It's not the battery, its the lack of OS updates. I can't install new certificates, or get access to app stores. They're useless.
In fact, the lack of a replacement battery has never prevented me from keeping something working, only software or physical damage.
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?
The downsides to have seat belts usage not mandatory outside of reducing deaths/injuries. A few that comes to mind:
1. Parents don't wear them -> kids don't wear them 2. Friends don't wear them -> peer pressure not to wear them 3. Accident happens -> body flies out the window (risk of hitting someone, makes a mess to clean up) 4. Accident happens, person survive but is injured and is now a cost to society
Upsides (I worked with someone who refused to wear it and told me something like that):
1. Anecdote about someone that was wearing one and got into an accident and the seat belt somehow prevented them to escape the burning car and they died 2. It's less comfortable 3. Makes me feel alive (freedom)
He would only falsely wearing it when there was suspected police presence.
In reality, the worse an accident is (deaths, injuries) the longer and more difficult the clean up process is .. increasing the time that normal traffic flow is impacted and increasing the danger to all those attending who are exposed to potential (and common place) cascading disasters.
The deaths and injuries impact the local health response services - raising costs, demand for resources, and impacting triage decisions (fewer injured non seatbelt wearing idiots to look after, more free resources to devote to other patients).
However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves. So why force them against their will?
If the seatbelt saves your life from an accident in which you were at fault, it is easier to prosecute and extract compensation from the living than from the dead.
Additionally if it was optional people would forget to do it more often even if they don't consciously choose to risk their lives for no reason.
BTW they are not only endangering themselves - they also endanger their kids.
I'd just like to pay 100-300EUR to replace the battery with a brand new one but the device should still be IP68 water-"proof".
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.
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.
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.
On the other hand: I used to work with a briefcase full of different phone cables, when the people that paid me had the swell idea to offer the service of transferring phone books between dumb phones and nobody agreed on how the connectors should be shaped. I think the number of them was >40. Some of them even looked identical in shape, but were not identical in function. Some were USB. Some were serial, with different voltages. Some used two data wires for serial comms, some used only one.
I was very pleased when we stopped doing that and I got to get rid of that stuff.
I'm also pleased that someone is making assurances that we won't go back to that way of doing things.
It's OK to have a common standard, and to stick with it. (It's also OK to draft a new standard when the old one turns old-and-busted somehow.)
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.
Isn't worth the benefit for who? the manufacturers? sure.
Let's say a single manufacturer decides to offer some phones with a changeable battery, invests in their marketing, and they start becoming very popular. What happens next? Every manufacturer does the same, nobody earn a premium, total sales volume gets cut in half.
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.
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.
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.
I do not think they are colluding, but they are definitely chasing the same trends and users preferences don't seem to play that much role, unless it is one of the few essentials things. Effectively, users do not have much choice except in few areas. All phones being the same is not just because "everyone likes their phones to be unpractically huge or slow" .
Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.