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0 pointsswiftcoder5mo ago0 comments

> Do people replace their phones because the battery isn't good anymore

Pretty much exclusively? The last 4-5 iPhone purchases in my family have all been due to dying batteries (plus a couple of off-brand battery replacements by local cellphone techs).

Nothing else on iPhones really ever breaks, provided you keep some sort of case on it. The only non-battery failure I've ever had was a corroded lightning port (on a iPhone that was regularly used in a salt-chlorine swimming pool). And of course a couple of replacements due to critical banking apps that have drop support for old iOS versions...

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losvedir5mo ago

And what did you do with them? Throw them away? I bought and used an iPhone 11 for a year last year, and it came with a perfectly functional, replaced battery.

People on HN have such a blind spot around old, used phones which thrive in secondary marketplaces. You'd think iPhones are filling dumpsters with the rhetoric here but they actually hold their value remarkably well, which means they have a much longer useful life. A replaceable battery is different from a user-replaceable battery. The former is a sustainability concern, the latter is just a feature.

swiftcoderOP5mo ago

> And what did you do with them? Throw them away?

The ones that aged out of running needed software are still sitting in a cabinet somewhere. A couple of the others were killed off when their battery pack swelled, and another didn't survive a local tech's efforts to replace the battery...

With batteries that could be replaced without delaminating the whole device, (and ideally, an open boot loader), I'd be able to make use of most of them.

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