This was originally a discussion on the Fairphone subreddit, where users almost unanimously responded with that they were fine with if a future Fairphone did not have a toolless removable battery as long as the battery was still easily replacable with minor disassembly. One of the main reasons being that modern devices generally have plenty of battery life on a single charge.
I remember carrying an extra battery to switch out when the first one died being a somewhat standard part of using feature phones, because their battery lives were terrible and chargers in public places weren’t really a thing yet. It was so common that some feature phones used to come with two batteries in the box and you could buy standalone battery chargers. Damn, I just realized: the golden age of feature phones is now over a decade ago.
What do you think? In terms of the niche of highly repairable devices, how important is a tool-less, instantly replaceable battery to you? Compared to if you had to unscrew the back panel or the screen assembly to access the battery. Would a laptop or a tablet with a toolless battery be more important to you than a phone, since those tend to have shorter battery life and be harder to find public charging spots for?
I guess another issue is barrier to replacement? Technologically inclined people will not find taking out a couple screws or removing a non-glued display assembly very difficult at all, but for the layman, even that could be a daunting task, possibly leading to more devices being thrown out because of dead batteries instead of being repaired? Though, this also seems more a problem with how society views repairing devices than a fault of the design itself.
On laptop you could hibernate and not loose the workflow
Good point, although my experience has been rather hit-and-miss with hibernation. There seem to be plenty laptop models where it simply doesn’t work.
I guess, you could research that before buying the laptop, though.
Same honestly. I would not trust any important running process to it. Also, it writes the contents of memory to the drive, which is an extra attack surface you have to worry about security wise, since when the computer wakes back up, the memory dump file is recoverable in software, or worse, can trivially be copied off the drive at any time if you don’t have full disk encryption. Though, this is also an issue to a slightly lesser degree with the Swap file if you don’t set it up to be encrypted with a random key at boot.