(www.theolivepress.es)
I can have two (or more) batteries, if it runs out I just change it. I don’t need walk around with a USB battery pack and cable hanging off the device preventing me from using it properly.
I can put the battery on charge somewhere and leave it, even if not completely secure, because just the battery not the device. This way my expensive device and my data is not at risk.
I can use 40+ year old cameras, because I can just put a new battery in. This is not something you can do with newer device, e.g. and iPod and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
Battery tech moves on. There are now some batteries with charging ports on them. Other batteries offer more capacity than the original ones. Apple even did this once for me, when MacBook Air batteries were fairly easy to replace, I had mine replaced (it wore out) at the shop and they put a slightly bigger one in, which was the standard on the newer models.
I question whether battery packs would be a good thing to bring back now. USB power banks have 100% interchangeability among many device classes, which is something that not even dry cell batteries achieved. I can choose to leave the house with or without a power bank and just rent one in my city (YMMV). Modern charging wattages are high enough that I don't miss shutting down my Nexus, changing the pack, then rebooting.
It's tempting to say that this could be solved if battery sizes were standardized, but that would inevitably limit device dimensions. For example, I especially loathe how the 18650 has made almost all modern flashlights clunky. I would hate it if Apple pushes for a 4.5mm thick battery standard to kill all foldables because they don't want to enter the market and cannibalize their iPad demand.
Or when phone manufacturers realise they may as well do so, at least on some models, because why not. And yes, the battery compartment can be waterproof with a rubber seal... but even so? Many would prefer battery swap to full waterproof, if that was the cost.
This last point is actually a real killer, an easily swappable battery in a phone probably sacrifices >10% "maximum" capacity in lost space. e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.
We COULD have an EV with a 200kWh battery that can go 1000km++ on a charge in -30C weather. But nobody really needs that beyond a few outliers.
What we NEED is ubiquitous and easy charging.
Going for a burger, it'll take 20 minutes for you to order, eat and walk out. On a 300kW charger in the parking lot you can in theory get up to 100kWh charged. Or less with a slower one. Even plugging in to a 50kW charger for 20 minutes is enough.
Same with shopping etc, giving "everyone" a 2kW charger in a parking lot is table stakes in 2026.
And with phones: just have the possilibity of charging everywhere. I have 13€ Ikea Qi2 ("Magsafe") compatible chargers[0] everywhere in the house. Anyone can just slap their phone on one and it'll charge a bit.
There's no reason why we can't have more of those in public - we did try when wireless charging first appeared, but it was a whole chicken and egg thing. Nobody had phones that supported it and finding the exact 1x1cm spot where the phone charges was a pain. Qi2 with the alignment magnets takes that problem away completely.
[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/vaestmaerke-wireless-charging-s...
While your reasoning has _some_ merit, it reads as an apologia for the status quo .. rather than an example of why we should prevent easy battery replacement.
Give these phone batteries a standard geometry and interface and pretty much all these problems immediately go away. 3 prongs on the battery (ground, positive, data). A standard protocol so the battery can communicate things like SOC or acceptable charge rate with the charger. And viola, you are off to the races.
Yes, this will mean manufacturers will have a hard limit on how thin they can make their phones and a constraint on what designs they can employ.
alternatively, i can trade more bulk for more battery. if its got a connector, why cant i put a bigger batter in the slot that sticks out?
Random thought: Maybe Apple should use radioisotope batteries to never have to change them, ever. I jest.
We don't need to fast charge anything, phones or EVs. Slow charging preserves battery life and smart charging will charge whenever it is cheapest.
Also, wireless charging is finicky and comes at a cost: way less efficient energy transfer.
Hell, this thread even has a person whose argument against USB-C is that mandating it will mean that the EU will get conquered by Russia.
Now I have to purchase specialized non-marring micro tool scrapers to clean the port without damaging it. The scrapers break after a few cleanings, so this is an ongoing monthly recurring cost. Yeah I can charge wirelessly, but I still don’t want sawdust in my phone hole after a day of ripping wood.
As a woodworker I'm surprised you didn't have that idea :D
(Like, c'mon, toothpicks aren't immutable objects that fall out of question just because they're a bit too large)
If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Having an easily swappable battery returns some power to the user.
Or phones with USB-C.
I suspect this will be a good thing to force, but I don't know for sure.
Yes, making seatbelts mandatory was also a weird decision.
As an example of public policy it had significant impact on death, injury, medical costs, etc.
Road Traffic Accidents before and after Seatbelt Legislation-Study in a District General Hospital (1990)
Injuries among samples of car accident cases attending the Accident & Emergency (A & E) department of a District General Hospital (DGH) in the year before and after the introduction of seat belt legislation were classified applying the Abbreviated Injury Scale using information recorded in the patient case notes.
Those who died or did not attend an A & E department were not included in the sampling frame.
The number of those who escaped injury increased by 40% and those with mild and moderate injuries decreased by 35% after seatbelt legislation. There was a significant reduction in soft tissue injuries to the head. Only whiplash injuries to the neck showed a significant increase.
( ^ One of many before/after studies that highlight difference made by seatbelt legislation )
However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves. So why force them against their will?
However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves. So why force them against their will?
Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy. Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.
> a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway
You don't, this is nothing but an excuse for
> b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.
So this change, while welcome, is a bit late.
It keeps getting all updates and will keep for few more years.
Camera results massively improved cca 2 years ago with some update so that they are cca on same level as current ones. Plus I still has 10x physical zoom which trumps all current models, iphone pro max including since we still can't bypass physical limits of optics.
Really, 0 reasons to update and battery capacity is the only upcoming issue - still fine now but I feel the decrease a bit. If I could swap it easily myself without paying some phone shop to do it, that's a massive advantage.
https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-sy...
If there is any incentive to make a product better is to make it more accessible to their first party customers.
There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.
(And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)
If it slows down innovation is debatable but even so there’s still a solid principle behind it, a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. It’s usually a worthwhile compromise. You don’t run tour engine only in the red zone because that’s where it makes the most power.
And customers directly benefit from the efficiency gain by burning through less fuel. So no need to decide for them.
You can’t have infinitely improving standards for an infinite time, otherwise you end up with bullshit like Dieselgate, and ecotechnocrats forcing everyone to drive around in mobile inextinguishable incendiary devices.
At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
Well, kind of. You have some seconds to try to cut it short, after that they will burn to a crisp, exactly like an electric car. The difference is that a battery will burn until the end no matter what. OTOH, an ICE fire is potentially explosive.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
They can and they do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu7tQ2-x61k or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKOQUE9U1Ek or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFvzTOZsnsg. That Youtube channel alone (Jersey Shore Fire Response) has more than a dozen ICE car fires, nobody comments nothing about ICE cars being dangerous, just "firefighters great job". ONE single case of electric trucks burning, and all comments are "lithium bad". ICE cars contain oil, gasoline, paper, rubber, plastics... They have some parts that get really hot on normal functioning, and any failure (e.g. an oil duct leaking, debris on the exhaust) could lead to a "spontaneous" fire. The difference is that a lithium battery can burn from a cold state without being our fault, while for an ICE car you can blame the driver for bad maintenance, parking over dry grass, reeving too much... we like to find causality, so we can convince ourself we can avoid that happening to us.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Any car can catch fire after any impact if the luck is bad. A gas or oil leakage can lead to a "spontaneous" fire very quickly. Any car can catch fire even without any impact, just driving around, as shown in the videos above. If your car catches fire, the fumes will be toxic, it doesn't matter if the toxicity comes from plastics, oil, rubber or lithium. Get far from the car quickly.
You are ignoring the fact that ICE cars are more prone to catch fire, proportionally. And the try to steer the debate to what is the cause of such fires, or if the ICE car can be extinguished with water. That would be a different debate.
That's not quite right. It's not like a non-special equipment like bucket of water or a garden hose (and I, for one, always travel with one of each!) work well for extinguishing any working car fire.
The remains of ICE car fires I've seen while out and about, while very few, are usually just hulks of vaguely car-shaped metal that have turned rusty from the heat by the time I come across them.
Car fires are never good. They're seldom easy to put out. EV fires can be worse in a lot of ways, but that doesn't make the other kinds of car fires saintly or anything.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
Nope. Except: One doesn't have to go very far on teh Interweb to find videos of car fires at gas stations, either.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact
Sometimes.
> and lock the occupants inside
Sometimes people can't get out.
> and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Nope.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Not usually.
People don't usually die from getting hit on the side of the road while pouring gas from a jerry can into their EV, either.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night
Not often, but sometimes.
> and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
I'm not answering that. I take too much pleasure in ignoring uselessly-specific addendums to questions like this. You'll have to forgive me.
You tell us.
From the way you wrote this comment, you seem to have a pre-existing belief that ICE is safer despite the evidence to the contrary, it looks like this because you're asking questions that are nonsensically specific, to paraphrase "does a ICE car catch fire while charging?", given that depending solely on how you count the tiny little lead battery in an ICE they *either* don't charge at all but rather refuel *or* they continuously charge while running.
> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.
False.
There are many different classifications of fire, each with their own special equipment; liquid fuel is amongst them, just as electrical fires are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_extinguisher
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=petrol+station+fire&t=osx&ia=image...
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Re "lock the occupants inside", that sounds like you're talking about Tesla's design flaws, which is a "Tesla" problem not a "battery" problem. Other EV companies aren't as dumb as Musk has been with Tesla over the last decade.
Also, firefighters have for my entire life carried tools specifically for breaking open vehicles that had been smashed in ways that stopped the doors working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_rescue_tool
And window-breaker hammers have likewise been standard emergency kit for a long time, though I don't know when they started getting recommended for drivers themselves.
Re "from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery", petrol and diesel fumes are also pretty nasty.
Irrelevant framing aside, post-crash fires are actually more common in ICE vehicles due to fuel system breaches.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Yes.
Stats I've found with a cursory glance say that there's more risk from the ship's own engine than all the vehicles, ICE and BEV combined, that it carries.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
Yes, and are more likely to than BEVs.
I don't know why it happens. Maybe a case of "if a dog bites a man, it's not important. If a man bites a dog, it gets newspaper cover". Maybe it is that an ICE car burning is extinguished in minutes, and then towed away, while an electric car burning is basically a two hours firework show.
You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.
Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.
There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
Short term thinking, if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape, it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.
(2) what would "significantly better" even look like? USB-C can do 120 watts, enough to fill a 20 Wh battery in 10 minutes, except the batteries themselves aren't ready to charge that fast.
(3) if someone somehow manages to make a significant advance, nothing prevents them from having two ports. Or indeed lobbying for a law change on the basis of a tangible thing they can demonstrate rather than a hypothetical that still hasn't happened in all the time since these discussions began.
We can compare that to the US. Here, we stayed stuck with power-thirsty analog phones for many years before bouncing through a litany of mutually-incompatible digital non-standards...and finally landed on the ~same actual-standards that Europe adopted.
I think they'll be OK. (I think the rest of us will be OK, too.)
I'll be the first to complain if the new standard isn't adopted in due time, but as a strong example I'm still very content with how the GSM legislation standard has played out.
The EU could have made a different decision. Or not got itself involved.
> The design for the USB‑C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc., with the help of Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum.
And the additional durability of Lightning is itself not free. It's not cheaper than USB-C. Quite the opposite. That additional cost means that it either uses more resources to manufacture, or more resources to make the tools to manufacture. So, it's just wasteful. Lightning is "physically superior" but USB-C is better engineering.
Apple knows that. So Apple chose to go with Lightning because it was theirs, not because it was better. Because it's not really better. Not better for the customer. Or really better for business. Apple chose vendor lock-in.
Worse than that, Apple's connectors are higher durability, but their cabling itself is awful. I work at a K-12 and we were in an iPad and Chromebook pilot back in the mid 2010s that ran about 4-5 years. We had a fleet of 3500 of each. The iPads saw less than half the usage hours as the Chromebooks, but had something like triple the incidence of cable replacement. The cable insulation splits. The plasticizers degrade, the cables get really sticky or oily, and then they split and expose the braided grounding sheath. That braided cable will shock you. That was true for both student and staff devices. So they had these wonderful connectors, but the cables still failed at effectively five or six times the rate of the alternative. And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!
Godswallop! Aftermarket Lightning cables were readily available shortly after Apple first use the the port.
Agreed though, their own Apple branded cables that came with the device are terrible, and I always just threw them straight in the bin.
And connection cycles is the wrong metric for USB-C vs Lightning. The correct metric is how many and how much side-force removals can the port withstand.
My experience shows that for USB-C the answer is wildly insufficient whereas for Lightning it’s sufficiently high enough that it won’t be a concern.
Like yeah, Apple helped design the USB-C connector and preferred something else.
Thereby only reinforcing my point.
All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable.
The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet.
The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.
How much cool aid do you have to drink to genuinely believe the corporate argument that using proprietary connectors is "innovative"?
Eh, no? USB-C was already pretty much the standard before, and you could plug in lightning cable with a cheap adapter cable.
Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.
And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.
OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. > > Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.
And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.
They didn't need to ban all other connectors..
So Apple could give people the ability to use their oh-so-superior Lightning cable while also being able to use USB-C for charging. If nothing else, it means that there are no longer any "does anyone have an iPhone charger" discussions at parties because people can just charge all their phones with USB-C.
That's a bit silly. There's only so much space in eg a phone.
(actually, which single-vendor connector are we mourning, here? I forget.)
So I'm not quite so sure why the EU needed to outlaw alternative chargers.
I never had a Lightning port fail.
I just wish that all of them would be legal, and consumer like you be allowed to pick what they like best.
I mind bureaucrats locking that in.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Haha, what? I like to complain about this piece of legislation, but it's not that important. And it's not like Russia has better policy. Oh, just the opposite. (Like waging wars they can't win, or running crazy high corruption.)
I really appreciate it, keep up with the good work.
Bloody Clippers.
You always got to watch out for the Clippers, they’ll take whatever you say or write and clip it out of context and make it mean something completely different to what you really said.
The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
Eh, you know that people can just scroll up?
> The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
Are you willing to bet on this?
Just like 3.5mm headphone jacks and MicroSD card expandable storage.
They're hard to find even on lower end devices any more, despite more ports being a premium/pro feature in other market segments.
2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery.
3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone.
4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack.
5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.
It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.
> but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it
The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.
> And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.
Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.
> why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.
That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!
Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.
Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.
Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.
As to why we want to make phones as thin as possible... I don't know, but I guess it makes them look futuristic, which helps with sales. The same goes for highly-reflective, glossy screens. I guess I'm not gonna cry if that gets regulated away.
Fairphone 6, recent with replaceable battery: 9.6 mm
Galaxy S5, has a replaceable battery, released _12 years ago_ - battery tech has improved a lot since then: 8.1 mm
iPhone 17 Pro Max: 8.8 mm
iPhone 12 Pro Max: 7.4 mm
We want to make phones as thin as possible so the latest flagship iPhone is 1.4 mm thicker than the one from 5 years ago? A whole 0.8 mm thinner than a recent one with a replaceable battery with maybe 0.1% of the iPhone's R&D budget, and 0.8 mm thicker than one with a replaceable battery made 12 years ago?
The bootloader was unlocked in many regions (and became unlockable in all regions). Custom roms were abundant.
And it was waterproof.
(In the subsequent decade+, I have heard it said over and over again that this is an impossible combination of traits. And yet, there was a time when we had all that.)
Rugged phones with removable batteries has vastly superior IP ratings. Glues go bad faster than O-rings used in removable batteries do.
I've had water intrusion with an iPhone, and it drove a sales of a new display panel from myself. Not so much with an actual rugged phone.
I'm quite certain you can find many companies in the far East who will produce cells of exactly the size and shape you want, as long as you're willing to order a minimum quantity. There are also a few semi-standard sizes of prismatic cells available.
That said, having a few truly standard sizes like we had with 1.2/1.5V and 9V batteries would be a good idea. BL-5C and its variants were a de-facto standard for many years too, and apparently are still available new.
It will stop only when there is a reason for consumer-detectable battery quality indicators — ie non-tech people have a reason to buy them. Which will now be the case with this law.
A camera doesn't care if you take the battery out, except for that sub-second bit when it's saving the photo. Otherwise it doesn't notice you swapping the battery at all.
Modern phones are different because they are basically computers, and computers really don't like it when you just cut the power with no warning.
There’s a bunch of things that don’t need their own battery if they just drew enough power off USBC. I have an office coffee setup. My grinder and espresso maker have their own batteries. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have a single battery pack and just plug both into USBC saving me a ton of weight. (In fact the Lagom Mini 2 grinder is powered straight off USBC with no internal power.)
For phones and cameras, that need their own power source, a replaceable battery is mostly just an end of life thing for me. Because I’d still have to carry a cable or spare battery around.
But in many environments you don’t have to heat from cold. There’s often a Zip tap or kettle to get you most of the way.
But maybe the internal battery can deliver more power directly to the heating element.
Works just as well.
So you agree that swappable batteries are superior.
Apple winces.
It is a lot of fun to pick up and use nice old glass from garage sales and such. They tend to require manual control, but that is the fun part of taking pictures anyway.
PS. Consumer surveillance cameras, on the other hand, don't have replaceable batteries in general, as they can operate indefinitely off a small solar panel or for months on a charge.
I, for one, don't welcome that change. I'd be ok with paying someone a bit extra to replace the battery. I mean, I'd be ok if I had a battery die in my phone in the last 10 years, which I don't remember it did.
Manufacturers only have to make it possible for users to open and close the phone to replace the battery without damage, using common tools.
When was the last time you kept a phone longer than 2-3 years? That’d explain why you haven’t had one die.
Assuming you do get a new phone regularly, easy battery replacement will probably help the resale value of your own a fair bit - the labour cost of a battery replacement is priced into most older phones on the second hand market.
I've had two battery replacements since 2015. One of them was required, the other was mostly optional (battery had dropped to 90% on my iPhone - which was probably sufficient).
USB-C - that was an awesome requirement that it was unclear whether Apple was ever going to do.
User Replaceable Battery? Zero desire, particularly if it reduces water resistance on the device. Dozens of things I've wanted from a phone - being able to replace the battery has never even entered my mind as something I wanted.
Ok, one was optional, and let’s round up to 3. So 1/3 of your phones. Kinda sounds like you would benefit from replaceable batteries.
Regardless, those 4-5 year old phones likely went to ewaste immediately or soon after you were done with them because the cost of replacing the battery was less than their resale value after 4-5 years.
That’s a pattern our planet literally can’t handle. Wars over digging up minerals using slave labour then putting them in phones for 3-5 years just to send them to have children get chemical burns stripping the metals out of them.
My last computer lasted me 11 years, with two battery replacements along the way. My phone should do the same, just as easily.
Maybe they updated the CPU slightly but screen and camera were identical.
I would have kept my iPhone 8 if they kept updating the software. Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8…
I know there is a cost and overhead toward supporting old platforms. But for the premium on these devices and the level of waste generated, manufacturers can still do better…
I’d prefer no new features and only security updates… perhaps I’m weird.
> Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8...
Are you seriuos? What does the look of a phone have to do with how long it is supported?
That's what governments are for.
Apple fought it the whole way, commissioned studies to show it was a bad idea, etc etc. This after they had a decade prior been subject to the same thing with micro USB and skirted that agreement by shipping more unnecessary cables.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/02/what-the-eu-manda...
Most people would argue the best outcome is spending <100$ and 1 min of your time to have your phone restored to like-new speed.
When I bought my first smartpone, a Moto G (1st gen) it was as flat as any phone most people carried around at the time (2014, I think). And the battery was replaceable.
I think also Samsung phones had replaceable batteries then. And this was the case for a few years after. Until it wasn't.
Devices didn't suddenly get thin when batteries were glued in. Why would they?
I did ruin the water protection on mine pretty quickly though, because the back panel was made of plastic and was... flimsy. It basically became a fidget toy.
When thinking of how flagship phone producers are going to keep making sexy phones that also keep their watertightness, my biggest worry is repeated stress from any removable component becoming a fidget toy
I also replaced glued batteries in phones following ifixit instructions a few times (using a hair dryer/heat gun).
They didn't have any less or more "protection" than the replaceable ones. They looked exactly the same apart from the connectors ofc.
Please substantiate your claim. Until then I call it BS.
Batteries also don't really die, but you get shorter and shorter life. When a device that barely could make it through 2 days of use now survives for less than one, an "upgrade" seems nicer than it really would've been if you could just swap the battery.
As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors in the rain, giving up superior IP68 water resistance for a replaceable battery that I'll never replace will be a downgrade for me.
IP_8 is "more than 1m, more than 30min water immersion" rating.
"outdoors in the rain" needs IP_5 rating if you want to be safe. You do not need a dive watch to go out in rain.
Even non-waterproof devices are not exactly made of sugar. My first iphone was a 3gs. I want running with the device in an armband. My rain precautions were plugging in 3.5mm earphones, and pointing the charge port downwards. Regularly got caught in rain with it, and the device was completely fine two years later when I sold it.
That doesn't mean that a modern phone of vaguely S5 shape, with an S5-esque battery door, can't be fitted with a more modern USB port, though. Does it?
They seem like very unrelated things.
(Those modern ports, by the way? They're pretty slick when they work right. They detect moisture and turn off the bit of normally-externally-available power to help prevent galvanic corrosion.)
Phone makers do not want you to be able to replace batteries easily because it will extend the life of a phone. End of story.
how do you square that position with your stance here on e-waste as it applies to other people who are apparently ruining the planet?
The comment above mine you linked to said they never had battery problems. I was saying they probably don’t keep their phones long enough to encounter battery problems. I wasn’t suggesting that’s a good thing - just that it’s very common. And if you need me to defend my position with action: I’m 5 years in on this phone and planning to do a diy battery swap soon to keep it running a little longer.
Urban rainproof phones like S24 and iPhone aren't actually intended to be left drenched in mud or seawater, so they don't have to be equipped to be resistant against pieces of soil or soaked driftwood jammed in the charge port.
Cameras also need to withstand drops for similar reasons to phones, it’s in you hand and you could drop it, also tripods can fall over, car mounts fall off etc.
I think you mean thickness?
Extra width is sold as a feature.
I don’t understand the obsession with reducing thickness.
Why is a thinner phone more desirable than a thicken one?
I had multiple android phones with replaceable batteries and many were no thicker than modern phones, especially once you've added the protective case.
For example, good luck finding good apple batteries in regions where there is no official apple service.
Most Chinese parts are inferior: for example rates for max 500 cycles instead of 1000
You could argue that the trend towards more energy dense batteries and wireless charging could enable new interesting form factors. Recent phones have magnetic connectors for external wireless chargers/batteries that snap to the back. Most of bulk and weight of a phone is for accommodating batteries. You could make an argument that making a phone with replaceable batteries is easier than ever. Many cameras have a bulge for the camera. The negative space of the rest of the phone could easily hold a swappable battery. How critical are those 3mm really?
The only reason I use a case is that the iPhone is close to unusable on a flat surface without it.
Nokia actually did an Android phone just before MS acquired them which they then promptly killed. And then of course they pulled the plug on the whole business unit. HMD apparently still makes feature phones based on Series 30. That's the pre-smart phone platform that a lot of Nokia fans remember fondly. The famously indestructible phones.
They're somewhat of a standard in DIY circles because they're a familiar form and all of the support stuff for them has existed for decades.
Even if you stripped a 5G phone down to a Series 40-esque interface the 5G radios alone would use more power than a whole 3310.
In order to get the power density modern phones need they require high power Li-poly batteries. An extra 3mm worth of ABS shell is a lot of lost capacity. You can't sell user serviceable Li-poly batteries without a protective shell. You'd never get a UL rating because Li-polys are dangerous if mishandled.
I came across them in portable radios (portable FM radios, small global radios, plane listening radios and similar).
Also interesting to know is that BYD was supplying a lot of phone batteries back then. I think they also supplied to Nokia. Phone batteries is what made them big.
Low cost phones will be most affected.
You seem to referencing from a older exemption for self serviceability if your smartphone can do 1,000 cycles and retain 80% battery. Specifically - B 1.1 (1) (c) (ii) (b) . Here is the link - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Article 11 of the new regulation (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...) covers exemptions but nothing to do with 1,000 cycles or Apple as far as i can see.
(a) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for replacement of the display assembly and of parts referred to in point 1(a), with the exception of the battery or batteries, meets the following criteria: [...]
[...]
(c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
(i) meets the following criteria:
— fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
- the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
(ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that:
— the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
— after 500 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
— the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
— the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
---
So manufacturers must make the battery replaceable, or meet all the conditions from (a) for replacing non-battery components, and meet the 1000 cycle / 80% capacity requirement.
It's or, not and
It was not said that Apple was exempted. What was said is that Apple complied with the exemption rules.
It really, really wasn't. All it said is that Apple became compliant with their current offerings.
Now you're contorting to dig your heels in, so I think this conversation is over. Have a good day.
It appears what you're looking for is in B(5)(c)(ii).
> (c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
> (i) meets the following criteria:
> — fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
> — the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
> (ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that
> — the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
> — after 500 full charge cycles the battery must have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
> — the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
> — the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
You and other poster could have just web searched and corrected me, Here is the the actual link https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj/eng
P.S. I had posted same link twice.
Written by the sub-sub-sub subcommittee…
Europe will fall to the Russians, if the Russians can ever find it under all the piles of disused regulations.
Surprisingly the phone was fine and works fine after a brief rinse under the tap. It must be hard to combine that sort of water resistance with easy user changing.
Modern phone water resistance is incredible. I've even seen people literally swim with their phones and not even question if it was a bad idea.
The battery compartment had a rubber gasket and some very tight screws.
I suppose the glue-everything approach is partly due to the desire of making a device very thin. There's no room for strong, load-bearing outer case, the internals are load-bearing.
There is a good reason waterproofing claims are specific about the kind of liquid (usually just fresh or salt water, usually without significant movement (i.e. jets, like you get in a shower)).
These devices are mostly sold in enterprise environments (eg field use, factories) and as such get a lot of wear and tear. But they hold up well. They're not ultra rugged but a good compromise. We use tons of them in our factories, we replaced DECT handheld phones with the Xcovers loaded with ms teams. Not an ideal setup (teams for mobile kinda sucks) but at least this way they can easily communicate with people in the offices.
Samsung Galaxy XCover7
169 x 80.1 x 10.2 mm (6.65 x 3.15 x 0.40 in)
150 x 71.9 x 8.8 mm (5.91 x 2.83 x 0.35 in)
The Xcover 4S was 146.2 x 73.3 x 9.7 mm (5.76 x 2.89 x 0.38 in)
Also, these are business rugged models, unlike the iPhone.
I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if IP68 could be achieved in a phone without glue. There's no clamping mechanism for the backs, they're just press-fit with small clips.
A phone needs to handle some rain droplets falling on its screen, anything more than that is a gimmick that's not worth the downsides it comes with.
I submerge my phone as a matter of normal use because I can. I take it into pools and hot tubs, and I clean it in the sink -- I personally wouldn't trade that for a battery door.
Then I won't chance any submersion and I can't think of an accurate way to test it.
Some like to read in the bathtub. Statistics say women prefer the bathtub more than the shower. Therefore your position is sexist.
(Yes, I'm being an asshat)
a lot of normal people who daily-use their phones near water and even jump into pools with them. I would bet you $100 that if you asked people "replaceable battery of water proofing to the same level you have it now", ~ nobody will puck the former.
Most the suburban kids in Houston had wristband attachments to their phones in the pool or would be in a floaty taking stupid pics of each other as kids do. Trying to keep a modern phone dry takes away a lot of utility.
> A phone needs to handle some rain droplets falling on its screen, anything more than that is a gimmick that's not worth the downsides it comes with
It’s actually the opposite - a user replacement battery is a gimmick not worth the downsides.
Apple know this, and they know their customers a lot better than you do.
Your position is niche at best, anachronistic really.
It's not really the old kind of replace-ability, though. The only requirement is that you should be able to change it with commercially available tools.
I suspect it's a moot point. Makers have every incentive to drive replacement cycles.
I keep my phones for 3-4 years, and the battery life while degraded isn't really an issue.
And that's with recharging it just about every night even if it's not dead.
I had to make the choice of getting another phone (used in great condition, as I do) or pay half the cost I paid to get the battery replaced but also knowing it would still be heaviy used and more likely to fail in other ways because of use.
If labor cost and decreased relaibility weren't factors, swapping the battery would have been the choice.
Now the question is: are there more people like me or more people who need a sealed, hard to repair phone? I don't know but if I did I'd accept keeping the current situation.
While manufacturers do have an incentive to get people to buy new phones, many of them with first party insurance do have an incentive not to pay out as many claims.
It also officially support submersion in seawater as well as cleaning with soapy water. Most glued phones support neither.
Which is funny to me, because even with an IP68 phone, I get worried if I even splash a little water on it.
The thing is - if the battery had been destroyed, that could have been replaced...
I've also had iPhone dying from gasket leaks, the circumferential double sided tape seal dries out after a while.
So manufactures might just responds to this by making your phone heavier with a bigger battery that is being under utilized.
Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.
It also has some other settings that relate to smart charging that I don't fully understand (mostly because it's kind of inscrutable).
But the idea, AFAICT, is that it works with a person who charges their phone on a fairly regular schedule (they sleep at about the same time every night with plugged in all night).
The battery meanders up to 85% or something and holds there. Shortly before the person normally wakes up, it starts coming the rest of the way up to 100%. And then they wake up, unplug the phone, and it begins to discharge.
This helps to minimize the duration of being at a high state-of-charge, which is also a big factor in long-term battery longevity.
It's a tidy set of tradeoffs, I think.
I recently investigated large portable power banks (Jackery, etc.) and like that there are options to charge faster with a battery life tradeoff. Let people make their own informed choices.
In that experiment, it’s also unclear if the 30% lower limit or the 80% upper limit is more important. I suspect the former.
This same thing happened to Pixels 6a after 500 cycles.
Just looking in maps, there are three Apple Stores within a 45 minute drive from where I live in central Florida.
The situation is worse in my hometown in South GA admittedly, you have to drive 70 miles for same day service for an authorized repair place - mostly Best Buy.
That is not an argument.
It’s like complaining about items from TEMU aren’t high quality and expecting the government to do more.
I’d rather get the additional structural rigidity, compactness, and weatherproofing that comes from the tight construction and then pay $99 to have Apple professionally install a new battery for me in 3-4 years. Forcing everyone’s iPhone to take all of the tradeoffs of replaceable batteries so some people can save $50 to replace their own battery isn’t a good deal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if forcing all phones to have easily replaceable batteries would result in a net increase in e-waste due to the additional failure modes introduced. Even if batteries were easily replaceable I think most iPhone users would have Apple do it for them anyway.
I’ve also replaced some iPhone batteries myself and it’s really not that bad if you are familiar with taking modern electronics apart. Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
This sounds like the exact opposite of real life. Every battery ages to the point of uselessness, not every phone gets to take a dive. It's not a stretch to say most phones never see more than some rain or a spilled drink. But the worst part of every discussion on this topic is this false (uninformed) dichotomy that water resistance and easily replaceable battery are mutually exclusive.
In 3-4 years yes, but how about in 10-15 years? Apple will refuse to take your money then.
> Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
Which is malicious compliance. They should allow the friendly neighborhood repair shop to purchase a toolkit so you can choose who does the repairs for you.
They still offer battery service for iPhone 6.
> They should allow the friendly neighborhood repair shop to purchase a toolkit
They do. My friendly neighborhood repair shop a couple miles away has the same tools and parts Apple uses themselves at their Store.
But then I haven't broken a phone in a while so I haven't really talked to my friendly neighborhood repair shop. That only because my daughter finally grew up, they remembered me at the shop back when she was young :)
> That only because my daughter finally grew up, they remembered me at the shop back when she was young
Ha! This is so relatable right now. My daughter is 15 and recently has been learning to drive, and last week she taught herself what happens if you set your iPhone on top of the car and then drive off. That is the only reason I've got familiarity with my local friendly neighborhood repair shop, I've never broken one of my own phones in all these years. Fortunately this life lesson only cost her the $39 deductible. Glad I decided that a 15 year old getting her first phone needed an insurance plan.
Mine once dropped hers without noticing in a parking lot. We called her number and some dude answered and said come back here, i'll wait for you, but unfortunately i found your phone by stepping on it (it was night). At least it was just a person and not a car.
But don't despair, they grow out of it eventually. You may have to wait until she's off to college and forced to be more responsable by living on her own though.
LTE has been up for 15 year in the US as of now. Chances are it may not be up after another 15 years.
Typically that's subject to some sort of recall or remediation through a service centre?
Not really. Take a 4000 mAh rated cell, advertise it as "rated for 3500 mAh" and that's it.
So it does not seem a big deal
It isn't quite that linear in practice but realistically it will still be at least 5+ years.
I’m pretty sure that’s more or less already the case, so…
This isn't even what drives obsolesce of phones, it's software updates.
If you really want to be able to self-swap your own battery, you can just buy an Android that has a replaceable battery.
Do we need to regulate something that isn't a problem? All regulation has downsides, is it worth paying this price here?
Part of the new requirement should be they can't kill battery lifespan in 2-year old phones through software updates, either.
Because even "replaceable battery" doesn't fix that serious problem!
(Thought Apple's $99 to do the repair themselves isn't terribly bad all things considered; and likely part of their attempt to forestall complaints and litigations).
45 EUR for a new battery
10 EUR for new display adhesive
20 EUR for screwdrivers and a spudger (unless you have them already)
a suction cup and tweezers you probably have at home already
Ignore the 25 EUR clamp and 20 EUR heat pack, I did and they weren't needed at all. So all in all, around 910 USD less than you claimed.
The heat gun discussion in the sibling comments is also completely ridiculous. There must be 100 ways to do it without a heat gun. Put it on the radiator, use a heat pack for muscle soreness, or just borrow a hairdryer.
If somebody's unable to replace their iphone battery because they can't come up with a source of heat, I doubt they'd even be able to replace the batteries in their TV remote.
Myself, I've had bad luck with getting things sealed up just-so in my own phone-repair adventures (which can be validated well-enough in Samsung world by looking at the barometer's reading, squeezing the phone to create some internal pressure, and then watching the rate of change).
I like to think that I have reasonably-decent mechanical inclination, but the luck here has been bad anyway. I really just want to be able to take the battery out, put a new one in, and have it otherwise work exactly like it did an hour ago. Alas.
I'd be happier if this was something the market took care of, but after 10 years of glued-in batteries that you most likely can't even buy, I think it's time for a regulatory nudge.
Agreed, and software-locking parts, like batteries, to only first-party or authorized third-party repair shops is one of those drivers.
I can see the argument for software locking some components (to cut down on theft) even if I don't appreciate or agree with them - it is at least a valid reason from some perspectives.
Batteries are a wear item though, and will have to be replaced periodically until the device is discarded. Software-locking them to only "Apple and people Apple likes" is unconscionable
Can we have this discussion once? In this thread alone, there's like 50 instances of people making this claim and each time it takes about 20 minutes before at least one person replies that it's not the case, after which no refutals are posted. I'm happy to learn it is false if it is (I never had a phone that I trusted to be waterproof to any degree so I don't have first-hand knowledge), but it gets really tiring to read the same information level over and over as a reason for why we can't have nice things
Taking this comment as an example of someone who actually used a battery-swappable phone in rain on a motorcycle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835184 (I'm not only taking the person's word for it: the device is also IP certified as waterproof 30 mins at 1m depth)
There is a lot you can do with advanced materials science but as you get close to the high end of capability the cost goes up very rapidly and the ability to scale production is reduced.
Anecdotally on this front, I have had to replace the screens of my iphones at least three times in the past (different models). Incidentally, I have never needed to replace the screen of a phone that had a replaceable battery. YMMV, but this seems needlessly defeatist.
>maximum battery life
One could also claim that bespoke charging cables allow for faster charging or longer battery life, but I don't know any iPhone users that are a crying a river for their deprecated non-standard chargers. But again, YMMV I guess.
He's right - the market wants embedded batteries, although perhaps not directly. Embedded batteries have improved price, battery capacity, water proofing, size, and strength. If the consumer really wanted a removable battery and all that that entails then there would be more phones that offered that. The reality is people misjudge what all that entails. By all means, I would love to just make the iPhone battery directly replaceable without any compromises but that's not reality.
If the feature isn't expected and it decrease sales, why would manufacturer put it in ?
Unfortunately I do expect other tricks towards planned obsolescence. Long-term support is now a thing but what they can still do is make phones slower over time. Even Apple did this with the iPhone 6.
Also, a new battery is how much - €100 for an iPhone battery? It's not that expensive.
We have thousands of Xcovers (also replaceable) in the factories at work and they break no more often than the regular phones in the office environment. In fact people treat them pretty roughly because they're handling heavy requirement and you know how well people look after equipment they didn't pay for :) They're not perfect but they walk the walk.
Another point: I know several people that have Fairphones where almost every component can be user-replaced and I've held them but I don't see them being any more fragile than any other phone, really. And these are not rugged models.
And a Fairphone battery is 40€. An Xcover battery (including NFC antenna which is weirdly enough in the battery) costs similar. The screen 90€. All a lot cheaper than Apple, probably because there is no labor cost. You can just do it yourself or ask a friend who's handy.
Using that hypothesis, the market also loves cookie banners and prefers subscriptions over one-time payments.
What is your hypothesis for why more phones arent designed with non-embedded, directly replacable batteries? If it's such a highly valued trait in a phone, why doesnt some company just gobble up that market share? Why havent existing solutions sold well? Mine is that consumers dont actually value non-embedded batteries when accounting for all the tradeoffs. What's your hypothesis?
In contrast, users were also given the choice between headphone jack and Bluetooth for years when every phone had both, and clearly chose the jack. BT headphones were rare. But Apple and many other phonemakers figured out they make more money by removing it.
I just don't see why we can't have nice things until proven otherwise (especially considering there is already evidence that this works), rather than have glued-shut devices until proven otherwise (by whom then? Apparently IP and practical experiences aren't enough for you)
We're talking about IP68, where you can take a new phone with you on a long swim.
For a simplest example - somehow my watch is waterproof to 200M down and replacing the battery just takes a tiny screwdriver. Gaskets are not particualarly hard to work with.
I don't know how most people will dispose of user replacement batteries, but I suspect the recycle rates will be lower. If you want to ensure higher rates you also need to do something they do in the USA for car lead acid batteries. Charge a deposit fee on the new battery that is returned only when the battery is turned into a valid recycling entity.
You've bought into and are now parroting Apple & Samsung marketing BS.
P.S. it had a headphone jack too. Gaskets over the ports. The headphone jack was the first victim of "but muh waterproof" despite all the other holes and cutouts.
What about wearable devices like a smartwatch, headphones, smart glasses?
Should all these be consumer-replaceable without tools, regardless of the effect on the other things people value in these devices (waterproofing, size and weight, battery life, etc.)?
FYI I do not work for anything close to the consumer tech industry.
Essential complexity is inherent to the problem being solved; it can't be eliminated through better tools, process, or design. Incidental complexity is anything added by poor choices or flawed tools. Every line in a "hello world" program that isn't something pretty close to `print("hello world")` is incidental complexity.
To change the battery in electric vehicles that follow typical present-day design patterns, it's essential to have a way to get some clearance under the vehicles like a lift, ramps, or a pit, and it's essential to have a lift or jack to support the weight of the battery. Everything else is basic hand tools.
It is not essential to use any proprietary tools or software that isn't onboard the car or battery. Requiring anything like that is incidental, and a regulation could forbid it in the name of right to repair, reducing waste, or maintaining a healthy used car market.
With commercially available tools, yes. The argument is that, given the skill, you could pull it off.
Then again, maybe cars are a different category. I really don't have enough skilll to add to this discussion
Obviously true for any iPhone battery.
The EU, just now.
Those don't really exist anymore.
> Do we need to regulate something that isn't a problem?
It is a problem and needs to be regulated.
> All regulation has downsides, is it worth paying this price here?
Of course the upsides of regulations are worth it. The downsides might cause slight inconvenience to the manufacturer, so that doesn't really matter.
Your next phone will be heavier, bulkier, more expensive, and less reliable as a result of these regulations. It will also probably not run as long between charges.
If bureaucrats in Brussels were better at designing phones than Apple, wouldn't they be doing just that?
It’s ridiculous that regulators are forcing Apple’s hand with design and engineering (I was one of the few against the USB-C switch), but it is also true that Apple is often incapable of making certain kinds of design decisions that have become impossible due to organizational inertia or shareholder-pleasing. Look no further than macOS 26, or the history of bad design decisions on the hardware side.
Huh, phones are getting heavier, bulkier and more expensive already with every new generation? There's no regulation needed for that. Also more fragile because everything is made of glass.
Yes, cameras are better now. But some phones had good cameras years ago. I bought new phones mainly because of battery decline and/or not getting security updates.
If one of these will be solved, that might change my phone buying behaviour.
I don't care whether a display is called "retina" , whether the next edition comes in the colour "space banana grey while lion tiger snail".
And I don't need to impress someone by proving that I'm able to buy a new phone either. Such behaviour gives me a good hint what to think about them though.
A phone that will have the battery situation solved is a killer argument. Then I'd like to have a software distribution on top that it's "mum compatible" and doesn't need nerd knowledge to maintain. Something that allows to use banking apps.
Let's see how it goes. Also I hope that there can be third party batteries without DRM-like behaviour.
It is LineageOS HEAD compatible and has replaceable batteries.
But it has some quirks. Medium performance if even that, non working fingerprint sensor. Camera quality from 2005.
I don't have gapps installed so I'm using my phone without any type of payment/2fa/banking apps. That decision from opsec makes it easily reflashable, so my anti malware strategy is essentially just reflashing the phone every couple weeks :D
My battery usually lasts a week because of using only f-droids chat, navigation, and translation apps for the most part, aside from the browser. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin, saves an insane amount of battery lifetime.
To me, repairability is the feature I value the most in a phone, so I'm kinda willing to compromise on the other features.
Fun fact: Did you know that WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal all restart themselves when you connect to your headphones? If you froze them before, they'll just drain your battery again when you have any bluetooth changes. You can easily verify that by staying in airplane mode and freezing them, then connecting your headphones in airplane mode.
As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
The updates for ios 12 are all security updates, not feature updates, so your comparison to "connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086" doesn't really make sense. The phones stuck on ios 15 are basically unusable because many apps don't support it anymore. At best you can download an older version from a few years ago, but that depends on whether the backend servers were updated. Apps that insist you use the latest version (eg. banking/finance apps) basically unusable.
BTW: DOS was supported until 2001, and Win95 could boot DOS standalone.
Nowadays they are doubling in performance every... 5 years?
They already are. 5 years of updates is now the legal minimum in the EU. https://www.osnews.com/story/142500/new-eu-rules-mandate-fiv...
I'll admit it's a little annoying that I have to pay a hundred bucks to get the battery replaced, but the phone is otherwise fine and still gets updates, so I don't know that I buy that it's "planned obsolescence".
$100 is worth it, but you can get a good discount by going to that one mall kiosk instead of the Apple Store.
Apple actively impeded third-party repair shops though. Oregon had to outlaw parts pairing for them to change that practice.
It says
* replaceable with 'commercially available tools' (which means: Apple could just sell you a 'iphone battery replacment tool kit for 1000 Euros)
* has excemptions for high-cycle / long-lived batteries
* ... nothing about the price of the battery (which can be 1000 Euros)
* ... or that the battery/the battery's form factor can't be trademarked, essentially locking you into 'Apple batteries' and preventing aftermarket ones.
Also, I'd rather have a less bulky phone with fewer mechanical parts that can break as compared to a more user-maintainable. Because of 'high-security' software (think: banking apps, or - I assume - the soon-to-be-released EUId wallet), the thing is basically worthless after four years anyways and needs replacement.
I'd wager that ... nothing at all will change in 2027.
Note that early phones had replaceable batteries and it was later phones that dropped that feature. The idea wasn't that making the phone impossible to open would compel people to replace their phone faster; it was that given that people didn't keep their phones long enough to wear out the battery, there was no need to make the battery accessible.
1) battery dying / not lasting enough
2) shattered glasses whose replacement costs 35-40% of the cost of the phone new (for budget/mid-range phones, not everybody has iPhones)
distant 3rd) not enough free internal storage
Are non-premium new cars a scam too?
sure on highest end phones you have very good cameras since a long time by now, but even there they find improvements here and there (e.g. zoom, low light pictures, even better image stabilization)
but middle to lower end phones are still have major improvements in every generation of a certain brand/line/price category. And you might be satisfied with a "acceptable" quality camera, until everyone around you has way nicer photos, or you now have a reason to make photes you didn't had in the past, or you get older and your hands a bit unsteady etc.
This is also reflected in the increasing support durations from major manufacturers.
Secondly, what you said may have been true in the past, when smartphones were rapidly evolving and upgrade cycles were short, but people are holding on to their devices for longer now, so its possible its becoming a problem again.
Not sure how comparable that is when considering that the devices are also commonly required as ticket on public transport with no offline fallback (going so far as to include animations on the screen so you can't send a screenshot to a friend or print it out -- no, I have no idea why they think you can't send a video to a friend). Having 10 minutes of use time is simply not on the table, and GP was probably not talking about that class of phones (pre-"smart" phone) in the first place
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/external-battery-packs/usb-c-po...
Now that this doesn't happen, the driver of obsolescence is the battery, which is much less defensible because you can swap it much more easily than "the whole internals of the phone".
Now we can scale up volume, swap them out, be free to purchase from a different manufacturer, and have scaled up recycling services.
Phones are definitely a more difficult use case.
Ideally, there should be some set of standard protocols/connectors/voltages/sizes, but the manufacturer should only be held to "downward-compliance" with at least one of them, so they can have flexibility in design but still leave a suboptimal standard option available to users as a fallback.
Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.
Funny, I observe the exact same things you observe and come the exact opposite conclusion: Europe is currently dying a slow and painful death and will likely be entirely irrelevant in less than 10 years (not that they matter much anymore today already).
Some better system that is!
So if you want phones to be usable for longer period, you need to standardize batteries.
> Replacement batteries for any model will have to remain available to users for at least five years after the last unit of the product is placed on the market, the regulation also states.
I use 15 Pro. I don't like the new aluminium iPhones much. So I just went it to Apple service center and had the battery replaced. It costs just 90 euros and I now have a brand new phone, basically.
I very much prefer my phone to be thinner, water resistant, and have a larger battery compared to being able to do it myself.
on the other hand, mandating easier to repair components is ineffective if the manufacturer does not support the parts sale or use parts otherwise widely available in the market.
this goes beyond for other consumer electronics. in the world of laptops, which are generally more repairable, i've had my own experience with a mid-range one from lenovo, the largest vendor worldwide. [1]
the laptop was from the covid-era and one of the refresh of their popular lineup which has seen minimal changes under the hood. despite that, when i had to replace its fans and battery, i had to look for third-party sellers for the components. they are quite easy to replace but as a regular consumer it is tricky to find the correct parts and not overspend on them.
maybe with the new silicon carbide batteries, we could have a "nokia bl-5c" moment, without the counterfeit explody part.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267018/global-market-sha...
Most consumers are like pigs who simply eat whatever the market throws into their trough, because ultimately they have better things to do than to get deeply involved in every purchasing decision.
> If replaceable batteries were better, they would already be available.
Developments like those in the smartphone market involve complex path dependencies. That’s why you can’t simply assume that competition will lead to the product offerings converging on the best product. Furthermore, “better” needs to be defined in some way. If we leave that up to the market, it becomes a circular argument: (1) The better product prevails in the market. (2) The product that prevails in the market is the better one. This circular reasoning is the biggest flaw in market ideology. I don't understand why people can't see that. The market moves in a certain direction, and they say, “There it is—progress!”
> Regulation hinders progress.
Perhaps, at times, the opposite is true. Even if we set aside the fact that “better” is defined in a circular manner here, the path-dependence of market development sometimes causes the market to get stuck in a local optimum. Regulatory interventions in the market can then serve as an effective lever to help the market break free from that situation.
> If you want a removable battery, you're simply in the minority as a consumer.
That’s another point where I just don’t get market ideologues: why should I reject regulatory intervention on the one hand, but on the other hand, if the market doesn’t give me what I want, I’m supposed to just shut up and accept that there isn’t enough demand for my quirky, special requests? I’ve been missing removable batteries ever since they disappeared from the market. That must have coincided with the rise of smartphones. Come to think of it, maybe Steve Jobs is to blame. With iPods, there was still a public debate about the issue [1]. With the iPhone, it was just the way it was.
You also can't simply assume that an existing solution on the market is not the best already.
I mean, who told us that smartphones with user-replaceable batteries are better than smartphones that are 0.5 mm thinner because their batteries are non-replaceable? The same people who want to ban encryption?
> Regulatory interventions in the market can then serve as an effective lever to help the market break free from that situation.
No, they can't. Regulatory processes are shaped by the same incentives as market ones. It's just that the tools for achieving goals are different. And because of this, it is always moving in the opposite direction from "help the market".
> I’m supposed to just shut up and accept that there isn’t enough demand for my quirky, special requests?
Generally speaking, yes, it is a market ideology. But what's not clear about it? People adhere to it not because they like when unqualified masses, with their consumer behavior, encourage all sorts of nasty things in mass-market products. It's simply better than when a regulatory body implements its "quirky, special requests" at the expense of everyone else.
What kind of rash response is that? No one here is making a blanket claim that the market solution is categorically suboptimal.
> I mean, who told us that smartphones with user-replaceable batteries are better...
Let me repeat: you have to FIRST define what you mean by “better” and then ask that question. I want a phone with a removable battery, and it’s immediately clear to me that making this a requirement is a measure that removes a lower limit on the devices’ lifespan.
> Regulatory processes are shaped by the same incentives as market ones.
That’s just another one of those market-driven circular arguments. There’s no alternative to market logic, because in the end, everything follows the same incentives. You should be able to see that this is nonsense just by driving down a public street or standing under a streetlight at night.
> opposite direction from "help the market"
I would rephrase that as: “help the market move in a desired direction for the benefit of people” and I do believe that regulation can achieve exactly that.
> It's simply better than when a regulatory body implements its "quirky, special requests" at the expense of everyone else.
At whose expense, then? People who are upset that batteries are replaceable again? People who now find their smartphones a few millimeters too thick or a few grams too heavy? Are these people also upset about safety and environmental standards for cars because they make cars a little heavier, more expensive, or more complex?
The ban on encryption is a good counterpoint! I’m not saying that everything the regulators want to do is good or in line with my views. But ultimately, I want to live in a world where policymakers set the framework and the market finds good solutions within that framework, not in a world where market players are given completely free rein and every political intervention is viewed as if someone had licked the sacred shrine of a deity with their tongue.
In order to reduce plastic pollution, they forced manufacturers to make attached bottle caps (terrible idea) but go to the supermarket and there are various fruits and vegetables each unit wrapped in plastic separately.
Now they are targeting phones but I also want my handheld and robot vacuum cleaners, electric toothbrushes, grass cutters, etc to also have batteries that can be removed and replaced without tearing down entire device and even learning soldering in some cases.
According to research bottle caps are one of the biggest source of beach litter because they float and end up washed up. They are also exceptionally harmful to animals that confuse them for fish and end up consuming them.
I don’t think anyone who is against the bottle caps directive is serious about protecting our environment. It’s a minor change with an outsized impact.
Wouldn't you just fill it up from ... a tap in the washroom?
And yes, I'm fully aware that a water filling station will probably be just as nasty, but it's the thought that bugs me.
But then I think someone will figure out to make these batteries so expensive, that it won't change a thing.
I'm confused why that still isn't the case today given all the EU headlines we've seen over the years.
If the shop could replace the battery with nothing more niche than a torx bit in 5 minutes we wouldn't be talking about this.
There are plenty of old Dell and HP laptops with replaceable batteries which can only be found on eBay or some random seller that does who knows what under the refurbishing process.
Having thought about this long term, I think the only solution to this would be mandating standardized battery cells. Rather than every phone model having a bespoke cell that is manufactured once and then obsoleted, they need to have standardized shape and electrical characteristics so that batteries being produced for new phones would also be useful to rehabilitate old phones.
No, they won't do the hard part. Just the minimum plus a ton of PR and back patting then move on.
Now I rely on a few random individuals who, for all I know could be state agents or a ransomware organization to provide unofficial versions of Lineage so I can keep using it.
Battery isn't the only problem to avoid e-waste, but it's a start.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
All of those can be achieved with replaceable batteries.
https://m.gsmarena.com/results.php3?chkRemovableBattery=sele...
1) iPhones for example are ip68 rated while those are just ipx8/9
2) Do you want to be limited to the universe of those search results? Do you want to buy a Sony Xperia?
You can't make batteries directly replaceable at the same quality and price. There are tradeoffs. Obviously waterproof non-embedded batteries exist. Just like you could make a removable battery the same slimness as embedded. With massive tradeoffs. It's capacity will be terrible. No one is surprised a removable battery can be waterproof but the point is there are tradeoffs.
In any case we heard the same sort of rationalization for getting rid of the headphone jack, so color me extremely skeptical-- yes of course there's going to be trade-offs, but what a coincidence that headphone jacks, replaceable batteries, SD card slots have all gone by the wayside, which just so happens to allow for upselling Bluetooth and cloud storage
Do you actually need it? For what?
A crazy take since apple has very clearly made anti-consumer moves in the past.
If having a baked in battery caused there to be 1% more iphones sales which would they choose.
You were likely nodding along when Jobs was out there telling people they were holding the phone wrong.
Replaceable batteries lets you use your phone longer, that means people will take longer to buy a new phone and reduce iphone sales. Such anti consumer moves requires regulations to be fixed, since there is no incentive for the company to be pro consumer here.
Sometimes "better phone" drives "sell more phones"
Sometimes it doesn't.
If phones are not for sale with features, how does that allow drawing any conclusion about popularity? I've yet to meet a single person who says, "I sure am glad I can't use fingerprint unlock on my iPhone anymore", but obviously it's not worth leaving the entire ecosystem
Recall also that building Android phones barely makes any money, so it's not exactly a business teeming with disruption
I guess there is some built in spare capacity, but that may still qualify for the exemption?
It's a genuinely hard problem to measure battery capacity with existing smartphone hardware, also because it's a matter of opinion how much to factor in the peak load capacity (how do you count the bottom 40%, where it can't handle peak draw anymore? Should one include half of it because the phone is still usable but in a degraded state?), so I'm not faulting Apple here at all. They choose to display this estimate and it's better than nothing / better than most manufacturers. Just that you can't take it at face value, even if you charged your phone from 0% to 100% for >=1000 days
Is there a definition for a cycle? 80->85%? 33->72? 22-83? 87->96? Would each of these be a "cycle"?
Had i gone a little slower, it would have been a very easy repair.
What a disappointment.
As a datapoint my iPhone reports 522 cycles and 89% max - from march 2024. I do use the "limit charging to 80%" feature which I suspect may become mandatory before 2027 ...
The definition is pretty well established, and Apple themselves have for years used it consistently.
https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
> You complete one charge cycle when you’ve used (discharged) an amount that represents 100% of your battery’s capacity* — but not necessarily all from one charge. For instance, you might use 75% of your battery’s capacity one day, then recharge it fully overnight. If you use 25% the next day, you will have discharged a total of 100%, and the two days will add up to one charge cycle. It could take several days to complete a cycle.
the definition of a battery cycle is very well established. there isnt really any room to finagle it.
But that supports my assumption that realistically the batteries don’t last 1000 cycles even when charged conservatively. The last 9% will go faster than the first 11%, the battery already has lower capacity and needs to be charged even more often.
On the other hand if I only get to 1000 cycles by charging up to 80% then I’m not getting 100% of the battery, am I?
Dieselgate was caught by some dudes with an emissions measuring device. It’s not that extreme to get a number of iPhone batteries, test them to 1000 cycles and see if statistically they still retain 80% capacity. If they don’t Apple could be looking at replacing everyone’s batteries.
A bigger issue which I don’t know if the law covers is with the other battery specs. An 80% battery that can’t handle any spikes (low power mode) is useless.
If it's not configurable people will likely complain battery life is higher on the US's software version, they won't care about the reason.
But that then brings in a "how many years" question.
They do claim it at least for iPhone 15 "under ideal conditions": https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575
But Apple batteries are already user replaceable? I've replaced my own and batteries come with kits that have all the tools and disposable glue strips and seals.
It is interesting to think about the range of physical tool usage that is within a reasonable expectation. Is owning and being able to operate an implement to open and replace a battery in a simple watch like the Casio F91W reasonable?
I mean isn’t that an okay exemption? If the intent is to drive devices to be less disposable and more sustainable… if it incentivizes all mobile phone manufacturers to improve battery longevity, I’d say that’s a win.
I wouldn’t even call it a loophole. The entire purpose of the legislation could be that clause
> Video Playback: Up to 27* hours
> *: 25 hours in the EU
Fwiw, based on tests I've seen recently such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lj4LMlGr4og, I think limiting to 80% is overblown, but somewhere in the 90%s could be a sweet spot that gives you several hours' longer battery life than with 80% but still has a much reduced chance of significant degradation. I don't understand why they didn't make this configurable
If Apple resorts to those tactics, then there is no limit in moving the goalposts.
Maybe iPhones are better about this, though, I don't know. But I definitely don't have a lot of faith in the laptops maintaining 80% for 1000 cycles.
This is doing a lot of work here. There's enough wiggle room for this to be absolutely meaningless. Anything short of I can slide off the back cover and maybe unscrew two or three screws to replace the battery means that a lot of people are going to end up not being able to replace the batteries.
There's big conspiracy here. They just don't matter to most people.
And this regulation is really bad and will harm innovation for very little to no value.
Also, given that iphones almost already pass the requirements, where is the harm to innovation?
I'd rather force larger companies to offer battery replacement at cost + shipping.
I have no real interest and opening up my own devices and messing with batteries, but I have no problem paying the manufacturer $100 for service.
--- start quote ---
Article 11 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 states that a battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Guidance on tool types can be drawn from standard EN 45554:2020e (2). In the context of the assessment of a product’s ability to be repaired, reused and upgraded, this standard uses the following classification groups: (i) basic tools (including those provided with the product as a spare part) or no tools; (ii) product-group specific tools; (iii) commercially available tools; and (iv) proprietary tools.
The concept of commercially available tools mentioned in Article 11 comprises the categories of basic tools or no tools and of commercially available tools as per EN 45554:2020e.
The concept of specialised tools laid down in the Regulation refers to product-group specific tools that are not available for purchase by the general public but are not protected by patents either. Article 11 requires that any such specialised tool that might be necessary to have a portable battery removed and replaced is provided free of charge with the product into which the battery is incorporated.
As per EN 45554:2020e, proprietary tools refer to tools not available for purchase by the general public, or for which any applicable patent are not available for license under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Such tools should not be needed to remove portable batteries
--- start quote ---
(I fully expect literally no one on HN to spend even a second looking for and reading the relevant texts, and complain about the law being vague or impossible to implement or something)
No heat or solvents required. Sounds good.
So I pay them and they do it. The result:
- back cover becomes rather loose while it's warm e.g. from fast charging or a hot day out. No longer waterproof
- the battery is no better than the original and is (2y later now) degrading faster than the original. If you ask a lot of it, the last 35% are gone within minutes. I think it's a knock-off battery but that the repair person doesn't know that
If there had been commercially available repair parts and tool access, neither would have been a problem and I could just have done it myself
My mom has the same model and sent hers in to the manufacturer for a battery swap. Took a while and cost half the price of the phone (since it was a 2yo second-hand at that time). That could have been much faster, even if the manufacturer is free to set the same steep prices
A colleague got their phone back from Google for some repair last week, I don't remember if screen or battery swap. He asked and they said it wouldn't be reset. He put a sticker on it not to wipe the device. They wiped the device. He's now trying to piece together what's in various backup files that Android allows making. Fun fun fun. Also not necessary if you, or your techy nephew, can just do it at home
---
The requirement for commercially availability of repair is so much better than the current state of what repair places can/are offering
It was clearly worse than the battery that came with my refurbished (!) phone, which never did that; it just couldn't hold a decent charge anymore. I won't even go into the absolutely ridiculous experience I had with the repair shop, like not honoring booked times and whatnot and having me wait in line for ages, both to drop off and pick up my phone.
My current phone has lost some of its battery health as reported by the OS, but still gives me over a day of use, but when the time comes to fix it, I'll go directly to Apple.
Also quite noticeable that the laptop battery market became much smaller once the batteries became an internal component (around 2015) that you can't see without opening it up completely. These also used to be behind a slider or two
People don't dare unscrew electronics, even if it's about as trivial as replacing a light bulb in a fixture that requires removing a screw. With phones having the battery inside as well now, not above the sim tray for example, I wonder how much such legislation is going to help the average person
It was often drenched to the point that the map on the screen was basically illegible without stopping and wiping off the water. But it never skipped a beat. Basically, I was the limiting factor and would eventually give up and find some hotel with a hot shower to pass the night.
If it is a special glue that needs to be heated (or something), I should be able to make/buy an oven the does the cure procedures.
Are these smaller phones in room with use right now? Where can I buy an iPhone 8-sized iPhone? Or an iPhone 4-sized iPhone?
The only ones who "preferred" "smaller" aka thinner phones are Apple with their psychotic "it's thinner again" yearly presentations.
Heat pads exist even in the most basic repair shops. It's not advanced technology, no need to over-engineer it.
In EU law, the intent matters, not the letter of the law. No silly loophole lawyering.
To quote:
>When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
For the people I know that do upgrade their phones regularly, they typically want to give their old phone to someone who would love a usable phone, but can't afford a new one. Giving a phone with a shot and non-replaceable battery effectively destroys the value of the gift.
I know many people who can't afford to by new, and they avoid buying older or used phones because they fear the battery may be shot.
We obviously have different opinions regarding what most people want... totally fine.
I don't disagree with this, but I also think it's because the battery often dies around the time most people would consider upgrading anyway. The battery isn't the only reason people upgrade, it's just a forcing factor.
If batteries normally last 3-5 years, I don't think we're going to start seeing most people keep their phones for 7-10 years. I still think we're going to see people upgrading around the 3-5 year mark. I would point to the current market as evidence of this. An iPhone battery replacement is somewhere between $50-$100 right now which is drastically cheaper than a new iPhone and yet we still see the 3-5 year upgrade cycle. Maybe making it something you can do at home in a few minutes will result in a few more people just choosing to replace the battery vs the entire phone, but I don't see it drastically changing things since a cheap alternative to replacing the phone already exists and yet we still see the 3-5 year replacement cycle.
I think they will eventually. People hang on to their computers for longer and longer because old ones are just good enough. Phones are getting to that same stage in their evolution where they stopped evolving by leaps and bounds between generations. A seven year old phone like an iPhone 11 for example is perfectly adequate for a lot of people.
There are two real blockers from keeping a phone for so long, official software support and battery life. If some big manufacturers solved the first with extended support cycles, which is an expensive one, why not solve the second too?
The average person probably can't (or won't) replace an iPhone battery themselves right now, but getting an iPhone battery replaced is relatively easy and cheap compared to replacing the phone and yet most people still don't do it.
I feel people on here are forgetting that for a lot of people a phone is not just about utility. It's a lifestyle purchase that people tie into their self identity. That's why we see things like the whole blue bubble vs green bubble messaging drama that came up a few years ago.
I do. I lasted more than 15 years on 2 phones, and the only reason I'm at my fourth right now, is because the third was stolen after 3 months of use. I'm hoping its replacement, a used phone already, will last at least 5 years. Regardless, my next upgrade will not be a choice. I will milk my current phone until I am forced to change, as I always do.
Replaceable battery and 10 years of OS updates and a large percentage of people would stop upgrading their phones. There hasn't been much innovation in phones in the past 10 years. If the battery hadn't died and the OS was still updated there would be zero reason for me to not be using my iPhone 7.
most people would buy one phone and keep it forever if they could, because most people can't actually afford to be replacing their phone frequently.
The only reason they do is because they get slower, or battery gets worn out or whatever else. If their one phone actually lasted forever they would likely happily keep it forever
The only reason I upgraded to my current model was to get USBC (thanks Europe!!!).
It's a philosophical thing, sure. But the EU is taking the approach that businesses should make honest money by selling quality products, not through consumer-hostile practices like inflating the cost of spare parts + labour for fixing stuff.
In the past our family has had several Android phones where the battery was easily replaceable. We even had a couple of Motorolas where the screen was a simple and cheap thing to replace. That seems to be increasingly a thing of the past.
With those phones, I have never once experienced a failure mode related to seams / screws holding the phone together. If it's one thing that's extremely well known technology, it's fasteners and gaskets for consumer products.
The ancients managed to design around replaceable batteries, I don't think these techniques have been entirely lost to time.
Incorrect. Here are 115 phones with removable batteries and rated for > 0 water protection.
Just making shit up.
My older Samsung Galaxy had an easy clip-off back cover and easily replaceable battery. Nothing related to that ever failed.
Whereas two newer Pixel phones have had issues with the back cover glue coming loose, leading to interior damage.
Given that, the idea that a case that can be opened easily “compromises the shell of the phone” sounds like a weak excuse for some other deficiency or agenda.
You can have water protection and easily replaceable battery.
Still, I'm really curious about how many people take advantage of those standards and need IP67 (30min at 1m depth) as opposed to a quick splash or rain on it, or how many buy the artificial tradeoff of water resistance over easily replaceable battery because this is all that's offered.
Most people I know get a new phone when they can't take the cracked screen anymore, or when they completely lose the phone. Or because a pretty new one came out and they upgraded two years ago so it's "time". That's most people.
Getting the battery replaced is already trivial and cheap. Revealed preference is that most people say they want it, but don't. This won't even decrease the cost or difficulty (you'll still need a screwdriver).
I've replaced more batteries (and screens) than I can count, and it's increasingly difficult and complicated. 5 years ago or so I'd agree with you, but now there's no phone I can easily open without heat gun, controlling the air so no spec of dust land on the lenses (and a blower to remove in case it happens), and almost always I need adhesive (B7000) to patch or replace the original one to keep similar level of weather proofing. It's easy if you pay 100 bucks someone else to do it, sure.
Back in the days of my HTC Desire I could carry an extra battery, or two, in the pocket, without issue. Nowadays I'm married to a power bank that needs to be plugged for the duration.
That's cheap. If you think that a safe first-party replacement battery will sell for less than the 79€ that the whole replacement effort takes, then you're fooling yourself.
I strongly suspect that there's also not good language for blocking against third-party batteries (and the phone manufacturers would have good reason to do so because it might result in overheating or worse with really bad third-party batteries).
That is why I have the battery replaced every few years.
They all know about Apple's battery replacement programme that's been around for years now
And iCloud backups makes setting up a new phone trivial
I am not sure if your statistic is correct or people giving you excuses to get the latest model. If we speak iphones, flipping the battery is cheap and fast process, incomparable with the hassle of doing re-setup.
I am not sure if the process is equally or more simple with android phones though, but in my circle noone buys new phone because of the battery (often the battery is used as excuse to get a newer model).
Your circle sounds pretty strange honestly. Everyone in it lies to you about why they do things, but you secretly know their real motivations?
I have experience saying the exact opposite, although this was a few years ago.
OnePlus set up a marketing booth on my campus in 2018 or 2019 or so, and they did exactly this, with a large sign asking people what they want out of a phone. They asked passerbys what they want out of a phone, and they let people put their requests on a board.
When I put my request up, I wasn't the first one to request replaceable batteries and a headphone jack. (At the time, OnePlus had removed the jack from their most recent phone, after advertising their previous phone in comparison to Apple's jackless phone).
I don't love everything the EU does (cookie banners!?) but this is one where I have confidence that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
As others have noted, most people do not replace their phones every two years anymore, there just isn't any big reason to.
They’re winning.
If that's actually allowed, yeah, bad law. If it's not… well I guess we can hope prosecutors will prosecute. Though I'm afraid we won't get much more than hope…
This type of ambush agree to XYZ or you can't come in that we see with EULA's and privacy polices is unfair, just like if some scammer demanded people sign a fifty page contract before they enter the supermarket. This is something people understand intuitively.
It was foreseeable, and the end result is very little has changed as far as consumer privacy. Most people just agree to get the box to go away, if you actually want privacy your best bet is still a private browsing session and a VPN.
Malicious compliance?
I don't care what the politicians intended. The outcome is no improvement in privacy but more annoying banners.
Because most people won't make use of their ability to opt out and will thus get the exact same thing as they were already getting, that's "worse"?
Somehow this nebulous "gray area" concept of not explicitly consenting (so, no actual difference) is better than the actual ability to opt out?
People talk as if the EU should have done nothing, or that the rule should be repealed, the GDPR forced people to have a functioning deny all.
The real lesson here is that people would rather annoy their users for money than create good products. Its a case for regulation.
I'm not sure about the rules around required ability but I'd like that too
I notice that Fairphone excludes headphones from their latest devices, and attributes it to the necessary of doing so in order to get an "IP55" rating.
I'm not sure if that ultimately makes sense (and suspect that it... doesn't), but the legibility trap of that ratings system might actually be part of the cause of the current market absence of a feature so many people still talk about after years of its unavailability.
Doubt. They have already switched over every other line they had.
I believe it was more of a marketing stunt, they calculated that n% of customers will be upset with the change, so they waited for the EU ruling so now they can just point these n% to blame the EU who will take the blame instead of them.
> EU’s Common Charger Directive went into effect on December 28, 2024
Years?
Anyways, Apple was working on an iPhone with usb C in 2022 and said they were going to do it anyways* so I don’t see it as some massive win that shows the prowess of the EU legislative body.
Granted this may have shaved a couple of years off of the timeline but at what cost of legislation (monetary, attention, and time cost)!?
# https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-pushes-back...
Your link is from 2020 and does not say Apple was moving to USB C, just that the industry was. By 2022 the law requiring it had already passed, so it would make sense they were planning on doing it at that point. Regardless, a few years would be a lot of impact for a market where over 100 million phones are sold annually.
Everyone moving to "battery must be replaceable without tools" doesn't do anything useful for most users. Yeah, now you can carry an extra battery on a camping trip, I guess, though you could also carry a portable USB-C charger and use it for more than just your phone. It isn't particularly useful that it doesn't take tools to replace the battery when it starts failing, five years after your phone was discontinued, if you can't find a replacement battery for that exact model.
You could already use the same charger with nearly everything. It was the cables that were not necessarily USB on the device end.
Apple for example as far as I can tell has used USB chargers for everything (phones, tablets, music players, headphones, Apple TV remote) except laptops since sometime in 2012. For laptops everything introduced after the last MagSafe 2 laptop in mid 2017 has used a USB charger.
Usually there are compatible ones that still give you some juice for 1-2 years at a small fraction of the price (of the original one).
If you worry about that, you can always buy an "official" battery in advance to be used 4-5 years later.
Speak for yourself, I've gained nothing but annoyance. (I'm willing to accept a theoretical greater good argument - but I'm not precisely sold)
Apple really fucked up by keeping the connector proprietary. Sure it helped them slim some phones but it didn't exactly help long term, and now we have a technologically inferior connector that took even longer to come to market.
I can't forgive Apple for that.
Good engineering, early to market, mired by greedy and short sighted businessmen.
Don't let them off that quickly. We've been making electrical connectors for well over a hundred years. There are books on high reliability connectors many hundreds of pages long. Connectors for aerospace, the military and industry have made connector technology highly advanced and connections very reliable.
Fact is USB connectors are shitty because they've been made as cheaply as possible—cheap manufacturing takes precedence over reliability and user ergonomics.
The trend of mass producing rock-bottom cheap connectors started in the early 1950s with that abominable super cheap RCA audio connector and it's continued ever since with consumer products. There's no end of crappy designs, the F coaxial connector for antennas, the DIN audio connector, the Belling Lee coax and so on.
Trouble is too many consumers are prepared to tolerate the crap without complaining so it continues.
I can personally speak to the seeming reliability of the springs on lightening, but thats anecdotal and would only apply to devices I’ve interacted with. Truthfully USB-C has been almost as reliable (only seen 2-3 ports with issues over literally hundreds, vs the 0 for lightning over a smaller sample).
I guess at some point the argument is moot, but I do like digging lint out of USB-C connectors a lot less- it is a lot more worrying to do.
People don't change batteries in their phones now because they'd need a heat gun and a soldering iron and they'd have even chances of starting a fire, breaking the phone, or succeeding in changing the battery without prior experience using those tools. A shop could do it reliably, but the shop will charge 100€ because it's time-consuming and error-prone. A 3-5 year old phone is often not worth 100€.
When a battery change costs 25€ and takes 5 minutes, people will do it all the time even if they don't know that today.
Still no real upgrade for hexbright, which is a shame.
I wish they were still being made. Fortunately, mine are still fine, and I expect to be able to repair them should they break. (xtal is a common failure point apparently)
Standard battery type is nice, but also has microusb charging port, the part that didn't age well.
Perhaps new circuit boards (with usb-pd charging, usb-c connector and mems oscillator) will be the way forward. It's definitely easier to order a pcb than the housing.
Regulated, open source, flashable, USB-charging, and a standardized battery describes most lights from https://www.firefly-outdoor.com/
I think if the EU really wanted to reduce phone waste they'd make it easier or cheaper to fix screens. Still, this doesn't seem like a terrible move. I bet you can make it relatively easy to replace batteries without compromising much. Look at the Macbook Neo for example.
(I always buy phones in the cheapest tier, so that happens sooner)
Samsung also makes the A-series Galaxies which are a pretty solid mid-tier phones that are supported for years, too.
I don't know if it's just my luck, I never drop my phone, but when I buy new, I'm guaranteed to drop it several times a day for the first two weeks of owning it. The protective case is a phone saver
I had a S3 that the battery would only last 12 hours or so, but the EMMC failed before the battery did.
You might just be lucky. Tempering glass is a tricky business and it can be very very strong if impacted in some places but extremely weak in others.
Dropped it off the top of some pallet racking, ping ponged down, broke the button and cracked the screen at the bottom near the button. Bought a case (and kept the screen protector on under it, lol)
Left it sitting on top of trailer tongue tool box to run timer to check/flip lunch that was being grilled in the vicinity. Trailer was involved in a minor industrial accident. Phone got tossed and crunched. Lunch was fine.
Exposed the 3rd one to, IDK, something, that etched it without hurting the case. IDK what that would be though since I can't think of anything that I have around or use that would do that.
Current phone has survived since 2022. Last month the case finally wore out to the point where corners were coming apart and it would sometimes get caught on its way in/out of pockets and got replaced.
On the other hand, my wife has never broken a phone, and has basically only upgraded when it becomes too old to be usable any more (due to battery issues or OS version causing problems). She's careful and sensible.
Half of my screen breaks have been from getting out of my car with my phone in my lap and gravel on the ground.
Another way I’ve broken screens is from my phone falling out of my pocket and onto rocks/concrete. That has happened twice.
And the final way has been from getting smashed in my pocket. I slipped while scrambling some rocks and my phone(in a case I bought for this long backpacking trip) got smashed on my hip, another time I was running around at my friend’s house at night and ran into a wheel barrow, smashing it on my thigh.
Never had a battery fail.
A note: My current iPhone 16 pro is built like a tank, and the glass is truly extraordinary.
Battery is starting to fade during the day, despite minimal use.
I think replaceable batteries should be mandatory and 10 years of security updates. In these times, phones are really expensive (however you pay for them) and we shouldn’t stand for planned obsolescence in any form.
This is going to be harder, or, at least, harder to replace your current phone with something objectively better. RAM and Flash shortages / high prices are likely going to last for years, wars are additionally jeopardizing production of electronic components, and the current crop of mobile devices is already insanely powerful. It's going to be pretty hard to sell most people an upgrade that feels meaningful when it's going to be like 30% more expensive.
Running AI locally could be a big selling point for an upgrade, but see the problems with RAM and general production capacity overload. I's not going to be a mass-market thing.
Actually will push a lot of people away. I don't want any hardware that has special relationships with AI LLM's.
But what if you asked the right question, "what is the biggest problem with your phone?"
Most would answer, "the battery dies too soon. It doesn't last all day like it used to."
Possibly true, and equally true of the screen, the charging port, or any other component.
"Repairability" isn't a feature people list unprompted, it's a property they notice the moment a £5 part bricks their phone.
The street-corner survey tells you what people currently notice, not what they'd value if the option existed.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new phone
In a market where batteries are glued in and replacement costs a meaningful fraction of a new device, of course people upgrade on that timeline. Change the cost structure and the behaviour changes with it.
Fair point that we'd want data, but the original claim rests on the same intuition, just pointed the opposite way.
The broader framing (that repairability is an idiosyncratic preference being imposed on a majority who don't want it) gets this backwards. Most people don't want to care about repairability, in the same way most people don't want to care about food safety standards. They want the option to exist without having to think about it. That's what the law provides.
Before that, you wrote "One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are" and it's exactly what I could say here. Not everyone has lots of money and for some people extending the life of their phones is important. They really do wish they could replace the battery without hassle and without paying a shop to do it.
On that note, mandating an SD card slot as a requirement would be a very much welcome next step.
Manufacturers selling space-crippled devices just to upsell "premium" models is such an environmental waste (at the very least).
Fuck that. Who are you to subjugate us with your preferences. Limiting what a phone can possibly be by mandating features such as SD cards is so unimaginative. There's always a segment of HN that truly wants to be tyrants and impose their preferences on the entire marketplace and consumers.
Nothing is stopping something like Framework laptops from existing in the marketplace right now besides demand. Y'all can all celebrate it on HN in your bubble but to mandate that the entire market goes in this direction reveals your frustrations more than anything.
You hate that people don't share your preferences and would go so far as to use the legal system to distort the marketplace just to satisfy your own preferences. It doesn't matter if it puts constraints on what a product can be, so long as it fulfills your needs.
So basically, it's a simpler path to impose your preferences on others than it is to actually do any work to build something or find something that matches your preferences.
Completely selfish. Just admit you have disdain for everybody else and you think you know better than the marketplace about what people want, and therefore should have the authority to dictate how everything should be designed and built while doing none of the work.
A healthy reaction to this frustration is to go build the thing you want, show people that it's better, and compete against the status quo - giving everybody more options and choices. You're not there though, and neither are the societies in the EU.
It's sad to see this kind of mindset take over Europe and it's clear it holds back Europe of reaching the heights of innovation and creativity that the world is hoping to see come from a continent that once pushed humanity to higher levels of existence and consciousness.
Product regulations are "selfish", mmmkay. Requiring seat belts in cars is starting up tyranny¹.
Ditto for rear-view cameras. How dare they! Those authoritarian Europeans²!
_____
¹ According to this guy — and we know it's a guy, don't we?
² Rear view cameras are required on all new vehicles sold in the US.
Now go ahead an explain how having a microSD¹ slot may hurt someone who has a device that reads/writes data².
Not hurt shareholder value. I'm talking about people³ here.
I'll wait. Very curious to hear your perspective here.
_____
¹ Technology that has existed for 2+ decades at this point, is the defacto standard for removable storage in phones, laptops, cameras, audio recorders, etc, supported by devices that sell for $5 new and relied on by the highest end pro gear, current spec making it forwards and backwards compatible for the foreseeable future.
Something that takes virtually no physical space and costs virtually nothing to add to a device that already needs to operate on gigabytes of data (we're not talking about forcing that, say, on a thermostat).
² Particularly, one which can run into a "Storage full" error.
³ Physical human beings (including, but not limited to, the end users), and specifically not your (or some CEO's) feelings about it.
Are you sure about this? I've heard this complaint from a lot of non-tech people who are old enough to remember flip phones with replaceable batteries. It might be age related.
In fact, the only place I would ever expect somebody to claim otherwise is here.
Well, yes it's quite easy to argue against strawmen. I don't know anyone who would favor a built-in shoehorn over a replaceable battery either.
Although on your waterproof point, that's just a single dimension metric used for comms. It's not really about specifically descending to 100m. A 100m rated device responds better to water. In a general sense, it's more robust. Even if I don't go diving.
Except that the latter has more functionality than the former, and should be prefereable.
Not true. In recent years smartphones do not advance much, and would be perfectly fine to keep working if not for the dying battery.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
The degree of "possible" varies greatly depending on the available expertise and spare parts. Right now in EU it's cost prohibitive for both coz the special labor required is expensive and almost no official spare parts for consumers. So of coz this will be no data to support your claim.
It’s a pretty commonly used canonical example of revealed preferences.
<proceeds to state opinions contrary to what the overwhelming majority of elected representatives of the people of Europe just expressed>
Were you trying to prove your own point?
Yeah, for someone that changes phone every 3 years or earlier, that's not a desired feature.
But many people did that change precisely because battery got weak, and there have been less and less reasons to keep on the most modern model for a while now.
E.g. most peoples don't really think or ask that their tap water be free of cholera and other harmful substances, and yet we might want to make sure that continues to be the case. So it's not strong argument worth arguing about.
The real argument is - how much a compromise a replaceable vs non-replacable battery is. And I suspect the biggest part of non-replaceable batteries is actually superficial vanity considerations (gee, is it 7mm or 6.5mm), and planed obsolescence making more money. But the technical aspects are still a valid debate.
I don’t understand. If we want to see the data we do need to make batteries replaceable.
What sort of compromise do you envision? I mean, toasters still have a crumb tray on the bottom that open so you can clean them even though no one does. Am I "missing out" on sleek, streamlined toaster designs because manufacturers feel they have to put a door in the bottom?
This regulation is targeted to devices with poor battery lives. Just because it hasn’t occurred to people to ask for the feature doesn’t mean they won’t appreciate it.
But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.
Did they flock to a phone with no replaceable battery the same way we flocked to phones with no headphone jack?
Instead this law is designed to provide the public with a good everyone can benefit from - less waste of valuable electronic components polluting our environment.
And even if those same consumers would choose a thinner phone over a replaceable battery, they will probably also enjoy being able to fully charge it more often for less money.
I feel like I will be using this phone until it crumbles to dust. Apple shows no interest in making decently sized phones. I would support the EU enacting legislation to enforce at least one phone in each lineup to be no bigger than 60 mm x 125 mm. (iPhone Mini is ok, but it's still bigger than what I prefer.)
Smaller and lighter phones are an accessibility concern. Miniaturization has been the goal for computers since they were invented. It is incomprehensible that designers and manufacturers are reversing course. My options right now are basically do nothing or replace my phone with a watch.
1. lifestyle
2. software updates
3. battery capacity
While it is hard to change the first, the other two can be influenced by laws. And while the second is rather complex, the third is quite simple. Since the manufacturers have few incentives to produce phones with replaceable batteries, there are very few options on the market to choose from. Most have other major limitations, like slow CPU/GPU, crappy cameras, or else.
So eliminating one factor of unnecessary waste is absolutely a good idea. I just hope it doesn't backfire in some weird way. And I don't say that replaceable batteries don't come at a cost, they do. But that cost is much lower than many assume and not that easy to measure, because currently, you can compare only apples with oranges.
May I remind you that the fist few iPhones were not water proof, yet the battery was not removable.
Laptops are not waterproof but those batteries are also no longer removable.
Although some of this depends on how you define replaceable.
Yes, and if you asked every passerby what feature they would like to add to the streets, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish there were more accessibility ramps".
Luckily for us, we're not governed by "passerby" people.
If the battery swap fails, you’ll get a as-new replacement phone and you also won’t be charged.
In exchange for this monetary cost and the inconvenience of leaving your phone at an Apple Store for 1 hour; you get peace of mind and a highly rated water/dust proof phone.
(Seriously, I’ve seen people diving with iPhones - no case - recording videos.)
That remains to be seen. This could accelerate cultural change around desiring shiny new toy being seen as cool
Like, I've had my phone for 6 years now and the battery is still going strong with the 80% charge limit always on throughout its lifetime. Meanwhile the USB-c port is shot to fuck and disconnects constantly, it can't connect to 5G, leaving me without a connection in lots of locations cause there are no fallback towers, and the OS support has basically been over for a year now. Cameras are no longer up to snuff either and I could use a storage upgrade.
My previous phone had a replacable battery, which I replaced once before the GPS and wifi chip died and turned it into an air gapped brick. Everything else seems to fail at a similar rate.
Still it's not really about if it lasts as long or not. It's about having the right to repair devices and to reduce waste at large. First batteries, then displays, main boards, etc. Each law builds on the previous one as precedent.
Why? There have been few new features in recent years and new phones have restrictions not wanted by many. Google is closing the Android ecosystem and making it more proprietary so I'll keep my phone as long as I'm able.
The non-replaceable battery has to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on consumers. It's great that it's about to be broken.
Why? My phone works almost perfectly still three and a half years after I bought it. Except the battery lasts shorter.
If I go to battery health in settings it says:
> Important Battery Message
> Your battery's health is significantly degraded. An Apple Authorised Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity.
> Find Your Service Options
Aside from my current phone, I also have a very old iPod Touch. That old iPod Touch would have been usable still as well, if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes somewhere around 10 minutes of active use until it goes from full charge to zero charge. In other words, unusable for bringing with me anywhere plainly because of the battery.
Replaceable battery would have been great. Both for my iPhone and my iPod Touch. Even if it meant they would have been a bit thicker than they currently are.
'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'....Henry Ford
Nobody cares about repairability....until they are hit hard by it.
Anecdote: Around 5y ago, the lightning connector of my wife's iPhone died after 3y usage.
We brought it to an Apple Store and the official answer was "Sorry, we don't fix that on this model. Here is a 200€ discount on a new one"... The phone was still worth >900€ at the time.
Let's be clear: This kind of commercial practice are unacceptable both ecologically and ethically speaking. It is terrible customer service.
A lot of high end phones (outside Apple) at the time would have their USB-C port fixed in matter of few hours for <100€ in any random "I Fix it" store.
The battery is the exact same shit.
Not really. The battery just needs to have a connector rather than soldered, and no other things blocking the battery once the back-case is opened. Realistically, a service shop will do the replacement like how watch-batteries are typically replaced.
I think that law doesn't even go far enough, they should standardize a battery format. When like me you are used to open smartphones and replace batteries you realize how very similar they are all in footprint and could be compatible with each other with very minimal effort. If there were only a couple of standardized formats you could find new batteries in every small shop/airports whatever and easily have spares. Chance is that other electronic devices or toys would also adopt them.
Then I sold it, because I ran out of 64GB space. If I could add an sd card, I would probably use this phone longer, instead of contributing to consumerism and creating more e-waste.
I wish that people would think about sustainability and using their devices for longer rather than chasing “new and shiny” every year Apple releases the “best iPhone we ever made”
* sd card slot
* headphone jack
* replaceable battery
* THICK for larger battery and structural integrity.> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
Sometimes we have to acknowledge the externalities of our lifestyle and take things down a notch.
Even if most throw out their old phones, now at least it'll be trivial to shuck these devices to get the battery for recycling, while sending the device for refurb or further recycling.
A key component to effective recycling is separation, and this is one step in that direction
Som even if most people change phone before the battery gets really bad (I doubt that this is really the case), the end result will still be that fewer new phones will be purchased.
Now we just need a law that requires hardware makers unlock their devices when they stop providing updates.
The article (granted, probably not the best source of information) has some numbers like "number of phones sold", but doesn't actually tackle the crux of the issue: how many of those phone sales would be prevented by having user swappable batteries?
Having said that, I do like having waterproof phones, and I expect this rule would make that harder.
I guess I run my iPhone on low battery mode a lot, due to idiosyncratic reasons too. Maybe I do.
Apple battery replacement costs anywhere from $70 (for a ~$400 phone) to $120 (for a ~$1000+ phone). In many global markets you can get a brand new phone for that much.
And no, I don't want a new phone just because the battery wears out, it did not lost the ability to do phone calls and SMS in the process.
We are on the year of Android 17, my oldest device still runs Android 12 perfectly well, with the apps I care about.
Very ironic, you almost got it, post.
I currently have a 12 mini, but I'd love to go back to the iphone 4 size, or even a blackberry curve. Would be fine for comms, and I suspect I'd spend less time doom-scrolling on it.
Okay, you're claiming two things: (i) replaceable batteries will compromise some other features, and (ii) most people want those features more than they want a replaceable battery.
Can you name 3 of those features? I personally can't.
Hopefully this will help bring the headphone jack back.
Its not enough by itself that the phone has amassed scratches and is 20% slower or has a 30% worse camera optic than the current generation, or that updates will only continue for a year or two more.
But the slowdown (associated with battery degradation btw) and fact that it doesn’t get me through a whole day definitely move the needle into me buying a new phone.
(and yes, I know that power banks exist)
Some products on the market are there to address some inherent need or desire people have; some are for more manufactured needs/desires.
To me the intent of this law looks to put a floor on the environmental cost of providing for the manufactured variants.
At the same time, 5.78 billion people have a smartphone worldwide. It is obviously wildly unsustainable to live in a world where 5.78 billion people have to throw away their old phone and buy a new one every 2-3 years. However, phone manufacturers have figured out that if they force people to, they can amass ridiculous levels of wealth because the demand for new phones would be constantly high. So obviously the incentives here are completely wrong. This has happened before with lightbulbs in the 20th century and is a legitimate form of market failure that needs to be resolved, as it wastes a lot of consumer spending to replace what consumers already had (like the parable of the broken window).
For many years since phone manufacturers started gluing phones together with a consumable part inside, consumers have been denied the ability to replace their battery. Where the option does exist, it's often very inconvenient, difficult, or with a price inflated to be nearly as expensive as buying a new one.
Phones stopped advancing significantly many years ago. Phone manufacturers now re-release practically the same phone with slight CPU and camera improvements, something completely unheard of until relatively recently. Lately the main marketing trend for new phones has been AI, but this is a nonsense trend because most of modern AI runs in the cloud, and very few are actually utilizing any local AI features, so the only "AI" thing about the phone is just a preinstalled ChatGPT-like app you can get on any other phone. So clearly they have run out of things to improve, and things to market around. In a normally functioning market, this would mean phones have become a solved technology and we can stop replacing our phones as often, maybe once every 10 years if you're careful with your phone. But this is not what we see precisely because phone manufacturers have been manufacturing problems that are most easily solved by buying a new phone, which they will push people to do whatever way they can for profit. The phone industry has failed to regulate itself, and so this is why we are seeing a push for this type of regulation.
Owner of an 11Pro iPhone soon to be obsolete after seven years. I probably will upgrade sometime in the next two years nine years with the same electronic device is long enough.
I got my moneys worth. very satisfied with the longevity and resale value of most of the Apple products in comparison to the competition.
... the answer would depend on which street corner you asked.
> people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are
Yes, they are. They also tend to state that "most people" agree with them. This is called subjectivity.
Extreme consumer brain coupled with privilege. Billions of people can’t afford a new phone every couple years, they buy things and use them until they are past the point of repair, only buying a replacement when they have no other choice.
Can you honestly even say this year’s new flagships, or any from the last decade, represent meaningful improvement for most people outside the tech bubble and influencer sphere? Smartphones have been “good enough” for a long time.
The phone now has a limited lifespan though because of this prior stupidity where eventually am gonna get into spicy pillow territory. At that point the phone prematurely dies.
We are going into a period where we are throwing away devices with 12mp+ cameras, and processors arguably faster than most desktops. It was arguable when the phones were old and legacy, but at this point the cameras on there are stupidly good.
We need these phones to be repurposed for a second life and actually capture their manufacture energy costs.
Frankly, if Apple allowed old iphones to be used for server usage, it is kind of crazy how efficient per dollar that would be.
I challenge you to give me an example of how this law might result in a phone that is worse for most people.
This law does not require a slide-off phone cover. It does not require a screwed-on backplate. It does not forbid the use of chemical adhesives. It does not stipulate how a phone should or shouldn't be designed.
It basically just requires the manufacturer to offer replacement batteries and to enable the replacement to be done with commercially available tools. I'd wager the overwhelming majority of phones are already compliant, pending availability of a replacement battery from the manufacturer.
I'm quite confident I could replace the battery on my Sony Xperia 1 iii with a heat gun and my basic iFixit toolkit.
If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby if they want their phone to have a replaceable battery, I don't think you would be there very long before receiving a "yes". I think that's a more honest framing of the question.
> I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone
How could they replace their batteries if they wanted to, unless the manufacturer makes it possible? The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
At the very least, we'd need only data showing that that number is non-zero. From where did you get the idea that we need to prove "most" people would choose to take advantage of this option?
But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.
1. Waterproofing is possible with replaceable batteries.
2. Larger batteries are possible with replaceable batteries. In fact, replaceable batteries makes this easier. I'm old enough to remember when you could buy a bigger battery for your cell phone that came with a bulged cover to accommodate it. If you don't want that though, you will have the choice to avoid it.
3. Smaller/lighter phones are possible with user-replaceable batteries. You could even use a smaller/lighter battery, too, if you wanted
These options aren't being taken away. We're just adding another option.
Invert the situation. If every iPhone in history had a replaceable battery, until 2027 when the newest iPhone did not have a replaceable battery, I think we can all agree that the uproar would be significant.
Most people want new phones because of shit software updates and marketing not because out of necessity.
Just as much, there's a certain HN complaint form that basically goes "any complaint about the crap that sold now is just programmer/civil-rights-fan/etc idiosyncrasy, real people want exactly this crap 'cause markets never lie".
I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.
It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".
Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.
We have so much experience with scientific method, yet these massive decisions are adhoc, that's how the whole world works. We never tested what would happen by allowing mass production of plastic, or phones, or whatever, so these antipatches are going by the "feels" as well, with no individual taking responsibility for failures.
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https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
However, these preferences don't really matter anyway because nobody is forced to replace the battery and not buy a new phone when their phone has replaceable batteries.
Welcome to democracy and lawmaking in 2026. We know better than you!
What's next, having TV remote controls with non-removable rechargeable batteries, for the "convenience"?! Gimme a break. I love tech progress, but leave your hands off my removable batteries! And my 3.5mm audio jack, now that I think about it! :-)
Least self-aware HN user out there.
Do you really think the European commission got lobbied hard by HN folks?
This law will make phones better for most people, who would rather keep their phone for a decade rather than having to every three years buy a new phone optimized for some vanity metric that looks good on Engadget reviews.
Not my experience at all. The (few) non-tech people I've talked to about phones soon getting batteries again like it. People believe the idea that non-removable batteries are a conspiracy by the phone companies to sell you more phones the same way cartels manipulated the lightbulb market (Phoebus cartel).
But I don’t think this is the case with phone batteries. I’ve had many conversations with friends and family that came down to replace the battery or upgrade the phone.
I feel the same way about soldered on CPUs, RAM and SSDs in laptops and other computers. The benefits of doing this are marginal at best. We all know the real reason is forced obsolescence.
We all know this is why battery replacement is hard too.
I thought I did everything right but then the thing wouldn't turn on. Could be a bad battery (ordered on Amazon so zero guarantees). Then when I tried to de-solder and re-solder my new battery the pads came off it. Very annoying.
Now, if I'm lucky, they will mandate both a replaceable battery and that the phones be ip55 or better, after battery replacement.
“let’s just pass a law that says ‘no trade offs’, problem solved”
Not me, and not most people.
- The cheapest phones available in the EU (and purchasable online) all have glued-in batteries, not swappable ones. Forcing consumers to use phones with swappable batteries may just mean that the bottom of the market disappears, and consumers will be left paying more for their phones. And would they rather pay less or have swappable batteries?
- This will cause some cascade of engineering changes, which will make phones thicker or less waterproof. Again, it's not clear to me that the tradeoff is being fairly reflected here.
This doesn't restrict the design space that much at all.
like unified charging cable, free EU roaming or intercountry bank payments that are instant and almost free, air travel protections?
Some regulations are good, some are bad, all have second and third order effects that need to be weighed against benefits.
Do you understand how rare it is for a company to actually sell its user data?
Put this JS on your page, we'll give you some money.
"Cheap" isn't enough, especially if it's cheap through externalizing cost.
Plus, what you're talking about is a failure of socioeconomic policy, not one to be fixed by giving poor people junk.
It's replaceable without special tools, heating, solvents. It can easily feature a screw or a million other solutions.
I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
The main enemy of cars is rust, but for that there are cost effective mitigations now. The real reason people ditch cars is always they get tired of the old car and want something more modern, not because the car is at the end of its "useful life".
Batteries are not like that. They actually have a useful life that degrades over time, which makes them non-servicable.
What I would like to see is serviceable batteries, where you can replace individual damaged cells and keep the battery going. Everyone would benefit from that, especially the used EV market, which would help stem the massive depreciation hits EV buyers are facing now.
I’m still driving a 26-year old Nissan Micra – though it’s now on its last legs: the Irish climate isn’t kind to steel and we’ve had to have the under-carriage re-welded three times in the past five years. :(
But let's go back to the original point, about being able to UPGRADE (not repair/replace) battery in the car. 20 years old car is worth like $1k-2k, which is fraction of the cost of the new battery.
While it's cool thing to do for hobbyists, it makes 0 economical sense.
What an old car is worth depends on many factors, but age is not the most important one. The average age of passenger cars on the road in the U.S. is 14 years old -- I think 14.5 years now. I don't think we have data on average appraised value of passenger cars on the road, but I would guess it would be in the range of 10-15K.
Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
Why not ask me my motivations instead of assuming them?
I'm not fine with the range; I bought an EV to stop burning fossil fuels, my 24-year-old RAV4 was on its last leg, and there was a $6K bonus for trade-ins (my RAV4 would have been about $5k in parts).
Plus, the long-term cost savings kick in after about 8 years, which I blogged about at: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/08/06/typesetting-markdow...
> Why you have to replace it with longer range?
Because I want to explore the interior of BC, drive across Canada on fewer charges, visit family, go on road trips, etc. Just yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to charge my Kona. It's a long and boring story, but suffice to say our charging infrastructure here sucks, and is not as simple, quick, or convenient as "tap-to-pay" (with a credit card) at petrol stations.
FWIW, that is actually a thing you can do. It is mostly done for SUVs and pickups since the primary use case for the extra range is off-pavement driving and the upgrade is simpler.
But the window is 10 years. After that, you rely on market forces -- if there is a profit to be made from making the part, then it is made. Heavily cars rely on aftermarket parts, but the question of a battery is a bit different.
Again, we need open source cars, with open source designs, so that batteries can be repaired, upgraded, and replaced by an aftermarket. I keep pushing this and hope I'm not being tedious, but people are underestimating the risk to the consumer.
I don't know why is this even an argument really, like.....in a petrol car, do you expect to be able to fit it with a bigger fuel tank after 10 years? or a more powerful engine? Until very recently even software updates to the infotainment weren't really a thing, if you wanted a newer interface you had to change the entire car(I'm not saying this was a good thing, just that generally the expectation is that the product will work the way it was when you bought it).
That was totally a thing for phones in the past. Depending on the model you could get a larger pack that had a bulge on the back of the device to have extra battery time. There was a similar thing with a number of laptops.
I do agree its kind of a questionable thing on something like a car. I imagine packaging concerns would really get in the way of adding a bit extra.
This law will be tragic for Google and Apple. What will compel people to upgrade their functional phones?
You make it sound like a large number. I’m keeping iPhones for 4 years now and upgrading because of cameras. Are pixels really that bad?
And next, hopefully, replaceable software.
Which will do much more for phone longevity.
> is good enough for 99.999% of the public use-case
Some were a bit of a pain in the ass to replace though.
People shouldn't have to pay $$$ for a 128GB upgrade when a 1TB microSDXC card is under $200. It feels like a trick to sell cloud storage and new phones.
But it is not super high on my list. Every 2 or 3 years I pay less than $100 to have a new OE battery installed, takes about an hour. There are other features I would put a higher priority on - like a good small phone option now and again.
Phones have lost so much in a decade.
Lithium batteries in things running 24/7 unsupervised always makes me a bit nervous
like this law isn't about users causally replacing batteries like on very old phones
but about an repair shop easily and without risk of breaking your phone being able to replace it without only holding on your phone for idk. 10 minutes
So that you can just drop by (once they have the replacement parts) wait a moment and have a new battery.
This means in the worst case something like needing to a add a bit of additional seal/wax/glue or similar to improve sealing is very much fully viable (Id the sealing agent is generally buy able.)
It just is something you have to design in from the get to go. And it's easier to not do so at all. And maybe if you obsess if your phone is 1/10mm smaller or not that gets in your way too. And not doing so is more profitable as people will buy successor products more likely, even if just very slightly more likely.
But in general? That really isn't the problem.
Also even if it where the problem. What is better? Having a less waterproof phone, but not needing to buy a new one for another one or two years or having to buy one now?
iff
- it's generally commercially available
- and re-applicable after replacement with just generic tools
- and removing the battery doesn't risk breaking your phone due to physical strong binding glue being used as sealant etc.
As a dump example you can design the phone as a sealed unit with the battery department being "outside" the seal. Then have the battery also sealed and apply a bit of "sealant" (wax?, glue?) on the electrical contacts braking the seal on both sides. As the battery and battery compartment back have to only be waterproof and not "rigid" this probably fits "just fine" into most phones (except the most over the top slim ones).
Which is probably more the actual problem. Thinks like phone makers over-obsessing with making phones slimmer on a sub 1mm standard ... and then people anyway putting "thick" cases on the phone to protect it...
it's so routine that they get abused that every llm I asked blamed leaving laptops plugged in for a spicy pillow.
It was done because:
* It makes phones massively easier to waterproof
* It allows for larger batteries
* It allows for more compact and lighter phones
Consumers, based on what they buy, have shown again and again that they want these features.
It also simplifies manufacture and lowers costs, which everyone likes.
I like removable batteries. If I had the option, I'd get a phone with that feature. But I know that I am certainly in the minority, as is almost everyone in this thread.
It's also worth pointing out that these days, battery and software have advanced to the point where degradation is quite slow in many cases. The phone will often outlive its useful life due to specs rather than battery.
What's next? Mandating that the screens be "replaceable" as well? Having used a fairphone before, I can tell from experience that easily replaceable parts are more prone to breaking from dust and moisture etc.
A proper gasket and screws needs to be the standard solution here.
I bought a 12 Mini a couple years ago to be the shared phone the kids would take if they were out somewhere that we wanted to have communications ability, and it came with a third party battery. It hasn't been awful, exactly, but the life on the battery seems very low even for a mini.
(every time I pick up the 12 mini, I feel tempted to find the nicest 13 mini I can find and set it up for myself. what a fantastic size, makes my 17 pro seem huge)
And they say this will save consumers money, but I will this not also make all new phones way more expensive?
Removing it is one of the most annoying things ever in a phone. Yes, Bluetooth is getting better, but the jack always works perfectly. Why can't we have both?
- rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
- availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
Frankly so long as my browser, VPN and mail app are updated I'm happy.
Batteries that can be popped out and replaced by your average consumer are something beyond that, and have certain consumer benefits like being able to bring along a backup or something, but aren't that important to me.
I agree in spirit though: storage chips wearing out seems to be common from my limited experience and it would be good if you could solder on, or slide in, a new chip with some standard procedure
There is a shocking amount of apathy on the part of people who think this doesn't affect them because they personally have no desire to use their car out of warranty or to take a car to an independent mechanic. It affects them because it affects resale price, which affects depreciation which hits their pocketbooks directly. Even if they lease the car.
There is a reason that EVs are getting hammered and even ICE vehicles are seeing steeper depreciation curves, and that's because they are becoming more disposable and harder to repair. People are talking about "useful life" of a car as if this was a disposable consumer device, and not a durable good that can be repaired and maintained for decades as long as the ability to replace components is out there. Toyota famously said "Our mission is to build cars that last for 30 years in the third world" and what do you know Toyotas don't depreciate nearly as much as other cars and people still pay 5 figures for 20 year old landrovers.
We also used to build toasters and refrigerators that easily last 50, 60 years or even 100 years if properly maintained. There is no reason cars can't do the same, and for some cars this is possible, but not for modern cars and certainly not for modern EVs. This can change.
[edit] didn’t see the fine print with the cycles requirement etc. so it seems Apple etc is still safe.
if you gonna go about e-waste then go by repairability and part prices and part supply. then let the market sort itself out.
as someone said - either standardize batteries or ensure that device makers can cap the cost of battery replacement from 3rd parties.
most phones these days - the screen gets damaged before batteries.
what about laptops ? other e-devices ?
Since 2020 phone hardware and especially battery has become much better, reliable and long lasting, at least at not dirt cheap ones. It will fail long after the screen brakes or the software updates stop. And a replaceable battery degrades the design.
On the other side a new battery makes an old phone like new. But again it only costs 15-20E to change it in a non-repl phone.
The only real reason to promote battery repl is to reduce e-waste.
*Edit. Not sure why people are downvoting. I didn't make a positive declaration. HN didn't used to be this way for completely milquetoast comments.
Also a notification LED, OLED screen, bezels to pick the device up by, headphone jack, unlockable, a continuous light sensor... peak smartphone, save perhaps for the meager 200 Hz accelerometer refresh rate (modern phones have 500 Hz usually, I have no idea what for but I personally love toying with FFT plots)
No one on this planet should use their phone more than 2 hours per day. Period. More is just plain stupid.
Maybe it's for our own good, maybe we have to suck it up and lose a little capacity to meet sustainability goals. Or maybe this won't do much for the environment.
Most phones today only look thin on promotional material. With the massive camera bump that is sometimes thicker than the phone itself, and the way most people use cases, in the end, you have quite a brick. Also a glass back panel, which to me is one of the worst materials for that purpose, but it looks good on the store stand.
So to me, a removable battery will not affect the phone dimensions as much as it will affect the look, which may piss off the marketing guys, and I take it as a positive!
Seriously, bring back the removable plastic back covers, plastic may look cheap, but to me, it is the best material, and if you put on a case, as most people do, you won't even see it!
A good middle ground would have been to enforce an easy to replace specification..but then we are up to interpretation.
Even today, phone batteries get replaced until the phone is no longer able to run today’s software.
You need some skill and patience to cut it open etc. without damage, so most people should probably go to a repair shop.
There is a difference between revealed and stated preference.
Anyway, if most comply, why not make it mandatory? Or are these kind of directives only aimed at picking fights with manufacturers?
Note that I am not suggesting that all laptops should have USB-C chargers, that's a separate directive. I mean user replaceable batteries available for at least 5 years, without requiring major surgery to replace.
The noname replacement batteries also have nowhere near the same capacity that the Apple batteries had originally.
"EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31652291
And 1 year later: "Apple says iPhones will switch to USB-C chargers to comply with new EU law"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33358353
It's interesting to see almost all the exact sentiment. I think barring some niches, most people are happy with USB-C transition.
I understand the scepticism but the expectation of "perfection" from regulators (incremental improvement disliked) while fanfare for incremental startup / tech improvement is a weird, cognitive dissonance of HN
Nowadays, good luck to find someone arguing that lightning iphones are better than usb-c.
I guess it would cost them dearly to recognize that they owe that to the eu regulation.
In the us they say vote with your wallet, obviously it didn't work..
Before that, many of them argued that powerpcs were better than x86. :)
Too often, including in HN comments, those regulations are presented as "obviously" good policies. Well, data are better than assumptions.
Edit: not the one I saw before, but found a similar document via https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu -> policy making -> "EIA reports and related analyses" -> 2025 overview report https://circabc.europa.eu/ui/group/418195ae-4919-45fa-a959-3... -> see e.g. the graphic at the top of page 79
The shaded area is the effect that they think is attributable to regulations, e.g. -2.2TWh electricity per year in the category of phones and tablets when comparing 2010 and 2030
As another example, for "Servers and data storage products" they expect almost no change due to regulation: the consumption is expected to go from 48 to 67 TWh (2010 till 2030) and that it would have been 70 TWh without regulations. If I'm reading it right, this small improvement would be due to the 2019 "information requirement ... including the maximum allowed operating temperature for the equipment ... to stimulate data centres to choose equipment that supports higher operating temperatures, to enable further reduction of the cooling load."
Page 42 shows that they also take into account 'additional acquisition costs' (how much more expensive devices are because of this, I think that means?), but that this added expense is well below the energy costs that would have been incurred otherwise. Of course, that's what I'd say too about my regulations :) but I don't know of another information source for this so this is the best info I have atm
...
> [...] if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased.
So if a family buys several phones and tablets that all use the same specialized tool to change their batteries they end up with several identical specialized tools?
From a reducing waste perspective wouldn't it be better to just require that the tool be available for free for some reasonable amount of time such as however long the manufacturer is required to support the device?
We are being gaslighted by Apple. They keep telling us that it's impossible to have a thin and light device with a user-replaceable battery, or even, heaven forbid, an SD card slot. I beg to differ: there are some compromises (it won't be as seamless perhaps and Jony Ive or whoever won't be able to wax poetic about the materials), but it can be done.
I would imagine something similar is true for waterproofing. There are certainly ways to have a separate battery and phone, with a waterproofed connector.
This is much more important, than batteries.
Next time I will also by previous generation rather than the newest model.
However, doesn't Apple already provides this? You can go to store and switch your battery for like 60 EUR or so.
if anyone can replace the phone, it's much harder to track how it was recycle with phone with battery. same with cars btw.
they trying to change the world by just issuing the order. That usually never works fine.
A spring.
A better example is the EU cookie consent law. The intent was to make websites stop using cookies, but what resulted was websites didn't change anything except put up annoying consent banners, and made the internet experience worse.
The inside of the phone should use standard screws and securing mechanisms, and batteries should not be glued to the phone.
I actually really like what Apple's been doing with its new batteries by sealing them in metal. That way if a user is being careless and accidentally slips a screwdriver under the back of their phone, the risk that they puncture their battery and start a fire is greatly reduced.
It secures the most dangerous component of your device in a way that makes it easy for anyone to remove and replace safely. I'm sure Apple has a robot to rip the battery out of its case at its recycling plant, and if the phone gets dropped in a lake or something, if that battery eventually catastrophically fails, at least it's wrapped in a suit of armor.
Like others have pointed out, if phones can certify using batteries with 1000 cycles of charge above 80%, they'll also be exempt, so this will likely only affect very cheap models.
The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools, if the manufacturer requires specialist tools then they must provide them for free.
Essentially they're banning specialized tools, and mandating that repair shops and consumers must be able to purchase replacement batteries for "at least five years."
For context the iPhone was already altered to be compliant with this law and none of the issues you raised were notably worse in the iPhone Air, or 17.
This likely will eliminate specialist software to "sync" batteries, and non-standard screws/attachment mechanisms.
> The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools
That's exactly what he's against, plus the premise "Making batteries removable prevents them from being waterproof, dustproof, and collision resistant". Which may be true or false, but not a straw man.
Again, multiple phones have already become compliant with this law and didn't lose or compromise any of those things.
So you OR they, will need to explain the basis for the claim, otherwise it is just a Strawman you're poking baselessly.