How would you do screen replacement? That is a common repair since people drop their phones and currently you can get your phone repaired by some teenager in a booth at the mall. If you fill the phone with epoxy, how are you detaching the screen, and getting a new ribbon cable through the epoxy?
Air is the only substance that compresses to any significant amount. When you apply pressure to a battery from one side it may deform, but I would expect that the battery wouldn't be crushed because the pressure is from all sides - unless of course there is air in the battery - I'm not a battery chemist so take everything I say with some salt.
Note that I would expect water to seep into a battery at this pressure and that will cause all kinds of issues - including chemical fires underwater. Just not crushed batteries.
So what if you can't replace a screen on an epoxy-filled cell phone? That's a small price to pay for knowing that your camera will survive if you take a one-way trip to crush-depth.
When was the last time your phone stopped working due mechanical PCB damage?
Typically the limiting factor on your phone is the screen breaking, your battery life getting too short, wear and tear on components like buttons or the charging port, and factory defects. Epoxy isn't going to help with any of those. The only thing it would help with is exposure to water, but if other parts of your phone like your screen aren't water proof, what's the point?
Epoxy adds weight and manufacturing cost. It introduces design challenges as you need to balance the thermal expansion of the various parts. It's an extra step that can go wrong, and makes repair of other defects far more difficult. What benefit is there for the typical consumer that outweighs these costs?
To add to that. My son got his phone caught in a reclining chair without realizing it. The fact that the phone bent in half instead of destroying the chair is a nice bonus. Replacing the phone was cheap, replacing a chair would not have been — yes, both are insured, but replacing/repairing a chair takes a hell of a lot longer.
And for just a few bucks per month, it can be insured and replaced for a couple hundred bucks. My chair is also insured through homeowners insurance (the US equivalent name, called something different here in the NL), and they would give me the value of the chair… but now I have to find it again, get it delivered, take my old chair to the dump, etc. The phone was a quick visit to the Apple Store and restore from backup.
Added cost and weight are two things that would put off consumers. The phone would also be neigh irreparable, but consumers don't seem to care for that other than replacing their screen.
I'm not talking about which methods are being used, I'm talking about which methods could be used. Further, potting, where you let the epoxy drip off, gives you a conformal coating.
Conformal coating is much less viscous and would leave a layer orders of magnitude thinner then letting potting epoxy drip off. It's not at all comparable.
Because then it’ll become unrepairable. It’s a tricky trade-off that cell phones/tablets-laptops have to deal with.
Easy to repair vs durable vs cost/time.
And Apple (for example) cares about repairability because they also need/want to repair phones (warranty/trade in for example)
That can be avoided by filling it with a fluid that the repairman can simply drain instead.
People hydromod digital quartz wristwatches by filling them with oil. This gives them truly absurd water resistances and even improves the readability of the screen somehow.
