2008: Year of the Apple iPhone battery rot
By Stefan Constantinescu on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 9:44 PM PST In Apple
Robert Scoble’s kid Patrick has an iPhone that isn’t lasting as long as it was on day one, something that batteries always seem to do. Mobile phones with multimedia capabilities inside tend to wear out batteries quite rapidly. I’ve had my N95 since August and I’m already up to my second battery. What will happen when people who own the iPhone can’t make it through the day? Will 2008 be the year that a huge wave of consumers sue Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for their faulty batteries like they did back in 2005?
Apple fans are going to tell me that for $70 they can get their iPhone battery replaced. Fantastic news my friend, but how are you going to make phone calls when you’re mobile is in the shop?
Apple fans are going to tell me that $30 a year will get you Apple Care so you can have a loaner while Apple fixes your device, to which I say how much is too much to pay to be apart of this cult?
$35 shipped from Amazon will get me a new battery for my Nokia (NYSE: NOK) N95 and it will take maybe 5 seconds to swap it. This isn’t only Nokia only feature, lots of devices let you swap batteries. Maybe the iPhone 2 will be better … who are we kidding!
[image via Greenpeace]
A couple of other notes:
You probably won’t get back your unit from the battery exchange, but a refurb. This could be good or bad. Good if it’s better than yours. Bad if it has a poorer screen, reception or whatever.
It’s a bad idea to rent the loaner phone, because it comes without insurance. Already reports on the web of poor users who dropped or got the loaner wet… and then owe Apple $250 in replacement cost. Pretty expensive battery replacement.
IPhone has always been a closed type of device. Until fairly recently there was no news of possibility to develop software for it, no GPS, no video recording, the I-can’t-change-the-battery-myself problem… Too bad, ’cause it looks great.
Oh, and love the “who are we kidding” ending
I just think it’s a shame that consumers as a mass are responding so fast to marketing but react quite dull to products which are purposefully thrown into the market with defects that should have been tweaked before release. It seems to me that many companies ( and Apple is on the forefront of these ) calculate with a few dissatisfied customers disregarding them as negligible.
I can see those marketing gimps at Cupertino go:
” Let’s make the battery unchangeable so we can charge those lamers for replacement , they won’t care… muahahahaha”
and the sad thing is they are right.
I think the “replaceable battery” is a non-issue.
Because of its use of codecs for video and avoidance of present memory-hog G3 chips, the iphone already offers superior battery life to almost any other smartphone.
Want a replaceable battery?
• Try the Mybat External rechargeable $39.95
• Try the M-Station Mophie Juice Pack which fits onto the iphone like a case.
• Try the portable iPowerRush Charger $29.95
• Try the Lenmar PowerPort (PPU2100) external battery $49.95
Or try the $20.00 replacement do-it-yourself batteries available on the web, or pay $5.00 more and they will replace it for you.
The anti-Apple cult seems to be more zealous than the pro-Apple cult these days.
Taking a personal stab at the execs in Cupertino was cute….albeit completely speculative and entirely unrealistic – in terms of typical application/product development processes and in terms of Apple’s user-serviced-hardware philosophy in general.
I hope your little venting session helped you feel better. I’m sure someone can poke equivalent holes in the design of whatever device you carry.
Hi,
Please help me out with, http://aamirrajpoot.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/iphone-battery-the-dead-block/
i have posted my all details over there, and its about bad side of replacing the battery.
AAmIr