It’s the first time I hear about Fairphone. How they embrace repairability is amazing. I hope they’ll expand to North America at one point.

That would be quite utopian, however I feel such a thing would be incredible hard to achieve. Different form factors require different layouts, space is much tighter and should not be wasted. In desktop PC land, you have plenty of room to fit things as you want.
It may not be showstopper, but it’s certainly a challenge. And of course, companies won’t like it :P

I’ve had this thought in the past, but upon further research, on a smartphone scale it runs into a few issues.

A PC has relatively divorced components because it has the space to accommodate slots, but that already goes out the window for laptops; the best you get is RAM and maybe MXM. People generally want slimmer and more battery-dense products, so motherboards with everything soldered can manage to be absolutely tiny (see: newer macbooks) compared to ones where everything is slotted. Newer smartphones don’t just last longer on battery because they’re bigger; much of the internal volume of a smartphone is now to hold the battery as everything around it shrinks. Modular connectors cost volume and money, for a use case where both are at a premium; most people would generally rather buy a non-modular phone that gets better battery life and offers better water resistance.

As evidenced by the Note 7, batteries also need a decent bit of structural integrity around them to be safe, and the best way to accomplish that is just a 2-part box that’s been glued together. This has the side effect of making water resistance easier and slimming the phone down. Any swappable battery inherently has worse water resistance and volumetric efficiency than a pouch csll in a glued box, and manufacturers value both good battery life and things not blowing up.

Smartphone CPUs (or rather SoCs) contain not only the CPU bit, but important parts of the radio, camera processing, location processing, and GPU. Therefore Android ones come with driver packs from manufacturers that make it all work, but if you’re swapping components around you need to make sure your sensors like cameras have a way to install drivers (and a general compatibility standard); which means at best you’re swapping pretty big chunks of a smartphone at a time.

Even without forced obsolescence, smartphones have a relatively fixed lifespan of ~5-8 years due to software upgrades, how carriers buy up new radio frequencies, physical damage, battery degradation, vibration motor wear, camera focusing mechanism wear (from vibrations) and in the case of AMOLED display wear. This isn’t a knock on standardization, but you can already achieve this lifespan out of a smartphone if you use something like Advanced Charging Controller to limit battery charge to 80%.

If you look at Project Ara (which is the most extreme case of modularity), it failed because of all of the above. The battery life, structural integrity, cost efficiency, compatibility, and waterproofness would all be awful compared to a standard phone.

In general, that’s definitely a problem too. Just look at Windows 11. Now M$ wants you to buy a new laptop such that their OS can run at all. I use a >10y old laptop with Linux. No performance issues for everyday use.

That’s pretty much how it used to work.

The main reasons why it changed are:

• Space, as a connector is slightly bigger than a soldered connection, and the battery itself has to be slightly bigger and stronger too to be safe to transport and handle without being protected by the phone’s case.

• Water resistance; it’s far easier to make a phone’s case waterproof by just glueing the whole thing shut than having to use seals and gaskets and such to make it possible to open and close it at will.

My last two phones both got slow as their batteries got bad, and were basically like new after replacing them. My current phone doesn’t allow swapping the batteries.

For someone thrifty, being able to replace the battery can extend a phone’s life 2x or more. Even if you don’t want to keep using it, you could still resell it or give it to someone who doesn’t need the newest phones. Non-swappable batteries are a form of planned obsolescence, in addition to just being more compact and probably a little cheaper.

How is “water proof” defined in the legislation? Apple carefully says their devices are water resistant. There is a possibility that it will not qualify.

It’s not just Apple. Almost all manufacturers offer water resistant flagship phones (and mid-rangers). ASUS, Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei, Sony, Samsung, Vivo, Honor…

However, the phones are NOT water-proof. From none of these (neither Apple). They are water-resistant, which is a big difference and they are just required to not be damaged if submerged underwater for 30 minutes, 1.5m, if they want IP68.

Phones and smartwatches are not resistant to condensation or water getting in – water can still get in, as they’re NOT impervious (smartwatches if they have speakers), which is actually required for calling your device truly “water proof”. Water resistant is literally two steps below that.

There has been some marketing claiming water proof devices. This was just wrong.