> It is my preference to have user replaceable batteries, and my belief is that they were only removed to make phones become obselete quicker and cause higher turnover of purchased phones.
My iPhone 12 is six years old. I replaced the battery last year. While it probably won't be workable on cellular networks in six years, outside of physical damage there's little reason it'll stop working. My original iPhone from 2007 still boots up and runs. There's no GSM service for it to talk to but it runs as a WiFi only iPod just fine if I really wanted.
The idea that non-replaceable batteries is a conspiracy to lower the lifetime of devices is sort of silly. Flagship phones are made of incredibly sturdy materials. If they were designed to be disposable they'd have a bunch of sacrificial structural elements to limit their lifetime. Instead they're built as well as they can possibly be built.
A flagship phone will be left behind in CPU power running bloated JavaScript blogs or cellular service long before any internal component fails. Non-replaceable batteries are about hitting a capacity/size target more than anything else. Replaceable batteries enforce constraints on a phone's design that non-replaceable ones do not have.
