> I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".

Possibly true, and equally true of the screen, the charging port, or any other component.

"Repairability" isn't a feature people list unprompted, it's a property they notice the moment a £5 part bricks their phone.

The street-corner survey tells you what people currently notice, not what they'd value if the option existed.

> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new phone

In a market where batteries are glued in and replacement costs a meaningful fraction of a new device, of course people upgrade on that timeline. Change the cost structure and the behaviour changes with it.

Fair point that we'd want data, but the original claim rests on the same intuition, just pointed the opposite way.

The broader framing (that repairability is an idiosyncratic preference being imposed on a majority who don't want it) gets this backwards. Most people don't want to care about repairability, in the same way most people don't want to care about food safety standards. They want the option to exist without having to think about it. That's what the law provides.