This summer, Walnut Creek, CA. Lines going out the door of the Apple Store downtown. Asked what they were waiting in line for - OS rollback issues.
Two months later, Lynnwood, WA, Place was hopping again, but employees were standing around. Someone got irate and asked why he wasn’t being helped - guy was in sales, not tech. The sales people were standing around while the ‘geniuses’ (the arrogance of that) were being mobbed.
Great cameras in those phones, and that’s about where it stops.
Who invents a phone you can’t do a standard battery-pull reset?
I can see them doing it for quality-control issues. Lots of third-party stuff is junk, and some users screw up in doing a replacement.
But I'm in some agreement with you here. As I write, I'm taking apart a failed battery for a MacBook. Since it's easily removable by using a coin to turn a lock knob, the battery is easily swapped making it easy to replace. The battery is third-party and failed soon after warranty was up. I got six years out of the original Apple battery (2006 MacBook) before it started losing its charge. The third-party battery simply stopped working after two years and won't even accept a charge.
It's a trade-off, ease of swapping batteries versus trying to keep only quality parts in a machine. I vote for ease of swapping even though there are crappy third-party parts that don't hold up, because I can do repairs. I've made my own cases to hold off-the-shelf battery cells to replace non-standard battery packs in various devices (non-Apple), mostly to use higher-energy cells. New stuff by Apple, it can't easily be done.