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| What's the real reason that laptop batteries are made not-accessible? |
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| IanB:
--- Quote from: james_s on December 04, 2021, 08:10:52 pm ---After that happened a few times I stopped updating anything at all. --- End quote --- I'd prefer to do that, but some app vendors prevent it. I have one or two apps that refuse to open until you update them to the latest version. |
| SilverSolder:
--- Quote from: tooki on December 04, 2021, 08:47:46 pm --- --- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 04, 2021, 03:32:00 pm --- --- Quote from: james_s on December 03, 2021, 04:20:08 am ---[...] Planned obsolescence is engineering that has no other function than to deliberately limit lifespan [...] --- End quote --- Doing planned obsolescence by making the battery uneconomical to replace has an element of 'plausible deniability' about it... the consumer cannot easily identify who is to blame for his/her predicament, and will generally just pony up for a new device. --- End quote --- But the company most commonly cited in such situations, Apple, actually offers perfectly economical battery replacements. Go online, schedule a service appointment, bring in the phone or computer, and 15 minutes later you walk out with your device with a fresh battery installed (and a cleaning inside and out), for the same price of a battery for the models years ago whose batteries were user replaceable. (So considering inflation, the laptop batteries are actually cheaper now than years ago.) --- End quote --- Yes, Apple has very enlightened policies in this area. For example, my wife insisted on a battery replacement for her ailing iPad. They simply gave her a brand new iPad (same model) for the battery replacement cost (less than $100). Apple appears to be not so interested in opening the sealed devices and replacing their batteries, with all the time, risks, and problems that entails... and managed to impress even an Apple skeptic like me! :D |
| SilverSolder:
We have had the "What is Planned Obsolescence" discussion many times... Wikipedia has a pretty reasonable definition that appears to be backed by good sources: In economics and industrial design, planned obsolescence (also called built-in obsolescence or premature obsolescence) is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time upon which it decrementally functions or suddenly ceases to function, or might be perceived as unfashionable. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long-term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases (referred to as "shortening the replacement cycle"). It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force people to purchase functional replacements. Planned obsolescence tends to work best when a producer has at least an oligopoly. Before introducing a planned obsolescence, the producer has to know that the customer is at least somewhat likely to buy a replacement from them (see brand loyalty). In these cases of planned obsolescence, there is an information asymmetry between the producer, who knows how long the product was designed to last, and the customer, who does not. When a market becomes more competitive, product lifespans tend to increase. For example, when Japanese vehicles with longer lifespans entered the American market in the 1960s and 1970s, American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: Ben321 on December 02, 2021, 10:07:00 pm ---1. Same goes for phone batteries. I see no technical reason why they can't make batteries easily removable anymore. They say it's because it helps to make these modern slim computers even slimmer, but I don't see how that actually relates to it at all. 2.0 One thing it seems criminals learned was that a computer or phone that you powered down from a menu option in the Windows start menu (or equivalent action for a cellphone) isn't actually shut down. It's simply put into a very low power mode in which even the OS isn't running, but it's not completely shut down. This means RAM memory is maintained in a powered on state so the physical RAM chips still store data from what you did while actually using the device --- End quote --- --- Quote from: Ben321 on December 02, 2021, 11:11:51 pm ---3. While computers do shut down completely as far as running in a user-accessible way, some components remain powered. If your laptop has an Ethernet port, it remains powered so as to be able to accept a power-on signal sent over the network. 2.1 I'm pretty sure that the RAM in a laptop also remains powered when you shut it off. It gets written over with the next time you boot the computer, but it doesn't get cleared just because you went to the start menu and selected shutdown to turn off the computer. 2.2 The only way to clear a laptop's memory is to completely remove its battery. And I've heard some claims on other websites that a computer's coin-cell battery (sometimes called a clock battery or CMOS battery) can keep the RAM powered as well, in order to maintain all of the data stored in RAM. --- End quote --- 1. Nonsense. Extra layers of housing add physical bulk. And see my separate reply above about waterproofing. 2. Nonsense. RAM consumes power, enough so that phone makers weigh the RAM capacity vs the power use, since extra RAM would unnecessarily reduce battery life. A CMOS battery would quickly die if it had to maintain system RAM. Keeping RAM alive is power-hungry enough that many laptops have a “hibernate” mode where the contents of RAM are written to disk, so that the hardware can fully shut down, but resume afterwards as if it had been put to sleep. 3. Wake-on-LAN and “lights off” system management do rely on special hardware, but those features are a) generally off by default; b) rarely used outside of large enterprise; and c) even more rarely used on laptops, because enabling them while on battery will severely reduce battery life. (Often, they’re configured to do it only when on AC power.) But regardless, this is special hardware in the Ethernet controller, which then essentially gets to push the power button to turn on the system. There’s nothing nefarious or mysterious about this. |
| tooki:
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 04, 2021, 08:58:27 pm --- --- Quote from: tooki on December 04, 2021, 08:47:46 pm --- --- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 04, 2021, 03:32:00 pm --- --- Quote from: james_s on December 03, 2021, 04:20:08 am ---[...] Planned obsolescence is engineering that has no other function than to deliberately limit lifespan [...] --- End quote --- Doing planned obsolescence by making the battery uneconomical to replace has an element of 'plausible deniability' about it... the consumer cannot easily identify who is to blame for his/her predicament, and will generally just pony up for a new device. --- End quote --- But the company most commonly cited in such situations, Apple, actually offers perfectly economical battery replacements. Go online, schedule a service appointment, bring in the phone or computer, and 15 minutes later you walk out with your device with a fresh battery installed (and a cleaning inside and out), for the same price of a battery for the models years ago whose batteries were user replaceable. (So considering inflation, the laptop batteries are actually cheaper now than years ago.) --- End quote --- Yes, Apple has very enlightened policies in this area. For example, my wife insisted on a battery replacement for her ailing iPad. They simply gave her a brand new iPad (same model) for the battery replacement cost (less than $100). Apple appears to be not so interested in opening the sealed devices and replacing their batteries, with all the time, risks, and problems that entails... and managed to impress even an Apple sceptic like me! :D --- End quote --- There are various circumstances where they do a device swap instead (like if the battery is not in stock, or a battery is swollen). In that case they give you a refurb unit, and your old one goes back to the depot for refurbishment, to become a refurb for someone else. The refurb process always includes a new display, housing, and battery, so they do appear brand new, though they are not. (Only when a model is absolutely brand new, so new that no refurb units exist yet, do they actually swap out using brand new ones.) But I assure you that when possible, the stores do a battery swap in your own device. I’ve done it a few times over the past few years with phones and my MacBook. |
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