As someone who tends to hang onto my phone for ages, I like being able to get replacement batteries… but I wish they would just take everything fairphone does (removable battery + lineage + and especially right-to-repair stuff) and base new standards on that.
OTOH, I also believe that would not be impossible to engineer a phone that could be taken apart where you could have replacement parts for both the battery and seals (e.g. while many companies currently frame things as “removable batteries OR water resistance”, I see no technology reasons why BOTH couldn’t exist in the same device) … There just hasn’t been a big push for businesses to develop something like that bc everyone buys their products without them needing to put that much effort into it.
If companies stopped auto-voiding warranties over users opening a phone and stopped treating everyone as incapable of doing their own repairs, I could totally see user-replaceable seals being a thing. You can basically look at other markets that do have right-to-repair. Sure, replacing seals on a phone might be a bit much for grandma. But grandma is also probably going to call either a repair shop or someone in the family who is good with it. Really not much different than upgrading laptop ram/hdd or doing your own plumbing or changing the oil on a car today… pretty damn easy if you know what you’re doing, but not something everyone is going to know how to or want to do.
As someone who tends to hang onto my phone for ages, I like being able to get replacement batteries… but I wish they would just take everything fairphone does (removable battery + lineage + and especially right-to-repair stuff) and base new standards on that.
OTOH, I also believe that would not be impossible to engineer a phone that could be taken apart where you could have replacement parts for both the battery and seals (e.g. while many companies currently frame things as “removable batteries OR water resistance”, I see no technology reasons why BOTH couldn’t exist in the same device) … There just hasn’t been a big push for businesses to develop something like that bc everyone buys their products without them needing to put that much effort into it.
If companies stopped auto-voiding warranties over users opening a phone and stopped treating everyone as incapable of doing their own repairs, I could totally see user-replaceable seals being a thing. You can basically look at other markets that do have right-to-repair. Sure, replacing seals on a phone might be a bit much for grandma. But grandma is also probably going to call either a repair shop or someone in the family who is good with it. Really not much different than upgrading laptop ram/hdd or doing your own plumbing or changing the oil on a car today… pretty damn easy if you know what you’re doing, but not something everyone is going to know how to or want to do.