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Fixed battery and removal of headphone jack and SD card slots were 1000% anti-consumer practices designed to cost you more money and make your device lifespan as short as possible. I don't see the battery problem going away - why enable your phone to last twice or three times as long when they can just force you to have to buy a new device when the battery is shot? At least we got our card slots and jacks back (mostly).
I am also salty that phones USED to have IR blasters and they don't anymore. IR LEDs cost next to nothing, another feature that was amazing but thrown away to save 5c per unit.
I don't think that this is a conspiracy by phone manufacturers to force purchases of phone hardware.
All kinds of devices use fixed batteries these days, not just smartphones. It's cheaper, lighter, makes the device stronger, avoids them having to deal with "User X bought a counterfeit battery that then caught fire" -- that's a real issue for lithium batteries, unlike traditional alkaline/NiMH-type removeable batteries. Virtually the only device class I can think of where removable lithium batteries are the norm is high-end flashlights -- anything on [email protected] probably supports removable 18650s or similar. I have gone out of my way to get a lot of devices that use AA batteries or maybe 18650s, but there are just tons of products, including in highly-competitive, low-barrier-to-entry industries like gamepads, where it'd be impossible to form a cartel to refuse to offer a device with removable batteries. And yet they've mostly moved to fixed batteries. There is no industry convention for removable, BMS-enabled, lithium batteries the way AA or the like were traditionally used in devices.
If there were a cartel driving this against consumer wishes as a whole, you would have just smartphones doing the fixed battery thing, not the consumer electronics industry as a whole.
If it were cartel-driven, I'd also expect to see, in a situation like that, manufacturers making hefty use of price discrimination -- like, think of how some laptop vendors charge a premium for devices with a lot of RAM when they have soldered RAM. But in the market today, the differences in battery size are minimal. Google makes a "large" version of the Pixel, and they barely bump the battery up, even with a slightly larger screen.
Instead, it was associated with the shift across consumer electronics to non-removable batteries with the move to lithium batteries, which is what you'd expect if sketchy batteries were a problem.
Phones in particular have a space and weight premium, so compared to a lot of devices that aren't held in your hand, using removable NiMH batteries or the like is more of an issue.
I was super stoked to find out my OnePlus Open has an IR blaster! I missed it on my old galaxy note 4. It is surprisingly convenient, and doubles as a fun way to mess with TVs in public spaces.
I can get the battery replaced on my phone for a fraction of the money it would cost me to buy a new phone. So I have to take it in to the shop for an hour. Big deal. I can do that once every few years. And I can still use wired headphones with my phone even though it doesn't have a headphone jack. Sheesh, I wonder how that works.
The biggest anti-consumer practice to make your device lifespan as short as possible is whatever software update practices the manufacturer has. Annual major versions increase hardware requirements - I can tell every day how my 5 year old phone is getting long in the tooth. Lack of long-term software support is another way to make sure the average user buys a new device well before the old device has reached end of life.