build cathedrals anymore

I visited a recently constructed Hindu temple in Atlanta last year. Very impressive. All imported marble. Sounds like these guys have been building them all over:

> A number of shikharbaddha mandirs (large traditional stone mandirs) were inaugurated in major cities; London (1995), Nairobi (1999), New Delhi (2004), Houston (2004), Chicago (2004), Swaminarayan Akshardham (New Delhi) (2005), Toronto (2007), Atlanta (2007), Los Angeles (2012), and Robbinsville (New Jersey) (2014).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochasanwasi_Akshar_Purushotta...

> Sure, we don't really build cathedrals anymore

Maybe not the Catholics, but the Latter Day Saints are still building plenty:

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/temples/photo-gallery/sa...

(For context, they refer to them as temples rather than cathedrals , but the general idea of it being a place of worship with lots of effort put into architecting it remains)

I think this comment ignores a lot of context.

Cathedrals were the result of centuries of research into materials science, physics, and geometry -- and that's just considering the buildings themselves, not even the often-intricate religious art within.

Some of the challenges and solutions in cathedral architecture took generations to solve; in many gothic and neogothic cathedrals with particularly tall, internally-unsupported naves, solutions like flying buttresses were thought up to support the walls externally -- sometimes with multiple layers of buttresses-upon-flying-buttresses. Developing the right cement and figuring out which type of stone you could use alone were often a project that took years, especially for landmark churches.

These churches sometimes took decades or centuries to build, depending on how you measure it (basically, if you include significant reconstructions).

They also weren't representative of the average construction project in essentially any region where there are cathedrals; those were more likely to be houses, shops, and other commercial buildings like port structures.

Things like flying buttresses or new, opulent-but-functional arch designs also weren't representative of the average innovation in those times. Depending on where you look, that might be stuff like, a new loom variant that lets you produce new patterns, or a new kind of cheese that ages quickly while having a similar enough flavour to a slower-aging, more expensive type of cheese.

My overarching point is -- at any given point in time, the average invention is small and boring. Specialists are a valuable resource, yes, but the more specialized they are, the smaller and more boring their contributions will seem to the average person outside of that specialization. Landmark innovations are built on thousands of smaller innovations made over years or decades, and those smaller innovations were usually invented by someone who's spent the past 25 years of their lives obsessing over that tiny thing, having published dozens of papers and argued for years about something you've likely never even heard of.

That you can have some glue unstuck by applying power, and even control which side ends up with the residue by changing the polarity just blows my mind. Really cool!

We build a million things each year which are a lot more impressive than cathedrals.

China built a entire high speed rail network that's about the size of all the other ones in the world, combined, and they did it in 20 years.

China built a high speed Maglev train between Beijing and Shanghai, I think Japan is going to build one soon, too.

The US has been building hyper tall pencil looking skyscrapers in Manhattan for about 20 years.

There are tons of amazing tunnels being built around the world, as we speak.

India, China, Indonesia, etc. are building amazing subway networks in tens of cities.

The scale, complexity and sheer audacity of what we're building has never been seen in the history of the world.

Sagrada Familia is still under construction and likely will be for a while yet. :)

Also at least one DiY cathedral build: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justo_Gallego_Mart%C3%ADnez

We build cathedrals almost daily, and they dwarf any cathedrals ever created. We just call them factories. Instead of exemplifying the unknown face of some made up entity, we create them to exemplify the industry and fecundity of humanity.

Glue in an iPhone impacts (for sure indirectly) more people than a cathedral ever would.

Rubber alone would require pressure pushing the battery against the housing to maintain the battery position during a drop. This pressure against the underside of the display module would mess with the display.

Adhesive is needed because there can’t be any pressure against the underside of the display module, and the battery can’t be allowed to move even a slight amount during drop impacts.

I think they want to leave some space so that the battery can expand. Easiest way to do that is to glue it on one side and leave a bit of space on the other side.

The rubber mat is only going to work if the battery is pressed against it with a lot of force. An adhesive will hold with no pressure at all.

Size, adhesive is thinner than any kind of physical layer surrounding it. I would presume as well it's better for thermals for allowing heat away from the battery.

My guess is that even the tiniest movement would wear out the battery's casing.

Drop protection is one of the main reasons, especially when you use batteries with soft shells.

In my experience, 3rd parties aren't worried about being identical to the original design. They'd just give you a square of double sided sticky tape to hold the battery down with, and accept that if you ever wanted to replace the battery again you'd have to destroy it to get it out.

iFixit speculated that the tape is from Tesa. Tesa says it has filed "50+ patents for 'Debonding on Demand' adhesive tapes' … 'using various mechanisms such as temperature, electricity, laser and electromagnetic induction': https://www.tesa.com/en/about-tesa/press-insights/stories/de...

So generic battery manufacturers could presumably buy the tape from Tesa, license production themselves, risk producing their own variants, or supply replacements without electrical debonding (the consumer probably doesn't care that the replacement battery doesn't use the same debonding tech their original battery used).

Would this be really necessary for a replacement battery? Are many people replacing the battery twice over the life of the phone?

If you’re referring to the edges then those are vias. Apple has been stacking PCBs like this since the iPhone X. See step 14 in https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+X+Teardown/98975

They're not holes (though there are probably many vias there to connect to the ground planes and signal traces, but on this board the vias will be tiny and will either be under the solder resist or under the solder blobs). They're soldering lands for where the two halves of the mainboard are soldered together into a sandwich via some kind of thicker PCB interposer, which can carry the signals between the boards. This is probably an order of magnitude or more cheaper and far, far less volume-consuming and way more robust than standard mezzanine connectors. But rather tricky to repair!

Look at the video in the article around 7:29.

The article calls out the soldered-on heatsink plate, but it's not very clear from the pictures how it actually works in the stack-up without reference to the video. I don't know why they didn't do a better close up of both sides of that, maybe it's in a different article.

I'm not quite up to date on modern electronics, but I assume they are ground-stitching vias - connections to the ground plane optimized in size and number to reduce electromagnetic interference.

Here's a decent explanation: https://circuitcellar.com/research-design-hub/basics-of-desi...

Not exactly sure what you're looking at, but aren't they just stitching vias placed there for shielding purpose: https://resources.altium.com/p/everything-you-need-know-abou...?

Are you sure these are holes? Looks like soldering pads to me.

Weight reduction, presumably?

The encapsulation of the six small cells takes up a significant fraction of the volume of a 9V battery.

Because what is in a 9 volt is 6 AAAA batteries. They are smaller than even an AAA battery. Only thing I know that uses them is some of the surface drawing pens and the like.

That said if you need 9 volts ask a church. I know we would gladly hand you a box of half full ones as you have to pull them out of the wireless mics before they die. And older Shure mics are 9 volt.

The tradeoff is that you would lose impact resistance. Consider the moment of impact when a phone hits a hard floor: the relatively heavy battery has its force distributed over the large area of the adhesive and absorbed by it, vs very high localized forces at the screw mounts and lowest corner that will more likely result in deformity or breakage.

Screws will weigh a lot more than the glue and take up more volume. You'd probably need 3-4 screws to keep the largest mass item in the phone secure. Also the screws would time it take to assemble, and increase points of manufacturing failure (incorrectly installed screws). Nobody wants a replaceable battery with the compromises. For smartphones, better weatherproofing probably decreased total phone waste vs fully repairable phones simply due to water damage.

The below is not a scientific opinion. But it is an opinion.

Apple is 100% milking the buyer in a way the lower end Android chain just isn't in the business of.

People don't not buy top flight iPhones because something else is worse, it's because they 1) can't afford it (priced out) or don't "know" better (don't have an appreciation for just how great the experience is).

Maybe, a top flight Apple experience really is 10x a lower end Android experience.

First, it's the fact that everything has a decent (if by now overbearing) design language and everything (more or less) just works and fits in the Apple ecosystem, and the momentum to date has meant the feature set and 3rd party app offering is pretty darn good (Anrdoid may have great hardware and an equivalent feature-set in software, but is it as consistent and polished or truly well-designed overall?).

Second, it's the fact that there are no good alternatives. Sorry, but the Android ecosystem is not good enough. Not close, not second best, just a non starter, for Apple acolytes.

Third, there is no serious competition. Ok, there are oddball more independent offerings, but let's be real. They are nowhere near as polished.

Therefore, nothing much is really pushing top flight Apple prices down other than people's ability to pay. Because enough "experiences" have been pushed to mobile by now, it's sort of a necessity to have something to answer that need.

Maybe, someone, somewhere, could make a serious competitor to iPhone. It is 100% possible. But it does not seem to be done now.

And so, the price is what Apple has figured out people are able to pay in order to maximize overall corporate profit.

Is it worth it? Well, if it enables serious business, then, yes, best Apple phone and best apple laptop are worth it, easily.

The problem is this (best iPhone) became the stack for mobile when things (capabilities all around, specs, and prices) were more middling, and it's hard for such people to go to Android. And it's hard to juggernaut into serious competition in the particularly highly complex technical space because of the hardware and software investments made in the past couple of decades that have really built up. (When iPhone started it didn't have copy/paste, but look at the over-complexity now.)

I come to HN for exactly this. /srs

Generally yes but there are ways to repair said seal. The difficult part is testing that the seal is up-to-standard without risking the hardware and data inside.

Unfortunately, no. When you reverse the polarity, the adhesive is left on the housing instead of the battery. iFixit has shown it in a video [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6jBXI6CR9s

Have you actually looked at it, sure it’s expensive but there’s nothing else like it.

Funny, 20 years ago we had hard cased batteries in our cell phones and we could just pull them out.

I fully expect Apple to release a phone in the future with a removable battery and claim it is some incredible invention of theirs when it was Apple that pushed everyone to the non removable battery in the first place.

But security and privacy... Just think what foreign attackers could do if they switched my iphone battery...

That's unthinkable.

It would be surprising to me, considering this is one of several actions done to make iPhones easier, not more difficult, to repair.

I was thinking they could add a little button to redirect the current from the battery, so it can release itself.

It can also be a good thing: given the EU's 2027 requirement for user-replaceable batteries, this could ensure the battery can only be changed if the phone isn’t stolen.

This seems very unlikely since the phones have been getting easier to repair rather than harder.