Apple could design products "the best they can be" within the constraints of having a user-replaceable battery, the old macbook pros where "the best they could be" and yet the battery was very easily replaceable, the RAM was easily upgradable, as well as the hard drive.

The fact that people have been trained to toss a perfectly working cellphone (built at great environmental expense, look up coltan and where tin comes from) is an unfortunate side effect of today's consumer culture, but it does not mean that a company should make it next to impossible to behave responsibly by making their products unserviceable and not upgradable (there is no reason to have soldered ram in a laptop, for example, but that's what you get nowadays).

Maybe next time you buy a car "designed to be the best it can be" it will come with integrated wheels and tires (which will perform a little bit better than user-replaceable tires) and will have to be tossed after 3-4 years once the tires wear out. Or once we all move to electric cars they will come with non-replaceable batteries as well, so you can just toss everything after a few years where the car doesn't last long enough to get to work.

do you think 0.01" is a worthy tradeoff for the environmental impact of having non-user-serviceable batteries? I also don't see replaceable batteries in ipads (which are plenty big) or in powerbooks (which are even bigger). It seems purely a commercial decision, and one that should not be rewarded by the market given its significant environmental impact.

have you looked at the iFixit teardowns at all? those people are pros at it, and they struggle a lot to disassemble the devices, and if they say "very risky" what chance does a "normal user" have of doing it successfully?

when due to gobs of glue pulling your battery has a very solid chance of breaking your device entirely (which by that point will be discontinued likely) that doesn't mean it's something that you would want to risk...

I don't think the samsung galaxy phones are *that* much thicker than other phones, or are they in your opinion?

I don't care about carrying multiple batteries, I care being able to have a phone that lasts as long as when it was new 5 years down the road, or even 10 years down the road, or that if I buy used I don't have to worry about how many charge cycles the previous user has gone through.

Phones nowadays are powerful enough that for normal (non-gaming) usage I don't see the need to upgrade them unless they die, and if you take care of your phone that's not going to happen for a long time, unless of course there is a forced failure due to the non-user-replaceable battery: same thing for laptops.

What is wrong with having a screwed in backplate and screwed in battery? why does it have to be glue-glue-glue-glue? there is no reason whatsoever, save maybe making the phone 0.01" thicker and 1 gram heavier which is not something worth sacrificing the environment for.

it kinda defeats the purpose to have a phone where you have to recharge it 2-3 times a day (which you will likely have to do some years down the road). I know, I know, "why should you keep using a phone that's more than 2 years old", see the comment above about environmental responsibility

Why is it that so few smartphones have replaceable batteries nowadays, it is such an environmentally irresponsible thing to do. Kudos to Samsung for still having them in the galaxy series, but seriously, every phone (and laptop) should have it. Wish Apple hadn't started this trend (for a company that supposedly prides itself as being environmental too...)

not so sure about relaxing if you get an unmanaged VPS... if you have an unmanaged VPS you automatically also have a full-time job trying to keep it secure.

I used to be a sysadmin for a webhosting company in the 90s (when things were not nearly as hostile on the net as they are now), and I would not use a VPS nowadays unless it was for business reasons and therefore I had enough time to keep a very close eye on it, for personal/fun stuff where I don't want to spend my time security admining, shared hosting is a lot less of a hassle (even if you have to go to different providers for different things)