I have never used a phone (nor a laptop) where the battery wasn't easily replaceable and to be honest I can't really imagine using one. Batteries can (and do) go bad and start expanding. Using a device where the battery isn't easily accessible feels absolutely distressing.
There have been plenty of smartphones with replaceable batteries. It's just in the last couple of years that everyone has given up on them. I'm still using a Galaxy Note 4 with a replaceable battery. I haven't replaced it yet, but just a few weeks ago I had to pull the battery to get the phone out of a reboot loop. (That was the first time I had seen that with this phone.) If I hadn't been able to remove the battery, I would have have had to wait for the phone to drain it completely and shut off.
Except user replaceable batteries were the norm until recently, and we did not have the situation that you describe. More importantly, user replaceable batteries also allows mobile phone stores to offer dirt cheap replacement services, equivalent to jewelry stores offering to replace watch batteries.
Those replaceable batteries were also much lower power (in terms of capacity and max current) than the batteries of today. My iPhone today has roughly the equivalent of an 18650, compared to the Razr I had 15 years ago, which has roughly the equivalent of a AA.
For sure, I would love it if my phone had replaceable batteries. I carry a couple 18650s and 16340s in my backpack for my flashlights. But there are a ton of downsides to having them, particularly in a smartphone.
This is just another example of consumer hostile planned obsolescence. Rechargeable batteries are consumables. Most cell phones used to have removable batteries so when it wouldn't hold a charge any more you could easily replace. Now most phones have integrated batteries which can only be replaced with an expensive and inconvenient visit to a repair center.
Nowadays? Never, obviously. The odds of me breaking the phone are so large, and the tools I need specialized enough, that I need a new phone on stand-by anyway. No point replacing the battery if I already bought a new one just in case I break the old one by trying to do something as weird as replacing a wear-heavy part.
So it has fallen out of style. There is no market for spare batteries and using them as range extenders is not common use. It seems like an outlandish thing to do now.
I think I went through three batteries on my Galaxy Note 2 (first Android phone) before upgrading. Apps dropping support became a problem... nothing wrong with the hardware at the time where I felt forced to trash it. Anyway, carrying an extra battery for long travel days was not a weird thing to do. I also remember non-tech people having spare batteries for Nokias (when they became more capable; not when the only use was calling your mom to say you were going to a friend's after school).
Your experience is either imaginary or ridiculously atypical. Its literally not a real thing. Devices with replaceable batteries don't normally fall apart unless you are in the habit of dropping them all the time. This isn't a design consideration or a justification.
Phones are designed without user replaceable batteries because it makes it slightly cheaper to manufacture, generates revenue from users who require replacement, and makes it less desirable to keep an existing device vs buying a new one.
There are quite a few good phones with a user replaceable battery, but that is just not what consumers want most of the time. The LG v20 is the most recent one that comes to mind
No one was saying that it is impossible to create a phone with a replaceable battery. There have been phones with replaceable batteries for four decades.
The argument is that the market doesn’t care.
If the market cared about replaceable batteries why are all phone manufacturers creating high end phones with none replaceable batteries? It’s not just Apple it’s the entire industry.
Engineering is about tradeoffs. The phone you linked to proves exactly that - the phone is bulkier and heavier than the state of the art phones from Samsung
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