Adrian Howard wrote:
And, a Todd says, if the majority of your customer base isn't replacing
batteries - is it customer focussed to add a feature that they don't
want or need?
If you take away the choice before they ever have it, how do you know
they want it? What if what the majority wants isn't actually good, or
is not good for the customer base as a whole? Is every design nuance
of the iPhone based on what the majority of the users wanted or what
Jobs/Ives and the bizdev people at Apple wanted?
The Android G1 has a battery that's easy to replace, which means I can
carry a spare on the road or buy an extra-capacity one. It's an option
I have, and there's enough people doing it that there are plenty of
aftermarket batteries available. It doesn't make the phone any less
reliable, I've dropped mine plenty of times and it's never fallen apart.
(It's certainly never caught on fire or imploded or any such thing.)
There are also enough iPhone owners interested in replacing the battery
in their iPhone/iPod that there are outfits selling replacement
batteries and upgrade kits online.
Is it customer focused to make it difficult for the user to change the
battery if the battery dies out of warranty and to make "upgrade to a
new model" the repair option? (And haven't we learn anything from the
planned obsolescence model of the US auto industry?)
It's certainly good business sense to make repair difficult -- when the
battery died in my 60G iPod, they wanted to give me %10 off a new iPod
if I'd "recycle" the old one. Let's see, I can pay $360 for the
current version of my iPod that holds slightly more music or replace a
battery that probably costs $10.
Which is the better deal for me and which is the better deal for Apple?
I ended up getting a battery online for less than $20 with shipping, if
you're handy with tools it's a trivial thing to replace. An Apple Store
Genius could easily swap out a battery in less than 5 minutes, test it,
and I'd have happily paid $25-50 for them to do it.
--
J. E. 'jet' Townsend, IDSA
Designer, Fabricator, Hacker
design: www.allartburns.org; hacking: www.flatline.net; HF: KG6ZVQ
PGP: 0xD0D8C2E8 AC9B 0A23 C61A 1B4A 27C5 F799 A681 3C11 D0D8 C2E8
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