Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.

Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it.

https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-sy...

I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.

> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.

There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.

It means that everybody copies Apple.

Just like 3.5mm headphone jacks and MicroSD card expandable storage.

They're hard to find even on lower end devices any more, despite more ports being a premium/pro feature in other market segments.

>> pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit.

Isn't worth the benefit for who? the manufacturers? sure.

Let's say a single manufacturer decides to offer some phones with a changeable battery, invests in their marketing, and they start becoming very popular. What happens next? Every manufacturer does the same, nobody earn a premium, total sales volume gets cut in half.

Manufacturers are chasing tends. What is superior about the stupid notch at the top of the iPhone and some competitors -- and what is superior about getting phones thinner and wider? They're too big to put in a pocket, you're not even netting anything with all that extra space. etc. The point is that phones are not getting "better" in any material way except maybe for picture quality from the cameras.

1. It's easier to design and build Ingress Protection without user-accessible compartments.

2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery.

3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone.

4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack.

5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.

The trade-off is basically having a thicker phone. Nobody except apple thus all manufacturers 6 month later want paper-thin phones. Never the actual consumers.

Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.

> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!

Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.

Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.

Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?

> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.

It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.

> but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it

The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.

> And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.

Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.

Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.

> why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.

> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.

I do not think they are colluding, but they are definitely chasing the same trends and users preferences don't seem to play that much role, unless it is one of the few essentials things. Effectively, users do not have much choice except in few areas. All phones being the same is not just because "everyone likes their phones to be unpractically huge or slow" .

Ah yes, “market knows best”.

Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.

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