You've misread his statement. He sees the benefit, but points out that the tradeoffs will be the main areas of competition among smartphones: size, weight, battery life. All three will be worse in a modular phone. You'll also get less for your money overall. Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want. Sure, there's a market for a modular phone, but it's not going to seriously compete against the Galaxy or the iPhone in the mass market.
As a phone owner with kids, I just don't see this happening in my household. Modules getting dropped/lost (especially the critical one that makes the others go), connectors wearing out from constant playing around or, even worse, smeared with food and crammed with junk.
I have a hard time keeping unified units intact and working, much less letting my family near a Lego kit that needs to be 100% assembled to work properly...
>Not to mention that having to choose among components just adds an additional layer of option stress that most consumers don't want.
I think consumers actually like a little choice in their products now. I mean, take a look at the apple laptop website.
Also, I could imagine vendors offering different phone presets (e.g. battery life, photo-taking, media consumption) and then letting the customer further customize it if they want.
And yet, probably 99% of their owners will never purchase a replacement battery.
For a given sized phone, a replaceable battery is necessarily smaller capacity than a fixed equivalent, due to space wasted on additional housings, clips and connectors.
