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i'm not gonna go off on the right to repair thing because i think all of you are making extremely bad arguments despite what apple did being bullshit and the law being wrong, but i'm gonna say one thing that we can probably all agree with
we *do not want* to replace glued-in lithium batteries. a law to compel apple to sell us their lithium packs and tools is not what we should want. what we should want is a law to compel them to develop easier ways to do this very normal maintenance procedure.
batteries were replaceable in virtually all devices until the mid 2010s push for unreasonable, unnecessary thinness. make it illegal for batteries to be glued in. problem solved at the cost of some fashion decisions.
replacing a battery shouldn't *be* a repair procedure any more than replacing a lightbulb is. that places enormous constraints on how devices can be designed, which is a problem we wouldn't be discussing had we not allowed this to happen in the first place
had anyone been asked "are you ok with <design decision> that will require us to make the batteries unreplaceable?" nobody who had ever owned a portable device would have said yes. but we weren't asked. this was forced on us and rapidly became "normal". it's like 7 years old.
in 2010 this would have been an absolutely absurd proposal. everyones house used to have a drawer with like 4 old cellphones and like 10 battery packs we couldn't get ourselves to throw away. everyone knew "lithium ion packs die"
i personally believe no individual should ever handle a bare lithium pack, but rather than debate that, i would much rather talk about the consumer-hostile design decisions that are made without our consent in order to change what is expected in industrial design.
computers with soldered in components and no access plates, glued in batteries that need to be installed by custom tools to get the alignment right or they get pinched and short out, flimsy charging ports that render perfectly good devices into garbage
We can't make these things on our own. We are beholden to corporations, and those corporations do not ask us before they make decisions. That is bullshit, and we can stop it, and it will decrease the flood of silicon and plastic into landfills.
I say we shouldn't beg and plead for the opportunity to painstakingly rework what was meant to be permanent, but rather we should require that, within reason, most things be *designed to be serviced* and accept the compromises that entails.
This will make ultra thin, smooth phones impossible. Perhaps you can't have that. Perhaps that's not possible within reason. Not something you ever should have learned to expect, because it never should have been made in the first place and certainly never become normal.
