Fairphone 3 Teardown
The more I look at this sort of project, the more I wonder if the &quot;hyper-repairable&quot; approach is worth it. How many of those phones will need repairs? How much more resources have to be spent, and what other trade-offs have to be made, to enable that repairability? (One of the trade-offs being less economy-of-scale because not as many people are willing to buy a bulky yet expensive phone.)<p>At which point is it better to just build 12 non-repairable phones instead of 10 repairable ones + some spare parts?<p>Take, for example, the user-serviceable battery with its thick casing. Given that you&#x27;d expect to swap it 1-2 times during the useful lifetime of a phone platform, does it need to be <i>that</i> easy to swap, or would it be OK to require some level of disassembly?<p>Not &quot;melt the glue, pull with suction cup, pry open, disconnect 15 connectors, loosen two sets of 8 screws (all different), remove all innards, replace some single-use parts&quot; level of disassembly, something like &quot;losen two screws, pry off the back, loosen two more screws, swap battery&quot; like with the Nexus 4: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;Nexus+4+Battery+Replacement&#x2F;13039" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ifixit.com&#x2F;Guide&#x2F;Nexus+4+Battery+Replacement&#x2F;130...</a><p>We don&#x27;t complain when we take a wristwatch to a watch shop at the corner to swap the battery every few years, waiting a few minutes and paying $5-10 for the service and another $5 for the battery. I would be perfectly OK with a phone that works like that: Repairable (especially commonly swapped parts), but not average-user-servicable.<p>Edit: Looking at the Fairphone 3, it doesn&#x27;t look as bad. I remember looking at the Fairphone 2, which looked like a brick made of cheap plastic all around.