Bjorn Trollowsky

How did we get here?

John Ternus, Apple's SVP of Hardware Engineering, explains why Apple deliberately made the iPhone harder to repair, and why the math says it was worth it: In a conversation with MKBHD, John frames the design challenge by asking you to imagine two extremes: "Sometimes for me I find it helpful to kind of think about the book ends. Like if you imagine a product that never fails, right? That just doesn't fail. And on the other end, a product that maybe isn't very reliable but is super easy to repair." His position is clear: "Product that never fails is obviously better for the customer. It's better for the environment." When pushed on whether infinite repairability and infinite durability have to be mutually exclusive, John acknowledges they aren't always, but explains why the tension is real, using the iPhone battery as an example. Batteries wear out. If you want to extend the life of the product, they need to be replaced. But in the early days of iPhone, one of the most common failures wasn't the battery, it was water: "Where you drop it in the pool or you, you know, spill your drink on it and the unit fails. And so, we've been making strides over all those years to get better and better and better in terms of minimizing those failures." That work led Apple to an IP68 rating, the point where customers fish their phones out of lakes after two weeks and find them still working. But there was a cost to achieving that level of durability: "To get the product there, you've got to design a lot of seals, adhesives, other things to make it perform that way, which makes it a little harder to do that battery repair." That's the deliberate tradeoff. Apple chose tighter seals and stronger adhesives, knowing it would make battery replacement more difficult, because the reliability gains were worth it. John argues the math backs this decision: "It's objectively better for the customer to have that reliability and it's ultimately better for the planet because the failure rates since we got to that point have just dropped. It's plummeted, right? The number of repairs that need to happen and every time you're doing a repair, you're bringing in new materials to replace whatever broke." His conclusion reframes the entire repairability debate: "You can actually do the math and figure out there's a threshold at which if I can make it this durable, then it's better to have it a little bit harder to repair because it's going to net out."

This is not beyond our abilities

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