And how many people end up upgrading the battery is yet another quality. I would suspect a small fraction of phones with upgradeable batteries actually gets battery upgrades. Having upgradeable internal components generally correlate strongly with recyclability... however once again, in my pessimistic estimation, only a small percentage of recycling actually amounts to anything.
I only paid $250 for my used iPhone 11, and that's not even as old as they go.
I imagine most of HN is shielded from the flourishing secondary market of old phones because they can easily afford the latest and greatest (counting even a couple years back). But at least where I live in Indiana, there's a pretty thriving ecosystem of yard sales and reuse, and people are not just going to simply throw away a functioning phone. An iPhone that's almost a decade old still has value, and there are repair shops that could put a new battery in it to keep it going for a little while yet.
If you don't think batteries get upgraded, what do you think happens? Do people really just throw their phones in the garbage?
Also, I haven't been on Android in a few years, so maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a problem anymore, but it certainly was in the past.
In terms of phones, I largely disagree with the conventional wisdom that repairable, upgradeable, Androids are better for the environment, more cost effective for the user, etc than iPhones. It's true you can't upgrade the battery yourself, but that's a different quality from whether the battery can be upgraded. And iPhones have a much higher resale value, so they're going to end up in landfills more slowly. I personally bought and use a used iPhone 11 that came with a replaced battery, and it's great! Old iPhones have a long useful life after trade in and resale, even if people buying new models here don't see it.
So I'd love to know how much this is the case for laptops like these as well.
For example, "repairable" is useful to the extent that repairs actually need to happen, and it seems to mean "self" repairable, though again that's a different dimension from whether a service center can do it. And whether you need self repairable is not a thing about longevity, environmental impact (since repair centers suffice for that), but rather convenience and possibly price. But price isn't the factor here because the thing is so damn expensive to begin with.
"Upgradeable" is useful if you want to.... improve a piece of it but not the chassis? Screen? How necessary is this? Do people really do that? I've been happy to use a laptop for half a decade or more, until finally upgrading everything all at once.