Last time I had it done with my current phone, it was done in less than 15 minutes.
Extra materials are not negligible - at the scale of the iPhone, even 1% of additional material is vast.
In any case, is not only the extra materials that are the problem, it is that phones with a battery compartment are much more fragile, harder to waterproof, etc, and so they fail sooner anyway regardless of whether the battery is changed.
Battery compartments are a red herring. It is already easy and economical to replace an iPhone battery.
People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
> People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.
When you spend 100% of your time in a technical field, and deal with people who are technically savvy, you think everybody is capable of "easily" replacing a battery, or knowing that it can be done relatively easy.
There are millions of people who are completely unaware that getting your battery replaced is an easy thing for someone who knows how to do it. What do most non-technical people do when their iphone battery starts dying a lot faster? They don't google, "iphone battery repair" or look for a local repair shop to do this, they take it right back to the Apple store. What do you think the Apple store employee is going to tell them? "Hey this battery is dead, you should probably just upgrade the phone."
Extra materials are not negligible - at the scale of the iPhone, even 1% of additional material is vast.
In any case, is not only the extra materials that are the problem, it is that phones with a battery compartment are much more fragile, harder to waterproof, etc, and so they fail sooner anyway regardless of whether the battery is changed.
Battery compartments are a red herring. It is already easy and economical to replace an iPhone battery.
People discarding otherwise serviceable phones because they have been misinformed about the ease of battery replacement is the real problem.