I remember, and I’m gen z. And some higher end laptops had two battery slots so you can hot swap the batteries without turning it off.
Those were the days. Everyone talks about how smartphones nowadays get people addicted to instant gratification and convenience, but IMO the ability to swap out the battery when it died was a level of instant convenience we had decades ago that modern devices are severely lacking. Having to tether your phone to a battery bank while on the go is nowhere near as good as just popping the back cover and replacing the battery.
I had one of those laptops (a PowerBook). Yes, it had two slots that could be used for batteries. But that meant taking out the CD drive. Modern laptops don’t have that anymore so I’m not sure where the room for another battery would come from. The other thing is, it lasted at best 4-5 hours on one battery when doing light work. Its modern counterparts last 10-15 hours on one battery.
The same thing actually happened with phones. But now we literally can’t spend half a minute not looking at them and we also play energy hungry games on them etc. You can still get a phone with replaceable battery though, e.g. Fairphone or Volla.
my last phone with a replaceable battery was a motorola smartphone with android. i had two batteries i swapped out when the other discharged, it was great.
but no, we have to have disposable planned obsolescence phones that can’t do what they used to anymore a couple years from now.
My LG V20 has a replaceable battery. I’ve been through 3 of them. It’s why I’m still using it instead of one of the garbage options available now.
Galaxy S3 had swappable battery, micro sd, headphone jack, and a freaking IR blaster.
Same with the S4. I still use mine, it’s on it’s third battery now and is running LineageOS.
Same with my old Samsung Note. In addition, you could buy a bulky aftermarket battery that had way more capacity.
Yup, that’s what I did with mine… forget the capacity but it would go 3 or 4 days on a charge. Even came with a thicker back panel on the phone because the original wouldn’t fit.
More than that I remember when you could MOD your phone
You had some money burning a hole in your pocket and/or were good at tinkering? You could change the casing of your phone, add gaudy flashing LEDs, etc
Real nerds like me would wire LEDs into circuits on the phone so that when it rang they triggered. Combine that with some of the circuits from the “baby’s first circuits” book and then you have a ring of LEDs around the screen that chase each other like the knight rider car when it rings. You can see them because OF COURSE you swapped the case with translucent plastic like a 1998 N64 or gameboy color. The resale value is now $8
Some designer asshole was like “b-b-b-b-but that’s not good design!!! My training says so! Myspace.com, livejournal, and geocities are a travesty! Soft edges and muted colors everywhere! All logos have to be a stupid flat piece of shit! Webpages should take much longer to load even though computers are literally hundreds of thousands of times faster! Now everything is BLAND and it SUCKS. I hate the future
My (smart)phone still does it! And it came with a second battery
❤️ Fairphone
I wish I could still use a fairphone as a daily driver in Canada. I have a Fairphone 4, had it shipped all the way from Europe and used it for two years before my network suddenly stopped connecting to it so I ended up getting a new phone. still use it at home though.
How many times have you needed to change the battery?
Not a fairphone but I’m on my 4th one on my phone and went through 2 on the phone prior to that.
Remember when cell phones did next nothing other than make calls, and their batteries would still die before the day was out?
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I’ve got an old Motorola AMPS phone around somewhere that has a charging cradle that will fit either the whole phone or the battery on its own. Most commercial two way radios still work like that, I wish they would still make phones like that too.
The dual laptop batteries are handy too. I’ve got a Thinkpad T480 and it can hot swap the external battery. The high capacity battery lasts so long that you rarely need to swap it, but if you use the slim batteries, you will need a couple to get through a whole day. Unfortunately, that’s the last Thinkpad model that can hot swap batteries.
