Essentially time and cost? Building such a Frankenstein-Phone would probably take you half a year to design the PCBs, get all the connections and power rails right, all the needed peripheral electronics for the chips. Read thousands of pages of datasheets to place the correct capacitors for the oscillator of the … sensor on your mainboard design. (And there are a lot of tiny components in a phone that all work together, in part depend on each other, or require additional control/supply circuits.) You’d need a lab and equipment do build it, and the mechanics and encasing. And probably some takes and failed iterations. And software and drivers also have to be rewritten and patched.

So I’d say if you have the expertise in electrical engineering, hardware design, embedded software programming… A 5 figure(?) sum of money for supplies and equipment and nothing to do in the next year… I’d say nothing is stopping you 😆

There isn’t, like, a standard like there is for PCs. Everything is custom made for that thing except the microchips themselves. And taking those off and just slapping them on a different board isn’t that simple.

I would love it if they were like a PC though. Build my own phone with this screen and that CPU/GPU, configurable RAM, etc. Why they don’t do that, though? Greed.

I’d say that I could do it for you, even, given sufficient effort, time and money. However, it would be the size of a shoebox. And don’t you dare open that shoebox or else all the parts are going to come falling out.

It’s prohibitively difficult. Like not just hard, but complete redesigns for even fairly small adaptations.

Hardware: The parts just don’t replace each other one for one, and it’s not just where the wires are. Each SOC or component requires a cadre of resistors capacitors, voltages, signal lines that don’t line up well between different products. The boards that these components mount on are many layers thick with wiring hidden in multiple layers. You can’t even just bodge and reroute everything all the time. In many cases the packages wouldn’t even fit in the intended target spot and phones have precious little space to spare. Then for a lot of chips you’ve got thermal considerations.

The 10x camera for an s23 wouldn’t have a chance at fitting in a pixel, the focal lengths are different It literally wouldn’t even fit in the case.

Drivers/software: especially relation to cameras, a lot of third party software can’t even run the full compliment of Samsung cameras. Commands to switch back and forth between lenses aren’t universal. In a lot of cases you can screw around with different camera software and get it to work and make modifications for the cameras to signal when they need changes. But then when you take a s24 which is 64-bit only you can no longer run any of the 32-bit camera software that used to do things like sphere camera. And then even if you did manage to swap sensors out all of the lens correction would be wrong. You’d end up with Chroma and correction issues. The cameras aren’t just giving you what’s off the sensor anymore. A long time ago we used to get big upgrades in picture quality going from one sensor to a new more sensitive sensor, We now do the opposite and use really big sensors that take multiple samples per pixel and we drive those pictures with complicated software or even AI to generate better looking imagery. When all the software and hardwares tuned together to give you a better image and you swap the hardware out it’s a bad thing.

These devices are all very custom they’re very purpose-built around each one of the features and the subcomponents don’t even match up neatly in between different models in the same line. I’m fairly certain you couldn’t even fit an s23u 10x camera into an s24u.

TL;DR it’s essentially as close to impossible as you could make it in just about every way you can imagine.

Don’t forget about device drivers. I can’t even install a newer version of Android on my Android phone because the community never managed to get the antenna to work after upgrading the OS.

Form factor, mostly.

One time I took apart my Nintendo DS. I broke my Nintendo DS.

Another time I took apart my PS2 controller. I broke my PS2 controller.

Now you want me to scrap parts from a phone, and build from scratch??? Aw hell naw!!!

There were modular phone projects that were killed by google.

But it’s intentionally hard to do it otherwise, to make more money out of broken phones.

All of this stuff is usually fit onto a single board, crammed into a very specific amount of space, and is thoroughly and iterated until it works properly. This isn’t the kind of stuff a home lab does, but you could certainly try. I think it would be damn near impossible to do it better and more reliably than teams of hundreds or thousands of various engineers. It’s not like you can just take a phone CPU and slap it on a random board without a ton of forethought.

Capitalism, kind of. Practicality, the rest of the way. Mobile parts need to be designed really tightly integrated, because they need to fix exactly into such small spaces, and standardizing them isn’t really feasible without significant pressure on the market (aka, socialism).

The reason desktop PCs can be so standardized is how big they are. Tons of room for customized parts.