Quote:
Originally Posted by sjfan
It's a lot tougher to have a user-replaceable battery on waterproof devices, which are gaining popularity. They're also starting to have to cram batteries into odd shapes to extend or maintain battery life while making phones thinner and adding other features; the iPhone X has a weird L-shaped 2-cell. That's tougher to engineer removable bays for.
None of that excuses hard-wiring the batteries to the phone so that even someone savvy enough to open the case can't replace it without a soldering iron. And there's certainly an element of lock-in at play, to make it more likely that people just opt to buy a new phone or at least send their money the vendor's way.
(Headphone jacks and SD expansion slots are likewise being eliminated partially out of legitimate concerns for things like water/dust proofing, but also serve to sell more vendor-specific headsets and force data onto the vendor clouds).
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I couldn't care less about my phones being waterproof, I'm very careful with my phones/electronics which means when I'm on the move, my phone/tablet is tucked away securely so that I don't have to worry about dropping it in a puddle or on the ground. And if by some chance I dropped it on the ground, it is nice and secure in a leather case so it comes through the drop just fine.
The reason for non-replaceable batteries is as someone said, planned obsolescence.
My Note 2 is stuck with whatever Android system it was sold with, so no more updates to that. However, I can update all of my apps on it just fine, as well as replace the battery, and a SD card holds all of my music for me to listen to. The phone has 16gb so it can easily hold all of my 1619 books with ease. So unless it decides to up and die, there is no reason for me to replace it.
If it did die, I would just go on Amazon or Ebay and get the last Note that Samsung made that had a replaceable battery.