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John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering, has said that the goal isn’t to make iPhones easier to repair, but to make them less likely to break. That sounds noble, but in reality it’s not that simple.
Speaking with content creator Marques Brownlee in an interview published on X on May 29, Ternus told Brownlee, “I think it’s helpful to think about the end of the book. So, on the one hand, imagine you have a product that never breaks down. And on the other hand, imagine you have a product that might not be very reliable, but is very easy to repair. The product that never breaks down is obviously better for the customer and better for the environment.”
Yes, but there’s a problem. And thankfully, Ternus himself explains the effect: “If you want to extend the life of an iPhone or any phone, you need to replace the battery, right? Because batteries wear out.”
That’s right. A battery that never wears out. or Having an easily replaceable battery extends the life of an otherwise perfectly normal device. So what’s the problem? Water ingress is the most cited cause of iPhone failures to date. People want waterproof iPhones! Yes, this is now a reality with the latest iP68-rated iPhone 15 series, which Ternus called “really impressive” and the result of “years of trying to get better and better in terms of minimizing failures.” But the downside, according to the Apple exec, is that “to get to that point, you have to engineer a lot of things, like seals and glues to make it work that way, and it makes battery repairs a little bit harder.”
So a waterproof iPhone is ideal, because it won’t succumb to smartphones’ biggest enemy: the devil’s drink (i.e. water). But achieving that protection also means it’s harder to take apart and repair, especially to fit a new battery, and it could shorten the device’s lifespan in other ways. You could call it the IP68 paradox…
$5 – I spoke with John Ternus, Apple’s head of hardware engineering. It was interesting to hear directly from the top why iPhones are so hard to repair. Take a listen pic.twitter.com/O9QsQOx4SPMay 29, 2024
There are a number of different elements to unpack in Brownlee’s interview. First, while Apple’s goal of “products that never break” is laudable, achieving it in one dimension seems to directly impact its viability in others. Alex Blake, a frequent TechRadar contributor and Apple expert, said: “Ternus is right. Something that stands the test of time and never needs repair uses fewer resources than something that’s easy to repair but needs repair in the first place. At the end of the day, reduce > reuse > recycle. Getting a replacement part means having to make another part, so if you can avoid that by having a product that never needs repair, that’s definitely a better goal.”
Absolutely. Now, let’s consider a crucial part of the iPhone: the battery. We all know that lithium-ion batteries have a limited lifespan. According to popular trade-in site SellCell, this is the number one reason people trade their phones in. And the power packs, which are high in cobalt, nickel, and manganese, are pretty toxic to dispose of when they’re no longer usable. If you don’t want to shell out for a whole new iPhone, you’ll almost certainly know that Apple will replace your worn-out phone battery for a fee, but there’s another option: Apple’s Battery Replacement Service. Might be I was left on the side of the road.
You may have heard of an established technology called Powerfoyle that uses only a light source to power your devices. It’s made with non-toxic, responsibly sourced materials, and it will allow Apple to finally eliminate batteries, offsetting the extra charge it charges for opening up your iPhone to remove the old battery. Powerfoyle is already on the market in audio products: the Urbanista Malibu headphones, Urbanista Los Angeles, and Urbanista Phoenix (the first ever light-powered earbuds) all use Powerfoyle for charging, as do Adidas’ RPT-02 SOL and Philips’ A6219 GO.
Are we talking about sunshine?
So why don’t we rely on big shiny things above our heads to power our phones? Well, brands are trying. Samsung was actually the first to bring a solar-powered phone to market in 2009 with its “Solar Guru” or Guru E1107, but the phone could only provide 5-10 minutes of talk time with one hour of solar charging. In 2011, Apple patented a system to use solar energy to power portable devices like laptops, tablets, and phones, but 13 years later, it has yet to be implemented in any of Apple’s consumer technology, let alone its most profitable device: the iPhone.
In 2016, various brands spoke honestly about why mobile phones aren’t yet powered by sunlight, admitting that harvesting enough light energy to power a phone is still a long way off. Why? One of the main obstacles cited was the limited size of the back cover of a phone that a solar panel can be placed on, limiting the range at which the battery can be charged. Powerfoil cells are essentially solar cells without a glass cover, more like skin than the kind you’d find attached to the roof of a house, but still need to be placed on a physical surface exposed to the elements.
In April 2024, Apple filed a patent for a removable battery for the same device that Apple recently tried to power in solar power in 2011. This isn’t conclusive evidence that Tim Cook has given up on solar energy — Apple files thousands of patents a year, many of which have yet to see the light of day — but it’s hard to say that Apple has given up on solar energy. do not have They’re working on a solar-powered iPhone, but that’s something you don’t hear much about these days.
Is there anything environmentally special about the battery pack in Apple’s 2024 patent application? Nothing in particular. It’s a rectangular core, an outer shell, and positive and negative core terminals. The application’s images focus on the concept of a standardized slot (think one battery to rule them all), not on any special new technology in the power supply unit itself. And replaceable batteries don’t solve lofty environmental goals. It could be argued that replaceable parts would lead to more points of failure and more replacement parts rather than fewer, which means more iPhones will fail, but for different reasons.
Let’s take it back (Let’s sing it back)
I’d argue that efforts to provide repairability are still preferable to the “we ran diagnostics and found one small fault in your iPhone’s circuitry that we can’t fix. If you’re still under warranty, we’ll give you a new phone” instructions from Apple’s experts, as I experienced with my iPhone 11 Pro late last year (a strange issue unrelated to water intrusion). Ultimately, Apple has to strike a balance: how to make phones last long enough that they don’t need to be repaired, while still avoiding completely discarding them if something goes wrong. But at least to some extent, repairability is important. teeth This is more environmentally friendly than the above scenario, since replacing just a small faulty part in your iPhone would have been better than throwing the whole thing away.
While Apple aficionados might question whether repairing tiny parts is economically feasible (as it requires highly skilled engineers to do the work manually), other smaller companies have adopted this “cradle-to-cradle” approach. This type of manufacturing means that every part that goes into a product is made in-house. Outside They can be used again, or even repurposed into an entirely different item. See the modular, easy-to-maintain Bang & Olufsen Beosound Theatre, which I listened to in 2022 (below). And the eco-conscious Danish AV specialist has recently been at it again with the 2024 re-launch of its vertical CD player. A triumphant nod to TechRadar’s Sustainability Week 2024, the project involved finding units already out there, buying them back, dismantling them, servicing them, re-anodizing them (in a leaner way than the ’90s) and re-releasing them.
Let’s go back for a moment to the idea of swappable batteries in smartphones. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking idea. I loved the original Nokia 3310 from 2000. Today, you can also buy the cheaper 2022 Nokia 5710 XpressAudio (which has a built-in Bluetooth earphone), as well as the August 2023 Nokia 130 and 150, both of which have swappable 1,450mAh batteries, which is nice.
Until now, there have never been any iPhones with batteries that users could install or update themselves – in fact, the last time Apple put a user-replaceable battery in one of their products was in 2009 with the Apple MacBook.
Sure, an iPhone that never breaks down sounds like a great idea. But if by “never breaks down” you mean “totally waterproof, but hard to open when the battery dies,” it’s a double-edged sword. And the Cupertino giant may have a hard time justifying it in the future. Nobody (especially Apple) wants lithium-ion batteries to remain trapped and slowly corrode inside IP68-rated phones that were discarded because they were too difficult (or too expensive) to handle. So giving consumers both of what they want – a phone that can withstand water ingress but is also environmentally acceptable in terms of its main components and their lifespan – is a tricky balance.
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