The debate is charging up

Should Apple give power to the people by enabling battery swaps?

- CHARLOTTE HENRY

There is a story, well established in Apple folklore, that tells of Steve Jobs being presented with an iPod prototype. Jobs inspected it… before proceeding to plop it into a nearby fish tank. He then asked the – presumably rather shocked – engineers if they could see the air bubbles coming out of the now ruined device that they had spent untold hours developing. When they conceded they could, Jobs told them rather bluntly that this meant the iPod could be smaller.

This story isn’t just revealing of the often-brutal way Jobs ran his company, but it shows how his design aesthetic drove Apple’s technological development and decision making. The impact of this can be seen in all many of ways, one of which is, perhaps surprisingly, batteries.

The batteries that power your iPhone and other Apple devices are firmly secured inside. For all intents and purposes, they are not accessible to the average user and cannot be removed. This can be frustrating, even (especially) for those belonging to the right-to-repair community. How many times have we all been caught out as our iPhone loses power and we cannot charge it? How many times have you had to upgrade because the battery was ruining the functionality of an otherwise perfectly fine device? There is no easy way to put a spare one in.