This is very welcome news if it passes. Non-replaceable batteries have NO redeeming qualities in my opinion. Some will say that they're important for waterproofing, but I previously owned an IP68 (ie, certified waterproof) mobile phone which had a user replaceable battery. It's clearly not a requirement. Being able to replace batteries as they go bad will go a long way towards reducing electronic waste, as devices can be used for significantly longer.
There are many advantages to integrated batteries:
- Waterproofing. Fewer seals means more resistance to water ingress.
- Compact size. Standard battery sizes rarely fit thin or irregular designs.
- Better battery life. An integrated battery can be designed to fill all available spare space in a device.
- Cost. Integrated batteries involve fewer connectors and parts.
- User satisfaction. Users often blame original manufacturers when the problem is actually poor quality 3rd party batteries. This was extremely common back when most laptops had removable batteries.
And why do arguments in favor of removable batteries apply to phones and laptops, but not headphones, vehicles, cameras, etc? Just let people buy the devices they want. There’s no need to have the government force people to use things they dislike.
>And why do arguments in favor of removable batteries apply to phones and laptops, but not headphones, vehicles, cameras, etc?
As far as I can tell this is not accurate. I want user-serviceable batteries in all devices. Phones might get the most attention because they're the most ubiquitous, but I wish that all LiON batteries were standardized and user serviceable.
That's a nice fantasy, but it would be simply impossible to build a device like my Garmin Descent Mk2 smart watch / dive computer with a user-serviceable battery while still maintaining 100m water resistance. It just can't be done. The extra seals would compromise water resistance and risk a leak when I'm underwater and need it most. And allowing for user-serviceable batteries would inevitably make it physically larger; it's already as large as a wristwatch can reasonably be.
"but it would be simply impossible to build a device like my Garmin Descent Mk2 smart watch / dive computer with a user-serviceable battery while still maintaining 100m water resistance. It just can't be done."
That's been a solved problem for a very, very long time. Even older battery-operated dive watches have user-serviceable batteries. My Tekmagic is user-replaceable. The gaskets and tolerance ranges are well-understood for this sort of thing.
No that's completely incorrect. It is not a solved problem. Those Tekmagic devices have very limited functionality and are not real smart watches or fitness trackers like the Garmin Descent series. A smart watch draws more power than a replaceable CR2025 coin cell battery can sustain. (I had a similar old Suunto wristwatch style dive computer with a replaceable battery so I am very familiar with the differences.)
"No that's completely incorrect. It is not a solved problem."
We have IP6X-rated USB connectors. Charge port is a solved problem.
Gaskets and seal plates are gaskets and seal plates, nothing really special about them. Solved problem.
The battery probably won't need to be replaced for a few years, we aren't talking a coin cell, we're talking a mini-pouch like what already exists in these watches.
I do work in this industry. It's a solved problem, has been for several decades.
I think the point was not so much to use replaceable coin cells, but introduce a rechargeable lithium battery with a standard interface and form factors that can be adopted by all devices. It doesn't seem impossible on the outset, but no manufacturer has incentive to do so.
That is impossible. A rechargeable lithium battery the size of a CR2025 would be useless for a device which draws so much power. Make the battery any bigger and then you'd have to increase the size of the device, which is already at the limit.
Smart watches already use rechargeable lithium batteries of a few hundred mAh which are tiny enough to fit in the watch. You just need to standardize the interface and form factors across the industry. Again, not suggesting to use CR2025 form factor, you can always define a new one. Most watches in the market already use very similar battery packs, it just isn't standardized.
Nobody's saying that they have to be single-use batteries? Just that the rechargeable ones should be replaceable once they reach the end of their lifetime.
> Because that innovation is market driven and turns out "brick of glass" is what people want, no matter what you or I or the Brussels bureaucrats say.
History has countless examples of how the market is very bad at accounting for externalities.
People may very well want just a "brick of glass", but regulation comes in and drives innovation when it turns out that selling people what they want in the short term actually needlessly harms society in the long run.
"What the people want" actually has a lot of nuance and variability over different timeframes.
History has even more examples of how planners and regulators are bad at accounting for… reality, really. Or the unexpected creativity of people bent on getting what they want in spite of "well meaning" regulators.
"What harms society" actually has a lot of nuance and variability over different timeframes. I don’t think anybody can define it, actually.
Regulators making nuclear power hugely expensive and activists making it wildly unpopular thus condemning us to burn coal in 2022 quickly come to mind. Or the idiocy of banning plastic straws in the west while the ocean drowns in fishing nets from Asia.
Quite wrong. The market is efficient at solving simple issues.
On the other hand a smartphone has pages long list if specs. And users have divergent preferences for those specs.
The market is only able to find a common denominator that makes everyone equally unhappy. In doing so it transfers power to the few manufacturers who now make choices for the users. Even worse, manufacturers copy each other and follow fashion trends.
It is almost impossible to find a phone that has a replaceable battery.
It is very hard to find small phones.
It is very hard to find phones with headphone jacks.
It is very hard to find phones without a punchhole or notch for the camera.
These are all things people desire, but either not strong enough or not enough people or both.
I like the iPhone mini but not enough to sacrifice the flexibility of Android.
I like displays without cutouts, but not enough to sacrifice the 4 years of updates Samsung offers.
> things people desire, but either not strong enough or not enough people or both
> I like […] but not enough
> I like […] but not enough
Sounds like the market has managed to understand perfectly the things people actually want in a phone versus the ones they are just paying lip service to.
Taking such a long list of specs with wildly contradictory requirements and create compromise products that satisfiy the most is an extremely complex issue and something the market is uniquely suited to do - I am not aware of another mechanism that can do that, maybe a future AI.
So since there's basically zero phones with physical keyboards that means no one actually wants them? I guess me and everyone else that have been angry about touchscreen only input for nearly the last decade just "dont want it enough"
Headphone jack is a minuscule cost (you still need the DAC for the speakers).
There are now magnetically attached Bluetooth devices that provide a headphone jack to an iPhone and make twice as thick.
This showcases perfectly that there is a market for an iPhone with a jack, but Apple has the power to decide for everyone.
A user has the options:
- use an old phone(for how long?)
- sacrifice the jack and stay on iOS (give up)
- sacrifice iOS, repurchase all apps (are they available? alternatives?) and other purchases, and find some phone that still has it (gradually all flagships other than Sony dropped it)
This is not a free market, it is a market with plenty of obstacles to entry (some natural some imposed).
And the following of fashion trends (mostly follow Apple) make the situation doubly toxic.
In a captive market it is sufficient for one player to demonstrate the market will accept a worse offer and other players will follow through.
This may sound like blasphemy, but capitalism is actually not compatible with the free market.
The simple fact is, unrestrained capitalism is ugly.
A company that has become wildly successful will equally hold a lot of financial power. The same company is often likely to engage in lobbying .. exchanging that fiscal power for actual political power.
Without regulations we end up living in world driven by the singular need to make more and more money.
These corporations are not able to factor the good of human kind into their plan because that's got nothing to do with their very reason for existence.
The key thing the EU are ruling on here are phones. I replace my phone or laptop battery every 3 years at average! Does it need to be removable for that? Hell no. Sticky tape, glued in I don't care. I will pay apple or whoever to replace it. 30 minutes of labour is fine for this interval!
What pisses me off are the people who are too fucking cheap to pay for a phone battery from the manufacturer but will throw 10x the cost on trivial repairs on a premium car while whining about it.
Yep, call pros to replace them every 3 years? Probably okay. Device becomes trash after 3 years because battery is DRM-protected and no longer produced?
EU should really f**k them hard about this behavior. It's 100% planned obsolescence.
Log the producer of parts is okay but intentionally make them non functional is not.
Oh I agree with that one entirely. One reason I buy apple shit is last year I got them to stuff a new battery in my old 6s which I bought in 2015 and they did it there and then in store. Second swap it has had.
No thats not the main issue. Most of the issues come from crap batteries not being anywhere near fit for purpose. I’ve swapped out enough (tens of the things) to see that as the average case.
Most laptops just whine about third party batteries and you can just nuke the vendor battery junk to get rid of it.
Because won't somebody think of the... Wait, no, I meant to say: "It's dangerous and a third party battery can set your phone on fire!" Also, "it will allow hackers to steal your data". /s
As far as I can tell, the manufacturers are doing a pretty good job at occassionally setting your phone on fire and exposing your data themselves.
How are manufacturers forcing anything? They are all competing with each other for customers.
The problem is that making a modern phone is ridiculously expensive, and not enough customers want removable batteries to make the investment worthwhile. Samsung made phones with removable batteries. Not enough people bought them, so the product line was discontinued.
Apple can’t force you to buy any of their products. Tim Cook can’t send men with guns to your home and put you in a cage. The government can. Anyone who uses that power to force people to make phones with removable batteries is absurdly authoritarian.
I only sorta agree with this argument. It's like saying that headphone jack was removed because not enough people bought phones with them - and that's obviously nonsense, pretty much every manufacturer dropped them within a very short timespan, so there really wasn't any choice in that matter as a consumer. Especially for consumers invested into an ecosystem(apple), manufacturer took away that choice - and the cost of switching away to android to keep the headphone jack was greater than dealing with the inconvenience, so most people didn't do that - but that doesn't mean they wouldn't prefer to keep the port.
>>Anyone who uses that power to force people to make phones with removable batteries is absurdly authoritarian.
Do you think any and all regulations are authoritarian? Governments everywhere, not just in EU, try to legislate based on what's best for the society. As the simplest example, they force manufacturers to limit transmission power to protect users from too much RF exposure - is that authoritarian? Or just a good idea that protects people? What if customers would prefer phones that have a stronger signal, at the potential expense of health consequences?
Similarly, we can decide that it's better for the society if phones have removable batteries, because in theory it will lead to less electronic waste(which affects us all). I don't personally think that's true, I think even with removable batteries people will just buy new phones every 2 years anyway, but I wouldn't describe this move as authoritarian - just misguided.
Could you point me to AAA-battery powered noise cancelling headphones? No bluetooth necessary.
I have a pair from 2014, and I love that as long as I have some spare batteries, I'm never stuck with headphones which I can't use because of low charge, and that I don't have to charge yet another device. That pair has no bluetooth, so power usage is low: one AAA battery for 30-40 hours of use.
When these are dead, I won't find a replacement, because manufacturer does not want me to use the same device for eight years. They want me to have the integrated battery dead in a couple of years and buy a new pair.
And I miss the form factor of the iPhone 5. Does that mean Apple should be forced to make devices of that size indefinitely? I don’t think so.
You’re demanding that the government force people to make things that they no longer want to make, usually because the product is no longer profitable. Someone has to pay for the workers and factories needed to produce these products. Better it be you than the >99% of taxpayers who don’t want battery-powered wired headphones.
The problem with phones, even up through the Symbian ones that presaged the iPhone, was that if you didn't have the most popular phone model around you could not find a decent replacement battery after the product end-of-lifed. For a while Fry's was the only place. So with respect to 'the largest battery' it's a matter of whether it's really fruitful for your new model to have a battery that's 2mm wider than the old one because you shrunk some component and want the extra 10% battery life you get by doing so.
If you're laying up your own prismatic cells from a reel of battery film, why not? If you need a whole separate distribution chain, fuck it, we use the same battery as last year.
I’m talking about EVs, not combustion vehicles. Also there’s no law forcing everyone to use removable batteries in any of those devices.
My point is that users freely choose different types of batteries for different applications. It makes no sense to coerce everyone else into choosing your favorite type of battery.
I also had a user replaceable battery on an IP68 phone. And it had multiple warnings on the phone and the manual about how to get a good seal and a strong implication that if it goes wrong that's your fault.
So while I am 100% in favor of right of repair, I wonder if the law of unintended consequences will lead to more difficult warranty claims.
Plenty of other devices such as outdoor cameras have replaceable batteries with no warnings.
Shavers have a water proofed interior shelled battery that although usually not replaceable, technically can be since all but 2 flat contacts are sealed.
Designing batteries for said water protection incurs extra cost, and is cheaper to just seal in, ensuring the financial burden of the design failure is on the consumer, this law helps end that practice.
Its likely he is referring to the galaxy s5 - the cameras and shavers you mentioned aren't trying to keep to the same size and weight limitations as mobile phones.
> Non-replaceable batteries have NO redeeming qualities in my opinion
Non-replaceable batteries contribute to lowering the price. If the producer can expect to sell more copies of the same product, the price of a single item can be lower.
Which is useful to the producer, not to the consumer. The consumer ends up spending more money by having to buy more phones. It's only cheaper if you're looking at a single purchase, not over time.
Device manufacturers see that as a bug, not a feature. They are starting to pair genuine parts to a specific device, which will completely lock us out of 3rd party repair options if we accept and normalize this behavior.
Ah yes, that 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery. The review of it was pretty interesting [0]. It's possible, but it's not exactly what I'd call user serviceable. There are a hojillion kits on Amazon which all include all the necessary tools to take the phone apart - triwing screwdriver, pentalobe screwdriver, impossibly small 00 phillipshead screwdriver, etc - so anyone that can follow youtube directions and has a steady hand can do it. It's just way harder than it needs to be so under the proposed law, they'd have to make it easier.
That's funny, I got the opposite read from that article and that it's Apple that's operating in bad faith here.
Really though I think what's important is that we should expect help from Apple. It might take EU regulations to force that, but what that really says to me is that as consumer in the US, my bar for what to expect from corporations is set way too low.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. What you're saying only strengthens my original point about Apple monopolizing repair.
My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned -- I want them to (be able to) work on my device in the event that I don't have the tools, skills or patience to do the repair myself.
> My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned
I don’t see how. The less reliable the device is, the more business they get. The more reliable the device is, the less you spend on repairs. Sure seems like opposing interests.
Repairability is orthogonal to reliability and I've only brought up complaints about the former. This dichotomy you're trying to establish doesn't have any grounding in reality.
All that repair shops can do is provide commentary and inform consumers about whether the OEM is serious about repair or whether they're just greenwashing their image and by all accounts, Apple's self-service repair program is about as anemic as their Apple authorized service provider program.
This is clearly not true when we’re discussing user replaceable batteries or the like. It’s a trade off, like most things in engineering.
There are many extra ways things can go wrong by making components such as batteries easy to replace. Poor contacts, oxidation, mechanical breakage, battery compartment doors popping off, ingress of dust and fluids, looser tolerances for the batteries etc.
Nobody discussing this in good faith can deny that these issues exist.
This may work for common phones (aka: Apple and Samsung phones). I had to retire a perfectly workable, but five years old, HTC phone after three such shops refused to fix it, citing unfamiliarity and cost.
I now have an ASUS phone, and fully expect the same to happen in several years.
It seems like weird logic to legislate that Apple and Samsung must make their phones less reliable for everyone simply because a 5 year old phone made by a cut price manufacturer is no longer supported.
Why did you buy the ASUS phone if you don’t expect to get support for it?
I bought it used, and with the expectation that I'm going to be on the hook for my own long-term maintenance and support, as is true with more or less everything I buy. (Full-time Linux user here.)
The sad reality is that the experience of running an off-brand phone with an easily-replaceable battery would, long-term, be much worse than running a locked-in flagship that LineageOS builds for.
They can't really say Apple and Samsung have to do this, everybody else doesn't. And they are by far the market leaders, so they sell the most phones ending up in landfills.
Pay extra for labor on top of parts, and theres a good chance theyll screw something up like the waterproofing seal or leave a loose connection that you won't notice until weeks later. Then you have to take it back and convince them its their fault and wait even longer while they hopefully don't screw the phone up even worse.
Yeah that definitely sounds more convenient than a removable battery.
> It's only cheaper if you're looking at a single purchase, not over time.
It's not entirely true, if you don't buy a new phone and simply live with a battery not holding power for more than a day, you get both cheaper price of the phone and a technically working phone.
Of course someone with higher expectations for battery time will have to buy a new phone sooner, but if you can't afford it, it's valuable to you personally regardless.
If the device degrades to the point where it’s effectively useless for my primary use case, I’m not really saving money. Useful timeline needs to be accounted for when considering cost effectiveness.
You are implying that the primary use case is the same for everyone. Consider this counter example: what if I want a phone to use a navigator app in my car (to leave it always on charge)? Battery life would not be important at all.
Given that we've largely decided that sustainability is the way forward, an argument in favour of e-waste isn't particularly convincing.
User-replaceable batteries are just the first step. What we should all be pushing towards to reduce waste and emissions is a no-compromise right to repair, with easily accessible parts, tools and schematics.
I support the right to repair, but it's not the only way to reduce e-waste. Another complementary approach is through refundable deposits, just like with beverage containers. Include a $20+ deposit in the price of each smartphone, then refund it when the consumer returns it to a retailer or manufacturer for proper recycling and safe disposal.
In the very short term, maybe. But it's only cheaper for the very first phone. In a few years when the battery dies, the cost of the battery would be much lower than the cost of a new phone, which the consumers are required to buy
Same faulty logic for injket printers. They're extremely cheap so sure, you're "saving money" for a period, but the scales tip after one or two refill ink cartridges
If non-repairable products were cheaper and those savings passed on to consumers, apple products and the surface series would be the cheapest that exist. They are not...
Which probably doesn't reflect the real costs of extracting, processing and discarding resources and their effect on humans, life and nature very well.
This is just wrong. Replaceable batteries add cost and fragility to the device, make battery life worse, and most phones die because they stop getting software updates anyway.
Replaceable batteries will increase e-waste because there will be a lot more broken phones.
Saying "we shouldn't legislate repairablity because <other bad practice that needs to be legislated away>" is not terribly convincing. There should 100% be legislation aimed at keeping old phones able to run newer software.
Thankfully EU is also working on legislation that mandates more years of software support. Hopefully days of only 2-3 years of support will be soon gone for good, it's just plain wrong.
Phones don't "die" because they no longer get software updates. They just become obsolete - as planned by the manufacturer. Sounds like the next step is to fix the software update issue!
They practically die. A lot of software, such as work profile, banking apps, etc will stop working (depending on the work settings, bank rules, etc) if you don't update your phone. Also, your apps will no longer update as the app vendor doesn't release their apps for older API versions and will effectively make your app useless if their server side protocol changes.
Indeed, but the issue is that the phone manufacturer no longer supports the phone and release OS updates. And on Android, you could install unofficial mods to upgrade to a more recent version of the OS, but then some apps (banking apps for example) refuse to work because of... reasons, again making the phone unusable. And in a majority of cases, this has nothing to do with the hardware no longer being capable.
Depends on what phone you get. Mid to high end phones usually have communities to maintain 3 party system patches for them after they are not maintained officially. You can still use it safely for a a few years if you even bother about it.
For example, my old sony xz3 is a 2018/08 phone with software update discontinued since 2020(?). But there are actually 3party roms that can update it android 12.
That covers most of the software, but basically every modern phone has some proprietary drivers that are necessary for it to function and that have security vulnerabilities of their own.
And nobody's going to exploit those device-specific vulnerabilities (that probably require local code execution anyway) unless you're a high-value target.
The mobile is maybe the most important device ever invented. The inventors and first movers got more than plenty rewards for their accumen. Its time it becomes a tool for a better society. Less junky, less wasteful, both in hardware and software terms. If the "market" wont deliver in its existing rails, thats why democratic govs legislate new and more appropriate rails.
I am sure talented engineers will fix any of the purported drawbacks of replaceable batteries if thats what they get instructed to do.
As for the EU, what can I say. Derided, badmouthed and undermined continuously both from within and from outside, its the only major entity that consistently provides a sense that there is hope.
This comment seems to assume that innovation in mobile phones is complete, and that no harm will occur from letting the regulators take over more control from the current inventors and designers.
The comment on the comment seems to assume that its better to sustain current and certain harm in order not to incur hypothetical future harm from the suppression of yet to be seen inventions
This scenario is no more likely that the legislation of safety belts preventing the invention of EV's
In fact robust and reasonable regulation that makes societal expectations clear can save inventors and designers a lot of heartburn and channel their energies towards more sustainable pursuits
The EU regulators seen to be moving rather carefully in this case. They are not mandating full right to repair, merely that the battery should be replacable. E-waste is an issue that vendors are more than happy to socialize the costs of.
I really hope that the industry will decide on their own to bring replaceable batteries back. I have accumulated so many old devices over the years and if you stop using them regularly they take less than a year to degrade to the point where the device is perma bricked and in some cases the batteries become unsafe.
I wanted to give my son my older iPhone I haven’t used in 5 years and it’s not able to hold a charge at all any more. That wasn’t the case when I stopped using it.
I don't know about phones, but here where I live (Eastern Europe) there is no official Apple stores, but are official partners. I own 16 inch 2019 Macbook Pro which has cycle count 984 and doesn't hold much charge any more. I asked for a quote for replacement from official Apple partner and they said it would cost me 861 euros. I consider it very expensive.
The 2019 MacBook had a horrible design that makes battery replacements almost impossible. They fixed it in 2021 so it’s significantly easier to swap now.
Obviously it’s not a solution for someone who has a 2019 model. Just some context that improvement has been made here. Current MacBooks now use pull strips for adhesive.
For the others who were curious how difficult the process was, here's a $130 replacement and a full guide on how to do it. Not easy by any means, but not impossible.
How do you define expensive? I someone charges $7 for a coffee is that expensive or cheap?
To replace a iPhone 14 Max battery Apple charges $99. I'm pretty confident 3rd parties could do that for much cheaper. Especially if 3rd parties were allowed to make the battery or if batteries sizes were standardized.
> I'm pretty confident 3rd parties could do that for much cheaper.
That's not in question — we know that 3rd parties will sell cheap and unsafe replacement batteries. We know that consumers who don't understand the risks will buy them. We know that lots of people will get ripped off, and that some will be hurt.
>How do you define expensive? I someone charges $7 for a coffee is that expensive or cheap?
I use my "Guinness Scale": how many Guinnesses can I purchase using this money? I have three local pubs and each sells a Guinness for €6.50, therefore, to me a $7 coffee is expensive. My latest keyboard cost me 4.5G - bargain, as it's backlit, and I've had it for two weeks now - I also factor in use/ per annum/ per day - my bicycle cost has cost me 1.06G since I bought it in 2019, but I have added/ replaced parts and bought clothing which has taken the price to around 3G (and 2020 was a washout for sports). I also kniow how many Guinnesses I earn a month, and that helps with budgeting.
The Guinness scale is adaptable: I sometimes use 'a pair of jeans', whatever gives me a perspective i can relate to.
I have no public numbers but the learning materials for fire safety at the work place here has lithium ion batteries from old devices called out as the most common reason for fires in office buildings. Likewise the waste management companies here are routinely reporting fires in containers because people throw away old devices there against regulation.
That's not quite the same thing as sitting still in a drawer though. Lithium-Ion batteries really don't like to be dropped or crushed. Basically anything that is a threat to the mechanical integrity of the cell should be really avoided.
Not that I'm aware of, and I'd like to find some. It's a known fact that LiON batteries can spontaneously combust. I wish I had an easy metric which helped describe the risk of keeping old devices around.
When I relegated my n-1 iPhone to driving music on my stereo I discovered that n-2 had a badly swollen case. Around the same time, I discovered an old MacBook Pro also had a badly swollen battery when I went to remove an SSD from it I wanted for another purpose. It's not clear to me how careful one should be about policing this sort of thing in general. Certainly I'm sure I have old LiON in things at home.
Totally anecdotal but it seems to me Europeans are more likely to use old tech than other countries at similar income level. So I know this looks weird for some Asian and north Americans, but it makes total sense for the rest of us.
Phone are essentially a finished product nowadays. Apple think the same and shipped iphone 14 with the same CPU as their previous generation. There is also rumors of them skipping the next GPU upgrade for iphot15 because of mower demands than expected. My partner still use an iphone se (2016)
We're currently using a 12 years old iMac with upgraded ram and SSD for basic browsing. It's absolutely usable.
The current generation of high end smartphones could easily last 10 years for basic usage.
Make the SoC upgradable next and we would have iphone SE that would last as long as cars.
Having taken apart my iphone smartphone to replace the battery and screen as needed, I really hope the EU'a regulations lead to that sort of situation! I haven't updated to a Framework laptop yet but it's in mind for next time I need to.
i hate that im forced go upgrade my phone due to software/os dropping support, not the hardware crapping out. i use all my phones for like 5 years for a long time. they're fine.
None of the phones I had to toss in the last few years were due to battery giving out. It was because they become too slow or weren't updated by the manufacturer.
Well, one stopped charging and wasn't popular enough for local shops to have parts for it. But that was likely wiring/port, not the battery itself.
I think phones are the least important devices that this regulation could involve. Phones already have a vibrant market of repair stores which can swap the battery on the spot quickly and cheaply. The real issue is the other devices, laptops, the nintendo switch, game controllers, etc which have embedded batteries that are hard to borderline impossible to replace and which are uncommon enough for stores to not stock parts.
Something like the switch for example has no waterproofing and isn't ultra compact, it's really just not acceptable that the battery isn't a screw in panel like previous consoles.
There's only so much a cell phone needs to do. I think a Note 4, which is 8 years old at this point is still a perfectly functional phone, with only software related issues. And the battery is replaceable.
Small nit - using a phone as a phone (voice calls) is fairly uncommon usecase anymore (speaking as a 40+ any my cohort, not even mentioning the younger generations). SMS et.al. is quite common still. But most non-SMS apps will probably not work on 4-6 year old phones anymore.
Plus, there's an insidious combination of changes to the underlying hardware and changes to the APIs. When old hardware is no longer supported by the app maker, and their APIs have changed enough that you need a new(er) version of the app (or they just force you to be on the latest version), you're often SOL.
I just replaced my 6 year phone; some apps did not work because they required more recent versions of Android, my phone came with 7 and I upgraded it to 8. It was a painful way to see one app at a time no longer working after an app update, some that I could not avoid.
My Note 4 worked for years, then for my SO, then again for me a while. In the end we only had to change the battery once and sold it to someone else, still serviceable if a bit slow.
Every form factor since has been a pain in comparison.
I am using my Pinephone as a daily driver, so it's probably possible. However if your bank requires an Android/iOS app, you may have a hard time. Can't blame Linux for that.
Just updating the OS can make a device obsolete, though I’m not 100% convinced that this is due to planned obsolescence. I have an old 16GB iPad that was perfectly adequate when I first got it, but subsequent updates of the iOS version gradually reduced the available storage to the point where, as of the latest version, iOS itself consumes nearly ALL of the device storage, leaving very little for apps, much less for storage of actual files. Basically my iPad is now useless. This is such a shame because I only really use it just as a sheet music reader. This could be easily solved by expandable memory, but of course Apple is only concerned with selling more devices.
Same here. Beside phones that simply become outdated (slow, small storage, RAM fills up) or accidentally damaged, I had a Samsung Galaxy phone which wouldn't read SIM cards anymore, and then a Motorola phone which stopped being able to get a GPS fix. Both shortly after the 1 year warranty expires.
The result is I only buy cheap phones now (~200$), with the expectation that they'll last about a year. I have no idea how people can justify spending the price of iPhones and other flagships when they are apparently so expendable.
My iPhone6 still works. I’ve moved on for other reasons (more space, better camera) but the product still works better than most Androids. I even had Apple replace the battery!
There's a healthy used market for iPhones because they indeed do last long, and Apple provides many more years of software support than cheap Android manufacturers do.
IMO when it comes to electronics with little to no moving parts it's almost always better to buy used quality than cheap new crap. An iPhone that has lasted two years without failing will probably last 5 more without anything else than battery needing replacement. Mid-range Android phones often aren't bad either except for lack of long-term updates.
Sorry to be so frank, but IMHO you probably didn't choose the most reliable brands.
I had 3 high-end HTC smartphones and one Huawei, which all lasted at least 4 years of use. And the reason for retiring them was wanting better hardware, camera, etc., not really that they stopped working or became slow (there only was a "physical" reason in in the case of the Huawei: the screen broke in a fall and it was expensive to replace, otherwise it worked just fine).
I don't have experience with Motorola, but from friends/family who have or had Samsung, it tends to be just... not good. Even if the hardware survives, which it not always does, after 1-2 updates they tend to lag like hell. I don't really get why they are so successful while e.g. HTC's smartphone business basically went under.
For the last 2 phones I paid about $300, with the expectation to last at least 5 years. One did last 6 years, the current one is work in progress. At $200, current phones models are too low quality to expect to work for 3-4 years.
You do realise that your Apple phone slows down precisely because the battery is less able to deliver high current bursts? This is the reason Apple gave for intentially slowing down phones.
Batteries are a consumable item, they only last a year or two before they have degraded significantly, whereas the phone will almost certainly work for years. With open source firmwares it could last a decade or more and indeed in the past I extended mobile phones for a long time that had replaceable batteries. Its become increasingly hard to avoid manufacturers planned obsolescence at a time where the improvements in phone performance has been diminishing.
As an iPhone user for more than 10 years, that just isn't true in my case. When I upgrade after 3-4 years, battery has never been the reason. The battery of the upgraded phone that I'm using for some other purpose does tend to give out after another few years but that's hardly 1-2 years total.
Everybody is talking about phones, but I feel like the regulation is quite a bit more extensive and applies to a wider range of devices.
- There has been a proliferation of battery powered devices (cordless vacuums, drills, home cameras etc., scooters) built usually by Chinese companies, using proprietary batteries with no replacement parts and no easy way to replace them.
- The requirement of 'user replaceability' isn't clarified as to what level of expertise can be expected from the user - the hackaday article shows an easily replaceable battery, but for example Ikea expects users to assembly complex pieces of furniture by hand, so I don't think this is going to be a huge constraint on manufacturers.
I feel like what the EP is going for is the creation of standardized and regulated drop-in batteries ensuring that if the pouch cell battery in your ASUS laptop dies, you can get an OEM-equivalent, regulated, third-party replacement for it which you can install with the same difficulty as replacing a RAM stick.
Article 11 calls for the batteries to be "readily removable" by end users. There don't seem to be any further clarifications but the dictionary definition would call for batteries to be removable "easily, without much difficulty". I don't believe Apple's current self-service repair program would meet this bar.
> Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and
replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the
appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at
the end of the lifetime of the appliance.
> A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be
substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance
of that appliance.
The market decided on this already. There were Samsung phones with replaceable batteries and they stopped making them. Samsung didn't stop selling them because people wanted replaceable batteries more than the phones without.
I'd really welcome to have a rule that mandates opening the firmware once a device is eol, as devices without updated firmware are quickly becoming bricks.
It will also subtly shift the incentives to either support things for longer or creating a long-term 3rd party ecosystem
I don't want to take tradeoff by (easily) replaceable battery. It's good that replaceable battery products exists for who want with accepting thicker and heavier product. Not for me so please don't mandate it. Perhaps it's good to make big manufacturers should have at least one replaceable product. I fully agree to right to repair for non-replaceable battery products.
Many people get a phone case partly to add some heft to ultrathin phones, it makes sense to mandate this, and possibly an SD slot alongside the (good) USB regulation:
You are not the one making the trade offs. The manufacturer is. When they realize that certain anti-consumer features that are not readily appreciated at the point of purchase are possible, they get implemented, even if the benefits you get in return are minimal and often more fig leave than anything else.
Replaceable batteries and SD Cards are prototypical for features that extend a phones useful life, but whose absence doesn't get punished because our purchase decisions don't factor in things we might wish to have in two years time.
And manufacturers have no incentive to extend useful life.
If long term consumer preferences really would drive phone design then why does everyone use cases, but there are no options to buy a phone that is less sleak but robust enough not to need a case?
> why does everyone use cases, but there are no options to buy a phone that is less sleak but robust enough not to need a case?
I don’t use a case, and I resent you supporting the use of government power to force me to make a tradeoff that I have chosen against.
Cases as an option mean the same phone can serve everyone, and people can choose to use a case or not. You are literally asking why phone manufacturers choose to serve a bigger market rather than a smaller one.
As someone else asked, what other purchasing decisions that I make should be illegal in the name of forcing every product to conform to your personal preferences rather than letting consumers like me decide what we want?
You are (wilfully?) missing the point that the paragraph about cases is making. Many people (most in my bubble) use cases. As consumers the device that we want isn't being built, and we resort to a subpar substitute. Why is something that soany people so obviously want not being built? Why is there no "slightly more clunky and no glass on the back" 'caseless' option? My thesis is because markets don't optimize for what we want, but for what is easy to sell us.
As for other decisions you don't get to make: One obvious example is the safety requirements for all your electronic devices. You can not decide to sell/buy unsafe devices.
> Why is something that soany people so obviously want not being built? Why is there no "slightly more clunky and no glass on the back" 'caseless' option?
Let’s try this another way.
Pretend your a phone company, and pretend that 70% of people use cases. And pretend 50% of those are zealots about cases and are offended at even the suggestion that they might ever go caseless. I think it’s less than that, but whatever.
So you’ve got three choices!
1. Build totally different phones for case and caseless. Everything from development to tooling to distribution is totally separate.
2. Focus on one market or the other, but not both
3. Ship a phone that works great caseless, and cases that can be attached for people who want bulkier phones.
Now, even if you personally hate the idea of a caseless phone, I hope you can work through why it is more economically and environmentally efficient to make cases an add-on.
I’m sorry the market isn’t serving your needs. I’m less sympathetic with anyone who insists their particular niche is actually the silent majority that would obviously be the correct group for companies to center every product decision on.
I don't get what you are suggesting here. Companies build separate phones for separate market segments all the time if it attracts customers. Moreover, there are many companies building phones.
Yet there are ~ 0 caseless phones out there. Your argument does not explain this _at all_. How you can look at this situation and pretend it's not an obvious market failure is beyond me. The only question is what the origin of the market failure is, and whether regulation could help. I don't think for cases regulation is an appropriate tool, for USB and replaceable batteries I think it is, for SD Cards I am not convinced either way.
But to have a meaningful discussion on this, it's first necessary to acknowledge how irrational the phone market actually is, which seems to be something that some people are (ideologically?) opposed to in this thread.
Maybe in your social circles, but I can only think of a few friends that use cases. Screen protectors are more common I think, but you can’t see that at a glance.
As already pointed out no, not everyone wants a case. But even those that do can and do choose different cases. On my work phones I often use battery cases because I use them so heavily. Having that option is useful flexibility.
Cases are also fashion statements for some people. Mandating bigger bulkier phones again forces trade offs on customers, making decisions for us you have no business making.
As for not knowing what I’ll need in future, I’ve been using smartphones for 14 years, I think I’ve got a pretty good idea by now what features I value.
As for SD card slots and replaceable batteries, phones with those features were common fur years and years, but the fact is the market simply didn’t care. If they were genuinely valued product differentiators those models would have been rewarded and the features would have survived. They didn’t because the fact is they offer marginal utility to most people.
Largely the products I want to use are being made, thank you very much. Please leave them alone.
> If they were genuinely valued product differentiators those models would have been rewarded
Can't vote with your wallet for a product that nobody is offering.
But you're half right. When my mom buys a phone, she doesn't think about those things, but when she calls me and says "my phone is full what do I do?" I would previously have advised her to pop in an SD card, but that option no longer exists.
It’s full of people like me who know what they want, and it’s not the bulky, feature encrusted structurally compromised things others here want to make the only legal option. I’m sorry that they don’t have the products on the market they want to buy, but is it really reasonable to ‘fix’ that by making the ones I and many others like and do buy illegal?
Nobody was suggesting mandating bulkier phones. The argument was only that in this case what a majority of (or at least many) people want is not actually being made. That is not surprising, it's just capitalism and market failure.
It optimizes for what makes companies more money, once all of their costs are factored in. That's all. We - customers - are merely consumers to them, and our only role is to buy what they sell; to give them as much money as we can bear to give for whatever they're selling.
Externalities are equally ignored, and government fines are simply another cost (which is, ironically, why significant fines drive changes).
Replaceable batteries and "right to repair" features in general for consumer electronics are things a relatively fringe group of consumers actually want. Most people would prefer to simply replace a broken device or take it to a tech repair shop and have them do it: they aren't hackers or electronics tinkerers and simply don't care to do it.
Lol >50% of farmers would disagree with you. Your opinion re. Who wants to fix stuff is quite limited it would seem. I mean hell my parents and every old person I have provided tech support to generally if they find out you can't change a battery in a device make a comment along the lines of "that's dumb" and "that's wasteful". The kids I tech about tech are the same. So yeah..
Probably just your peer group bud. Most of my mates would prefer to spend 10 seconds unscrewing a compartment than paying someone 10 bucks for nothing.
> a relatively fringe group of consumers actually want
Pretty big chance that we are falling victim to a paradox here. If the majority of users think "I can't buy a phone with a replaceable battery because all high-end phones from any manufacturer lacks them" the battery issue never get cited on polls on why a person bought a particular phone.
a very serious point , is what can be done about a damaged/swollen battery.
you used to be able to remove it, and deal with it safely.
now , when glued in, if it starts to go thermal, you cant remove it, bare minimum your phone goes mission impossible, large chance of injury or starting a fire.
all batteries should be removable, for basic product safety.
im pretty sure a federaly mandated recall of all such nonremoveable battery items is legally possible here in US, but how is the will to do it going to be born.
exactly, that is a safety issue, vs the risk to manufacturers of telemetry loss if your phone isnt always on.
it shouldnt just be ~possible~ to remove a battery, it should be expedient, as in, push a thumbnail into the slot and pry lightly, or similar to FRS radio batteries [push on a catch, lift battery out]
At the risk of stating the obvious: if your phone is about to explode get it away from you (or you from it), lest you lose more than your phone (or your fingernail).
Lithium Ion going bad is an excellent time to have proper respect for chemical burns.
I wonder if mandated replaceable batteries will apply to lithium ion, which require careful handling to not 'explode' or at least sizzle and spark violently, which i've seen happen in a lab even with skilled engineers in Cupertino.
In the context of this post, "replaceable" means "can be replaced by a relatively unskilled layperson without tools more specialized than a tiny screwdriver, and with very little risk of destroying the device"
This includes every iPhone for the last few years, most everything Samsung makes, and basically every phone which is just two slabs of glass glued together.
So, some silly definition that isn't relevant. Got it. I think if that is what you mean, maybe you should use the word "swappable". Replacement means it is at end of life and doing extra work to change them is ok. Swappable means that you are running low and you need more power and have additional batteries that you can swap in anytime.
A "better" design is one where the consumer can service the battery without having to use special tools and a heat gun. It is explicitly _not_ one which looks "sleeker" in the marketing materials.
You can do it with a hair drier and the suction cap that usually comes with the battery. Or you can take it to a store at any mall and they do it on the spot for you.
It's one of the easier things to fix. I could swap a phone battery easier than I could replace my door handle or repair clothing.
This is the thing that annoys me about these discussions. Be against arbitrary barriers to consumer repairs that have no benefits to the consumer? Totally on board.
But that doesn't mean that repairs/replacements need to be limited to something a random user can do without tools or at least with tools they're likely to have laying around their house. I've replaced batteries and had batteries replaced in my MacBooks a few times and it hasn't been an unreasonably difficult or expensive process.
I've had laptops with batteries you could pop out but they were relatively heavy compared to today's norms.
So basically there's an entire industry needed to support people (and mechanics/shops) who work on cars--including vehicles that pre-date modern computer controls and which are considered user-repairable. But somehow repairing a smartphone or a laptop shouldn't require any knowledge or equipment beyond what the average user possesses.
I'm sure it's technically possible to build a phone where the battery is easily replaceable and is highly water resistant. Difficult? Sure, but possible. If this regulation really does lead phone manufacturers to go back to the days of hand-removable backs or slide-out batteries then I'm sure they'll be investigating in R&D to get their IPwhatever ratings back.
Example: many GPSr units have replaceable AA batteries and support IPX7. It's not exactly rocket science -- a good locking mechanism and a rubber seal.
The GPSr crowd tend to be less obsessed by their devices being a fraction of a millimeter thinner than last year's model, though.
(Much as I love a good locking mechanism and a rubber seal, I can see it making the phone a little thicker than it would be was the battery non-removable.)
You can buy a Casio watch for about 20 USD that claims to resist water to 100 meters. The battery replacement requires a small screwdriver, does that count as user-replaceable?
Having a number of portable V/UHF radios, GPS receivers and assorted other bits of outdoor electronic gear, I have had a tiny bit of acid-free vaseline on any gasket or O-ring I could find annually. Has worked a charm so far.
(With today's rubber being what it is, I guess I could safely at least double that interval - but it only takes a few minutes, and the vaseline is effectively free, so...
My father's underwater flashlights from the 1970s had replaceable batteries and were quite water resistant, I mean from sea water, not just rain. Of course a phone makes it more difficult both for its shape and size, but hey, technology progressed a bit in 50 years.
Underwater flashlights sooner than not suffer from outgassing and tend to have pressure relief valves and multiple o-rings to keep the water out. O-rings do need a bit of maintenance but it's not a huge burden.
How tall and wide should the phone be.
Max brightness
Slipperiness
Volume
Whether it’s round at the corners
How thin the phone should be
Whether those that are sold in EU should have all the parts made in member countries just like Airbus
Lol,EU fighting unnecessary waste and here we have people butthurt? Lol spud we literally regulate people for building shit products that are harmful in every other sector, health, food, you name it. Why should tech be any different? And yes your e-waste that's completely unnecessary just because your company wants to make shit decisions isn't acceptable. It's harmful and there's no reason why it should be allowed. Stoked the EU are doing this finally. Get wrecked crappy designers (looking at you apple).
You’re cool with designers, e.g. Apple, shipping EU models that are less waterproof, bulkier, less reliable, and cost more? In the name of reducing e-waste?
And does your legal philosophy of “anything not explicitly allowed is forbidden” apply to other aspects of life?
All these laws remind me of the apocryphal tale of a legislature mandating the pi = 3.
> You’re cool with designers, e.g. Apple, shipping EU models that are less waterproof, bulkier, less reliable, and cost more? In the name of reducing e-waste?
Regulations act as pressure. If this results in less waterproof devices and I as an user still want waterproof, I'll keep on looking for companies that do the best job under this constraint. That will further push the industry to figure out the replaceable battery + waterproof combo.
Well folks seem to keep pushing the boundaries and pumping out crap that's wasteful, unrepairable and just shit designed to appease to some kids fishcher price kids toy aesthetic. Then yes. We need these laws. If your so thick we have to spell it out one by one a law at a time then so be it. I have no problem with this.
Less waterproof? Oh no, how will we all be able to continue diving with our iPhones? This is such a common trans-European tradition, I fail to see how we will ever adapt to this change.
They seem to have no issues earning money offering a cheap smartphone (much cheaper than Apple), creating a waterproof smartphone with a user replaceable battery.
Phones have been getting better every year, and with it, new features and utilities enabled, throttling or not. No one (few outside HN) wants an old phone. People want the new features that are enabled by new hardware. The effective life of a phone is not limited by a battery but the remaining hardware.
Lot of iPhone users seem mention longevity as main feature. I personally know both Android and iPhone users, who like to have phone longer than 2 years. Having user changeable battery doesn't take away your freedom to change phone more often, but now you have phone with aftermarket value.
Phones are good enough that they feature sets last 6 years, while the batteries don’t. Plenty of people don’t want to drop $800 on a new iPhone every few years when their old one works fine. And those who do move their old iPhone to the secondary market. The secondary market exists because contrary to your statement, plenty of people are fine with old phones.
Next thing you know after this passes they’ll be regulating the size and interface to the the battery such that a standard sized battery must be supported on all mobile phones or else you’ll be fined 30% of global profits.
Proprietary batteries are useful for getting the best trade off of capacity, weight, cost, and form factor for a product. Standardized batteries will result in products that are worse in 1 or more of those categories.
The benefit standardized batteries have over those trade offs just by increasing longevity of items and in turn reducing waste I will argue day in day out make it worth it. Those metrics are worth zip in the grand scheme of things given what we are ruining in order to achieve them. Stop breaking the world just so you can have trinkets.
Consumers prioritize capacity, weight, and cost over longevity. We are simply making the best devices we can for consumers. Phones make up a tiny percent of the waste humans produce. There are much more high impact areas that should be focused on if you want to reduce the waste output of humanity. The bias against waste of phones in due to their cost instead of the amount of waste it is.
> but the state shouldn't be regulating to such a level
Why not?
> We don't need nanny states
How do you define a nanny state? It feels like you're against any regulations at all, but plenty of countries have laws about how businesses operate and specifications that their products must meet to be allowed to be sold. I'm not sure how a law intended to reduce electronic waste is somehow indicative of a "nanny state", whatever that is, unless you just believe everything should be up to individual choice. Which doesn't make sense to me, because I don't know how individual choice would be able to solve things like protecting the environment from manufacturing waste processes or preventing the extinction of wildlife.
The EU won’t be mandating on-the-fly replaceable batteries, like where you can simply remove the back cover like with old phones. It’s about making it easy to replace at home with a screwdriver and maybe a suction cup, and no glued-in batteries like those annoying strips used in iPhones.
No. There are no options if the state is to govern for the people, not for corporations
There is more money to be made if the corporate types herd together and institute such dark patterns. There is no incentive for any of them to break ranks.
Regulation is the only answer. Not perfect, not all that good, just better.
