DigitalSandbox

I was listening to the Episode 41 of the MacBreak Weekly podcast which had a pretty heated discussion of the iPhone. One of the things that I keep hearing people harp on ? and it was brought up in this episode ? is Apple’s choice of a non-replaceable battery.

Let me go on record and say, “I don’t get it.” If you want to moan about low battery life ? something that may or may not be an issue ? I could understand. But whining about the lack of a replaceable battery? I can’t understand it. Maybe it’s just me, but I have never replaced a cell phone battery. Not once.

In fact, the only time that I have even taken the battery out was to insert the SIM card or restart the phone after a crash. But buying a new battery to replace the old one is something I have never done. Nor have I ever had a need to have an extra battery handy to swap it out with when mine dies. And that is a pattern I have repeated through 8 phones (both mine and the Wife’s). Many of them were used for longer than two years.

Are there a lot of people that are constantly replacing batteries in their phones? I don’t think that there are. If it was a common problem that people needed to be replacing there phone batteries I think that Apple would have allowed that, but I don’t think there is a large group of people that have this issue.

The iPod has a sealed battery and I don’t hear large numbers of people complaining that they can’t replace the battery. I know that some people have had this very complaint, but it is a small percentage of the user base. My brother has a 1st gen iPod that has been going strong for well over 5 years. I’ve never heard him complain about battery life.

I know that there will be a percentage of people that will have battery issues with their new iPhones that could be easily resolved with a quick battery change. But I believe that percentage will be small. Yeah, Apple could save themselves some money by allowing a quick battery change, but they decided that a solid robust design was more important than the amount of money they would save by offering a replaceable battery.

If it is a big problem and Apple ends up spending a lot of money to replace and then refurb the iPhones I expect we will see a replaceable battery in the 2.0 version. But all this whining and complaining over something that is not likely to be an issue to the vast majority of users is pretty pointless.