The shunning of these in favour of a single sealed unit with the battery in it is utter proof of just how throwaway our society is, and I hate that. If I'm going to spend £400 on a phone I want it to last at least 5 years. If I'm daft enough to spend £800 on a phone like the next iPhone might cost, I want it to last 10 years or more.
My old phone was a Galaxy Note 4 Edge. It lasted me from 2014 to 2019 when the charging circuitry gave out and it wouldn't charge any battery even though I had spares. It was, I believe, the last Sammy to have a removable battery. The next model, the Galaxy S6 which came out in 2015, didn't have this and was applauded for finally having "proper industrial design" because it was a glass sandwich.
LG hung on to removable batteries in the V10 and V20 but by 2016 they had moved over to glass sandwiches as well.
My current phone is an LG V40. I like having a large phone because I have big clumsy trotters and prodding at a small one is not something I find easy or fun. I got it in 2019. I fully expect it to be dead by 2023 because the battery will give up and because it's a sealed unit it can't be replaced. So the whole phone will have to go. All because the battery is fucked.
This is why I will insist on keeping a desktop PC. Because if one part of it breaks or gives up you can, Godbear willing, swap it out for another one and carry on regardless, or recycle a part from a previous build. But with a laptop? Good luck with that. Apple in particular even bricks your devices with updates if you get them fixed by other people. I mean, I can understand them not honouring the warranty but actively bricking them? That's low. Meanwhile, tech from the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s can still be made to work today because it wasn't designed as being disposable consoomer shit. I have an Atari Mega STE from 1991. That was a sort of "last of line" ST model in that it included a built in hard drive (the older STs relied on external ones via a variation of SCSI) and a separate keyboard with a PC style flat pack case. They were aimed more at the business and commercial market and for that reason are piss easy to repair or maintain, relying on socketed chips rather than soldered ones. Mine still goes to this day though with a replaced floppy drive mechanism and an SD card solution in place of the hard drive.
I also recently acquired a Sharp VZ-2000 boombox of which I am inordinately fond because I've been getting back into cassette tapes and things. It's basically a portable music centre in that it has a vertical turntable for vinyls, a tape deck (and a quite good one - 0.055% wow and flutter, Dolby B, manual type select, manual record levels), a radio, and an aux port for plugging in something else. It would have cost £375.00 in 1983. That's £1,200 in today's money. It is still trucking, though I thought I might have it professionally serviced because it is older than I am and I'm not so confident with audio gear (I found a guide to disassembling it and it is reportedly like a puzzle box to take apart and see to and if I broke it I have no idea where I'll get spares) as I am with PCs and computers.
How many items of audio gear cost £1,200 today and could expect to still be working in 2060?
Very few, I suspect. You want that level of durability today, you need to spend five figures, possibly.
And this is why so-called "gaming laptops" are best avoided. You are paying over the odds for a less reliable, hotter, less repairable, less powerful system than a desktop of equivalent power, and whose portability is curtailed by the fact its battery life is still poor and so needs to be plugged in all the time.
