The problem is not really the battery anymore, it's the software mainly. It's all closed source and is often deprecated before the hardware is dead. Then the manufacturer makes it hard to unlock bootloaders; keeps drivers closed source and effectively bricks the device. For recurring sales are the backbone of modern economy so we must force obsolescence.
Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device?
Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.
I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.
IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection. And protection granted by government decree can also be taken away by government decree.
So no "permission" to release would be necessary if government's modified ther copyright laws to withdraw their granted protections after some "event" occurred.
The bigger problem is not the permission, it is actually finding the code so it could be 'released' once the event triggered. To make this work would require some form of required escrow in order to gain copyright protection in the first place where the code would be held until such time as the removal of copyright protection from it triggered, and then it could be released.
> To make this work would require some form of required escrow in order to gain copyright protection in the first place where the code would be held until such time as the removal of copyright protection from it triggered, and then it could be released.
Trying to mandate that for all software might be too ambitious to politically succeed in practice - but mandating source code escrow for software used in certain regulated devices - smartphones, cars, planes, medical devices, etc - might be more achievable. You wouldn’t even need to touch copyright law, it would just need to be a product regulation. Of course, copyright law would have to be touched for a compulsory license, but consider that phase 2 and source code escrow as phase 1 - phase 1 could be enacted now, phase 2 saved for later
The easy option would be to have a default law like "you open source your code 5 years after it was created for phones/tablets/cars/etc and it automatically applies to your suppliers as well and the necessary software tooling to get it working. If this requires hardware to program the devices, provide the blueprints of the devices as well".
Then it would be understood and agreed that anyone making software they have to release as open source what was closed source 5 years back. This way I would say that you can't bring the "but the competitors will use this to steal my business" argument.
What you would get in essence is a snapshot of what technology looked like 5 years ago (or a decent number of years people can agree on) and you can fork from there if there's a will to give a second life to various devices.
But really, I don't want an ugly phone because someone decided batteries should be user replaceable like in the old days. And yes, I like my iPhone to be sleek.
> But really, I don't want an ugly phone because someone decided batteries should be user replaceable like in the old days. And yes, I like my iPhone to be sleek.
I don't know about ugly, but my galaxy s5 with a replaceable battery was barely thicker than an iphone 14 without one: 8.1 mm vs 7.8 mm, according to wikipedia. The difference is actually bigger between the 14 and the 7, so even without removable batteries, iphones are getting thicker.
The GS5 was also IP67 certified, and, indeed, it had no issues under heavy rain attached to my motorcycle handlebars, during multiple long trips.
I strongly doubt that having a removable cover would noticeably alter the phone's looks or thickness.
Nobody cares about what pmoriarty1 thinks of a word when the legal and political worlds have well-established meanings for those words; meanings that indicate the parent poster is correct in stating IP rights are not "natural" in genesis.
There is a recent movement trying to redefine them as such, led by moneyed interests that would obviously stand to profit from such arguments; but legal history is very clear: IP was never conceived on the grounds of being "natural" or "innate" in any way, but as a device to sustain certain economic sectors. IP is no more natural than subsidies for carmakers are natural.
Yes natural rights are those the constitution recognizes as coming from a Creator and those shall not be infringed.
Copyright and patent are not among those. The Constitution provides that congress can grant "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
"Limited times" could be defined by congress to "expire" under whatever circumstances they choose.
The difference is one of justification: we accord "natural" rights to human beings on the basis of the belief that every person is valuable and deserves certain protections and opportunities (e.g. a right to life, a right to education). Non-natural rights are instead determined on the basis of the belief that they provide an on-net benefit to the general welfare, even if not every person needs them or benefits from them.
You're right, but all EU states are members of WIPO, and their governments can't take away protection of foreign-owned IP without violating their international obligations.
Realistically, I'm sure there's a loophole they can leverage to achieve these. The EU is a major party to the WIPO and other members will likely be open to "renegotiating" if the alternative is the EU leaving completely rendering the WIPO pointless. The US pulled this stunt many times with other international orgs and treaties.
"We would never think about taking your IP but if you want to do business in this region, you must agree to voluntarily open-source all drivers after the product is no longer maintained."
Or:
"Of course you don't have to agree to anything but if you stop supporting the product and don't open source the drivers, consumers can obtain money damages for their devices becoming inoperable. "
The US created WIPO and bullied everyone else to join, there's a big difference in what you can do when you're the one with the world's biggest army by a long shot.
This is one of the biggest issues with current copyright laws. That what you can do in private while in your own country depends not on what the citizens want but on what other countries want completely undermines the citizen's right of self-determination.
The usual concern with regulation is not the big players.
It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regulations. Bad regulation raises the cost of entry into the market and strengthens the big players like Apple.
That argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts.
Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance.
The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.
Thankfully people here are asking for good regulation, once which states that at some point in the future every phone ever sold in market X needs to have its core software open sourced, so companies can plan ahead.
The EU isn't making good regulation, they don't have any tech companies and are just attempting to make it illegal to make anything in a fit of pique. The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore.
Europe has an unhealthy culture of naturalistic hippiedom, so this is just the same thing that causes Germany to shut down nuclear power.
(If you think this one's good, try combining it with their six other giant laws you haven't heard of some of which conflict with this.)
I've been trying to find words to describe this take but I fail. It's as if someone thought "what's the most jingoistic thing I can say in support of the US and its anti-regulation free-for-all?".
The US isn't the only country with tech companies. You may have heard of China, Japan, or Korea.
And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.
This is a complete mis-characterization of the EU and it's ability to make laws.
As a legislative body it certainly isn't perfect but you are ascribing motivations and making statements about it that have zero connection with reality.
The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.
could you specify the actual GDPR regulations in question which clearly conflict with these battery regulations (without any creative contrivance required on our part)?
or are you saying there isn't a conflict in that case (in which case, which ones do?) that part wasn't clear
> The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.
again: could you specify (meaning cite, obviously) the actual regulations in question which conflict with this battery legislation (you know, the topic)?
it seems like a creative but unlikely contrivance that there is an actual legal conflict there as you describe
you quoting yourself when it doesn't answer the question, without adding more context, leads me to believe that you don't think there is any actual legal conflict there, either
I did not say anything conflicted with replaceable battery legislation. I said other legislation conflicts with the things people who like this legislation want out of it. (Though maybe I misworded it.)
The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore.
Really? Are you claiming that capitalists are so much of a fool that instead of making, say, half the profit they were making before in an unregulated market, they would readily prefer to make 0 profits? The reality is that if American BigTech exit the EU market, then some local or non-American competitor will step in to fill the vacuum. Or have you already forgotten that the European Nokia once dominated the mobile phone industry?
Yes, I'm aware of how economic protectionism works.
The reason Nokia instantly failed when the US entered the market is because their products were bad and nerdy and they couldn't do good software. eg when they got an iPhone and their reaction was to do low level optimizations of their boring UI to make it 60fps instead of having a nice UI instead.
Not sure how much weight this really has in a market such as mobile phones in which additional external competitors are never going to become a reality.
OnePlus was a nobody when they launched the OnePlus One in 2014. They could have easily gone out of business.
And that's one that got big enough to remember them. Wikipedia lists 188 mobile phone manufacturers [1]. A lot of them very local (e.g. EvertekTunisie making phones for Tunisia and Morocco) or defunct; But even my local (German) retailer offers 35 brands. Big ones like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, budget brands like Oppo or ZTE, niche brands like CAT or Beafon. It's a crowded market that doesn't seem particularly hard to enter.
And judging by the spotty compatibility of LineageOS they don't all use the same hardware either.
How would _this_ regulation raise the cost of entry? At worst they'd just have to release the source code for the firmware they wrote (putting source code on github takes maybe 5m).
Those suppliers would be subject to the same regulations when supplying to the big players. They should have all that stuff already available once it's in force.
> If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...
I think I have even more elegant solution. All IP should be subject to a tax (or maintenance fee or whatever you want to call it). As soon as the IP owner fails to pay the tax, IP falls to public domain irrevocably. The actual structure of the tax can be subject to debate. I would propose a highly progressive tax over time, for example for patents something like $100 for the first year, then doubling every year.
Seriously, why should IP not be taxed? We tax almost everything else that is possible to tax. Especially given it is far from certain that IP is net benefit for society. (I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt though, that's why I am not proposing to abolish IP completely)
Under your model any author would immediately lose protections unless they could afford the fees....
If you can't see the glaring problems there then there's no hope for you....
But hopefully you immediately recognize that it hurts the least advantaged the greatest while also providing a mechanism for anticompetitive behavior under the guise of following your precept (make the fee high enough and only established authors/publishers can hold any copyright).
I really get the feeling you didn't think it through at all....
> I really get the feeling you didn't think it through at all....
I said the structure can be discussed. There is no problem giving first number of years free to see if the IP is commercially viable. The aggressive progression (doubling every year) means that literally all IP is in public domain after a couple of decades.
You saying "it can be discussed" doesn't change that your model is flawed on its face, with no amount of extra layers of ad hoc workarounds able to overcome those blatant flaws....
A simpler solution is to start with a return to something resembling the original IP laws where one lost their rights within their own lifetime.... Theres a reason that was originally proposed, rather than lifetime protections, and why creators originally accepted it with glee... All parties need to remember those reasons, whether rights holder, state or consumer.
Private citizens get different rules than corporations might fit into a discussion. Let an author hold their personal IP. Corporate IP taxed. Might be odd for legal exposure as there wouldn't be a corporate vail.
If the IP is commercially viable then it would generate revenue to cover the fees.
If it wasn't viable then it would either never be created or would automatically enter the public domain.
Currently, if IP is not commercially viable then the author has the choice of not creating it, or creating it and releasing it under CC or just public domain. So essentially the same.
A poor writer who works full time min wage to barely scrape by and writes a masterpiece will not have the funds to cover the fees while waiting to get accepted by a publisher
To assert the model isn't blatantly flawed is absurd
"If you can't see the glaring problems there then there's no hope for you...."
Correct, but easily solved if the tax were to be based on license sales numbers and income. Small/poor license owners would pay almost nothing whereas the big players would pay plenty.
How does that resolve the issue of IP squatting that is in question?
If there's no income the fee is negligible, permitting the rights holder to squat on them for next to nothing and prevent the use of the otherwise abandoned IP by the public....
That's a separate and in some circumstances a serious problem.
For instance, an art gallery takes a photo of an artwork that's out of copyright for reference/insurance and (a) doesn't allow photos in the gallery and (b) the photo which is copyright isn't on sale (as it wasn't intended for that purpose). So the out of copyright artwork is locked up from reproduction.
Variations on this theme are a problem with galleries and museums worldwide.
and the money i use to pay for goods was already charged income tax, and then it gets charged sales tax, which is bigger than otherwise since it is a percentage, and the workers who produced the product is income taxed, and have to pay salestax for their food...... its hardly as if the regimes around the world have any problems with taxing things to hell
In 2011 you obtain a patent wholly owned by the company.
In 2012 you fail to pay the franchise tax and filing paperwork for your company so the state dissolves it. You don't care because you aren't making money.
In 2013 another company starts making a product that infringes on your patent.
You are the defacto owner of the patent. This is because you were the owner of the company when it was terminated. All of its assets and liabilities devolved to you. No action was required of you for this to happen, it just happens.
Now imagine this business was actually a joint venture between two wholly owned subsidiaries of two different holding companies, one of which was public but has gone bankrupt and the other was private but subsequently merged with a public conglomerate that spun off a child company, keeping only 40% of its stock after IPO.
The patent is still owned by people, but good luck finding them all.
The purpose of a patent, generally speaking, is to encourage innovation by giving the creator legally protected time in which they can exclusively use that innovation. If they don’t use the innovation but someone else wants to, society is improved by dissolving that patent, even if the owner could theoretically be traced to some person.
The patent renewal system is the attempt to solve this. In the case that the patent isn’t wanted, or the patent owner goes out of business, the patent owner won’t pay the annual renewal (in most countries; the US is once every 4 years) and after the (usually) 6 month grace period, the patent is public.
The invention as disclosed and documented in the patent is free to the world.
Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is? Why do we need to pay taxes to employ those people? We have patent law, which is already a lovely gravy train for the state.
> Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is?
This is reversing the natural order of things. That bureaucrat isn't nullifying fucking ANYTHING. That bureaucrat is artificially limiting who is allowed to create/use a thing.
The natural state of the information is: "Use this - it's free". The whole of humanity might exist because mirror neurons literally go: "Hey - I can do that too!".
It's only when you add a monstrously complex and entirely artificial patent system on top of things that it gets complex.
So we're ALREADY deciding who is allowed to use things, and it's already artificial and bureaucratic.
All this does is fucking stop making it worse. And patent/copywrite is already so god damn egregious as a system. I'm firmly in the camp of "nuke it from orbit". It's time to try something other than this hideous abusive system.
It's hard to know what point you're making, although your aggression is (hopefully) a sign of how extremely you care about this topic.
I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power. You seem to be saying this at the end as well, so, as I say, I'm not sure what point you're making. But your excitement on this topic is appreciated.
> I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power.
What is confusing here? The entire structure is already a perversion of the natural world.
If we did not have our government, and the rules that it enforces (those "bureaucrats" you don't seem to like), then there is no "invention" to be nullified.
They already have this power. They enforce it through violence and imprisonment (tools reserved officially to the government). If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.
The question is not: "Will the government nullify my invention?!?!?". It's - "What might my life have been like if the government did not restrict SO many people from competing at all - by artificially stopping them from using the tools and ideas they see around them? (for fairly ridiculous time periods)"
> If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.
This is possible, but the power to enforce patents is in the courts, and not in the patent bureaucracy. Having a single group that can invalidate parents on a whim is different to that.
And patents can be useful, although I don't have many examples. SawStop is one, though, where even a 20 year patent doesn't seem to have been long enough to establish a successful business before incumbents swoop in. Patents like that are pro-competition in that scenario. Otherwise why bother starting a new business when your R&D effort can just be taken advantage of by someone else as soon as you hit on the answer?
Tough luck. If it's that important, register your ownership interest somewhere and keep that property claim alive by renewing it once every few years for a nominal fee. Property rights are not so important that the world should stop turning if a property owner has retired to a cave without leaving any forwarding address.
So hire a PI. If someone doesn't want to be found, that's one thing, but if they're just out there, living their lives normally, that's not insurmountable.
In reality, it's a bunch of work which costs money, and if you don't have to spend that money, why would you?
They wouldn't be orphan if we knew who holds the corresponding rights. Selling the liquidated estates could help with certain out of commerce works, but I wonder how many such cases exists. Usually other publishers buy the catalogue just to keep it quiet and reduce the competition, even if they have no intention to reprint anything.
Only if you think that the IP remaining restricted rather than entering the public domain is a halfway decent solution.....
Arguably the American model of abandonment is better because abandoned IP doesn't actually result in any lawsuits, while that UK model is built to effectively encourage them.
It would require doing things slightly differently, such as hardware vendors having to buy the rights to redistribute firmware blobs / source code... just because it's hard it doesn't matter it can't happen. After all, if physical components can be brought together to make a product, why can't software licenses move with them?
One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.
We're talking about firmware which is device-specific, which is why it has to be released separately for each device.
Moreover, there exist devices with fully open source firmware, so if anybody wanted one to copy, they don't need yours. They only need yours to use it with your hardware.
But there is still a difference between software and hardware. This is like saying that for every hardware device I should be able to also spin up my own factory to produce it, and have that bundled into the purchase price.
These devices have a chip in them that needs drivers and firmware. That's software. In particular it's the software that interfaces with the operating system. But the software is specific to a given version of the Linux kernel. When a new kernel comes out, you often have to update the software, for which you need the source code. So when the vendor stops doing this without publishing the code, nobody else can cost effectively do it either, and you can no longer use the hardware with recent versions of the kernel. But older kernel versions have known security vulnerabilities in them, so you can't use those either.
The ask is not that they provide free factories for everyone to make their own hardware, it's that they release the source code for this software in particular. Anybody could then copy the software, but it's only useful in combination with their hardware. A competitor in China can't use the same drivers with some other chip, that chip would need different drivers. That's what drivers are. So the only people who want this code are the people who paid the hardware vendor for their product and want to continue using it.
The hardware vendor, by contrast, doesn't want to give it to them, not because they fear some competitor using it but because then the customer would be able to keep using the hardware they paid for instead of having to buy a new one. Which is unreasonable enough to prohibit.
"IBM compatible" was a result of reverse engineering, not open source.
And it also has no meaning in this context. What is "compatible" with a WiFi chip or a storage controller? They're all already compatible with each other. The driver is the thing that converts from the device-specific operations to the APIs provided by the kernel. The kernel APIs are already public and anyone can implement them for their own hardware.
Do you want to sell your devices in this large, debeloped, profitable market? The you have to comply.
Manufacturing supply chains are already awfully complicated beast. Complying with reflgulaion of providing firmware for your hardware should hardly be a huge problem.
> I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.
Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.
If we are talking about making new laws, why not just modify the law to exclude firmware from any IP protection. i.e. compel disclosure of the firmware, and also ensure the device manufacturer is protected from any lawsuits arising out of such disclosure.
Easily fixed by assuming that if an IP owner no longer exists or cannot be find, their ownership interest may be reasonably presumed to have expired. It's only hard because people insist on keeping it that way.
How? How exactly would they figure it out? As someone who works in hardware development full time, often supporting older hardware, I don't see how this is feasible. Most of the IP we work on requires 3 or more parties to be part of the NDA.
I have no idea. But I know it's not a law of physics so it can definitely be changed.
It's hard to see in the status quo, but it doesn't mean it can't be changed. Whatever system exists today works the way it does because laws defined (or didn't) how they operate. If we change those, the system has to change with it.
Nah, the government can change the law. The obstacle to overcome would be the software quality. Today your driver is a hairball stuck with chewing gum to a point release of everything. In the case of a smallest change of anything it goes up in flames. That’s something harder to overcome by decree. Needs incentives in place.
The normal neoliberal solution is to wait for a new company with a new design to meet the demand for repairable, open devices. This is already happening, and I am convinced will eventually replace ALL proprietary blobs and silicon. This is especially true as the barriers-to-entry keep lowering. The only way this won't happen is if government and the tightly coupled industrial interests prevent it by fiat. This is more likely than you think, since control of these devices is far, far more important than most people realize. Smartphones are crucial for the tracking and control of both large populations and also problematic individuals. In theory they could lead to perfect law-enforcement, which should terrify everyone. Letting the space open up is to give up central authority's invaluable tactical and strategic advantage over distributed authority.
How about a rule that says you have no intellectual property whatsoever on my phone if you don't maintain it for a year. I would be free to decompile it recompile it and make it opendource
How about as part of FCC approvals you submit everything needed to unlock the device, and it goes into a vault for X years than gets automatically released.
No, it's batteries too. And water/dust/fluid ingress protection. Modern phones are sealed up pretty tight because users want them to be waterproof. This makes it very difficult to build in replaceable batteries!
Only if you made absolutely sure that the battery was secured tightly - from the same article. Out of the 200M+ iPhones that Apple sells every year, how many people do you think wouldn’t put the battery and the cover on perfectly?
The same applies to gluing the rear cover back on, except instead of simply ensuring you've applied enough pressure and the gasket is in good condition, you now need to check that you've soldered the battery properly, positioned the glue correctly, heated the glue enough that it melts but doesn't fry your phone, and applied enough pressure evenly.
Well you don’t have to do anything. Spend $69 - $89 and let an Apple certified repair company to replace it and if they do something wrong, it’s covered under warranty.
All I'm saying is that you used to be able to get smartphones that were like this, and they weren't any more expensive than any other smartphones. (EDIT: I was wrong, they were about $25 more expensive.)
So this is demonstrably possible. The only reason I can think of that it's not done anymore is cost savings.
Modern phones are packed to the brim with features. My phone has a goddamn LIDAR scanner! I really don’t think it is feasible anymore, and I think most people would prefer an extra 2-300 mAh over swappable battery. Of course replacing it once by a dedicated shop each 3 years should be possible.
Only actual people who must have an IP68 battery replaceable phones are that kind of people. Others just go for an iPhone and just pays for shop replacements few years later.
No? My Hero 10 and 11 are both waterproof on their own up to 10m, as long as I use the included battery door (can’t use the optional doors that allow direct access to the USB port, or the media mod).
There is a dive housing that can handle up to 60m depth, but that’s a special case.
But really waterproofing the phone doesn't require gluing everything together to within an inch of its life, just a gasket and a few screws. Yes it will add $5 or something to the cost of a phone, totally worth it, and will improve repairability in general to boot.
You make this claim but have you ever worked in product design for something trying to achieve an IP water and dust ingress rating?
It is far more than "just a gasket and a few screws". The rating can't just be good on unboxing day. You want it to hold even after a few years, several drops on the floor, in cold weather, etc.
Watch makers solved this problem decades ago - there are very reasonable mechanical solutions to waterproofing. And if some limited components need to be sealed (i.e. the USB port requires special shielding) that sealing can easily exist in a device that is otherwise reasonable to maintain.
Watch maintenance has been done by skilled professionals using generic tools and (generally) generic components. Waterproofing is an excuse used to limit our ability to repair and maintain our devices and maybe because somebody didn't like the appearance of a screw face or screw cover on one side of the device.
Do most watches have ports that are designed for thousands of uses? My smart watch sure does. But of all the possible avenues by which its waterproofness might fail, that connector is #1. I'm pretty sure its custom, as the cable has actual pogo pins to connect.
Strictly from a product design and especially hardware design standpoint, I get the resistance to easy replacement of certain parts. Designing for a replaceable battery means designing your seal to withstand at least twice as many battery replacements as the law requires, or you make sure you have enough replacement seals stockpiled to cover the number that will be replaced, or you use a a commodity seal (think an O-ring).
Apple eventually made ~86 million iPhone 8 and 8 plus. Let's say that's representative of any given model of phone. How many millions (billions?) of seals is that? How much does that cost to store? To distribute? How much does that affect the cost of the phone?
I am fully behind right-to-repair. I won't work for companies that have lobbied against it (and as an embedded hardware and firmware guy, that's significant). But there is a measurable, monetary cost to designing things to be repaired. Either we accept that only the richest n% of e.g. phone manufacturers can afford to stay in business, we as the consumer accept lower performance at the same price point, or both.
All of that said, my point regarding connectors with finite cycle lifespans is relevant. These physical devices themselves have a lifespan. What is the point of replacing a battery when the charging port, headphone jack, physical buttons, touch screen, etc are spec'd to fail well before the average battery does? What about if you have the same iPhone 8 soldering problem, where the phone can't actually survive being put in the back pocket of a decently tight pair of pants? How does government regulation regarding batteries reverse the trend of people buying cheap things because they cost less?
> What is the point of replacing a battery when the charging port, headphone jack, physical buttons, touch screen, etc are spec'd to fail well before the average battery does
Parts often/usually last far in excess of what they're spec'd for as I'm sure you know. And many of the things you list aren't critical to operation like the battery is.
The iPhone has always been serviceable by an authorized Apple dealer or if you’re good enough and brave enough by the end user wiling to use the iFixit guide.
The answer to my question - was that you could spend $69 - $99 to get a battery replaced by an authorized Apple provider and if they broke something or didn’t do it right, it would be covered under warranty.
I can also make a tiny little thingy waterproof, but it’s much harder to do with a mini-computer that is insanely powerful, has a whole camera department, can be used as a semi-professional video recorder, can withstand drops, and has a 1+ days battery life at least.
Also, it is just ingenious to attribute everything to malice — is a modern combustion engine also irreparable because of some conteo, or is it irreparable simply because for efficiency reasons they had to use more precise technology with smaller error margins, where one’s fatty human hand just doesn’t cut anymore?
They solved it in a way where they don't guarantee you that it is water proof for more than 2 years without service and appropriate maintenance and it stops being water proof as soon as you open it.
Controlling water in machines is not new, neither is phone design. It's been done a million ways and all of those ways have certain trade offs. It's just another design challenge and the flipside of your comment is a suggestion that there isn't some person other than me that is up to the challenge. Customers can make their own judgements about looks and size versus (replaceable battery) functionality as they always have.
The fact is gluing is simpler and cheaper but most importantly it reduces the repairability of phones by third parties. Quite often trying to repair a phone will cause it to be destroyed, making replacing a battery more risky and difficult. Companies would love not to have to use glue, but <design excuse>! Nothing at all to do with built-in obsolescence.
I'm sure many people want a repairable smartphone and a replaceable battery. Of course, there are many that don't. I don't understand how it make sense to force those people, that don't want a repairable phone and a replaceable battery, to get such a smartphone.
Because the cost of the waste these throw-away phones generate isn't priced in. There is a societal cost that isn't being paid by the firm or the consumer.
Honestly, it probably only adds a few bucks to the BOM and the consumer who doesn't care about repairability still likely comes out better off in the long run because their phone lasts them longer and/or resells for more because it isn't junk after 3 years.
Yeah iphones were premium/valuable enough that people would go through the trouble to repair them even if they had to deal with some glue.
With android phones the resale value/demand wasn't there (also due in part to bad software support lifetimes which would also need to be addressed) so they'd just get tossed/shelved after 2 to 3 years even if they were perfectly functional.
Users of cars pretty routinely replace seals that are under a lot more extreme enviroments and abuse than a phone without issue. All of the ones I've dealt with pretty much are "just a gasket and a few screws" Sure, there needs to be some design process to get there, but let's not pretend that doing this would be some unheard of technological advancement.
Cars are much larger and their seals are much larger. They consequently have much more play and far larger tolerances.
If you scaled the forces and subjected the car to the equivalent of dropping a phone on the floor it would be totaled instantly... forget about maintaining waterproofing.
Thus I stand by my original statement: people making claims like "just a gasket and some screws" have never designed a product under similar constraints and are making bad assumptions or straight-up Dunning-Kruger errors left and right.
the easiest way is to just separately encapsulate all parts that need to be removable (i.e. the battery + wireless charging coil in one piece and the rest of the phone in the other), and only have the connectors as the exposed pieces. A gasket around those and contacts far enough away from each other for good measure and you're good to go.
Plus the Samsung Active line never needed to go to these extremes to churn out perfectly fine waterproof phones at slightly higher than average prices. And they weren't the only ones with these sort of offerings.
That means double the casing which takes up space and adds weight.
I never claimed it was impossible. I'm only pointing out there are far more severe design constraints than a lot of people even understand, yet they confidently proclaim it is both a simple matter of trivial engineering and completely free of consequences.
I have this new Nokia phone with a replaceable battery. It came with the pin you can use to open it (probably costs a few cents to manufacture, but if I had plenty of time to spare, I could've made one with a sturdy piece of plastic and sandpaper). The "mechanism" that keeps the back panel is just a piece of rubber, probably the same kind you find on hermetically sealing food containers.
Also, very few people want their phones water-proof (what for?). And even if you really, really wanted that, you could like spend 5-10 Euro on a water-proof case.
Back when phones still had removable batteries, I had them rained on, spilled on, and even dropped one in the toilet. I then submerged that one in a bowl of rubbing alcohol for several minutes. In all those instances, I popped the battery out and let it dry. I've never had a phone destroyed by water. Worst case was buy a new battery! Back then non-waterproof phones without removable batteries also existed. I'm sure they succumbed to water much more easily.
I'd take a removeable battery over almost every modern feature on phones today.
> This is insane. So that rain doesn’t destroy it? So that spilling a drink doesn’t destroy it? So that dropping it in the toilet doesn’t destroy it?
If rain destroys your phone that is just plain incompetence from the design department. Or rather, they were not incompetent, but other forces made sure they were not paying much attention to water resistance.
My wettest experience with a smartphone was when I got surprised by heavy rain when walking to the hair dresser. I arrived soaking wet. Got the phone (a HTC Desire Z) out of my pocket, water was running out of it. I opened the battery lid, the hairdresser blew with the hairdryer for a couple of minutes and all was fine.
Once my Google Nexus 4 died because of rain. Normal rain was no problem ever with it, even to make calls in a rain. But one day it rained very heavily with a wind so strong it was hard to walk against it. It felt like being in a carwash for ~ 10 minutes.
I was waterlogged up to my underwear. Nexus 4 was in my pocket and died. I put it to a bunch of rice and let it airdry. After it dried, the phone acted weirdly.
Lesson learnt: if the product doesn't specifically indicate a high level of water protection level, consider it not having ANY protection. "Resistant against spills" and other handwavy marketing mumbo jumbo has zero substance.
Before cell phones were common, wrist watches were. Very few of them were water-proof, and very few people wanted them to be.
Yes, if you were stupid and went swimming with your wrist-watch you would've killed it... and every now and then I'd hear a story about how something like that happened.
Water-proof watches were seen as a luxury, however small, that nobody really needed outside of like scuba divers.
I don't even know if my phone is water proof or not, and I had it since 2016. I never tried swimming with it or leaving it outside in the rain or doing any of the other stupid things you listed... why would any sane person do something like that?
It’s literally the most commonly used tool, hell, I have my phone on me more times than even my shoes! Of course I want it to be waterproof, people get their phones wet from any number of things, sudden rain, kid hosing you, phone falling into the sink, etc.
No, they don't. And those who do have to expose their phones to extreme conditions might buy a protective case. Very few people expose their phones to conditions they know to endanger electronics... it's common sense not to use electronics underwater, unless it's the special kind that's designed to do that.
First, it seems like you could just make the phone part waterproof and if they dunk it, they have to replace the battery. I have ruined a phone by putting it through the wash, and I would have been very happy to just replace the battery instead of chucking the phone.
Beyond that, I wonder what the reality is for waterproofing needs. Are people taking smartphones diving? IP65 means it's resistant to 'spray' - like rain, not a firehose - and it seems like a battery compartment with a tight-fitting cover would be more than enough for this. IP68 doesn't apparently mandate a depth rating but recent iPhones are tested to 6 meters for 30 minutes. That's more water pressure than 99% of those iPhones are ever going to see.
I don't personally think the non-replaceable battery has anything to do with IP rating, it's because manufacturers want soft-sided batteries with more delicate terminal connections, for volume/capacity reasons.
Most waterproof norms are only valid for freshwater. Most usb/lightning ports rust after being subjected to salted water and you end up not being able to charge your device anymore.
See Jerry Rig Everything. He even says that there are solutions for this even for glued-up phones, manufacturers just don't want to implement them because they're for sure against battery replacements.
It's not like glue is some sort of magic substance.
As I keep mentioning, Nokia has been building hardened phones for construction workers, with replacement batteries, for ages, all the way back to their feature phones.
And every article says they were “splash proof” which is a lot different than dropping a phone in the water or forgetting to take it out of your pocket when you jump into a pool.
I want replaceable batteries in that I want to replace them like 2-3 years after purchase. Which is already possible for a negligible price.
You really shouldn’t want to replace batteries on the fly in general — it makes stealing easier (modern phones can’t be powered off easily without authorization) so you may find it before it loses power, waterproofing suffers, etc.
I don't. I just want it splash resistant - it's more than enough. just because there is a promile of morons that can't handle the phone doesn't mean that a lots of users should be prohibited from easily changing the battery... because of that lots of devices end up on landslide because users can't get enough charge I fit anymore...
I loved lumia devices - easily openable back to replace battery, nice materials (rubbery polycarbonate?) that offered nice grip. Having PC displays instead of glass would be awesome - no need for extra protective case because the shatter woild be a tning od the past. At the worst, a scratch resistant screen protector, which we all already put in the devices either way to help avoid screen cracks..
If the battery was easier to replace, the phones would still end up unusable either because the storage would wear out, the cell modem would become obsolete, the display would get burnin, or someone would drop it and crack the screen.
I'm sorry but what? I replaced my previous mobile (OnePlus3) because of the battery - after about 4-5 years it became quite difficult to get through the day on single charge, and in the world where everything is getting more "electronic" (tickets!) it became a problem.
Yes, id didn't have newest 5G, but guess what - my new phone has it yet I don't have coverage. Storage could wear out but are you really doing load IO test on it? screen burnin/crack... maybe if someone is glued to the phone "24/7" and doesn't take care of the device... but as I said - using good policarbon materials (including for screen!) would get rid of this problem mostly...
That's a sample of one but we're talking about millions in different countries here and a bit longer timescale than here. I don't think phones could last say 10 years with battery swaps and nothing else.
All my last phones the battery had issues, including two phones where the battery became a ball instead of a rectangle right after warranty ended. And the battery caused problems before the software.
I ended using even a KaiOS phone just to have a phone I could replace the battery. People keep moaning about phone being waterproof yet my phones fail on me nowhere near water so what is the point?
> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.
I don't see much hope of such a thing being decided soon, if ever. The incentives for politicians are mostly not aligned in this direction.
The much more realistic path towards having devices/software that can be used for more than 3-5 years is IMO if more people started supporting projects like postmarketOS, fairphone, shiftphones, Librem, (mntreform for laptops) and other such croud-funded and more open/free designs.
Once such devices/OSes work good enough to be usable in day to day life without serious hassle/disappointments, more people will actually use them and a community can grow, allowing the products to mature.
I think a very good example (in software) is the f-droid app store that has reached a sufficient level of maturity that many people now use it exclusively (instead of the Google play store).
These phones are unusable in a large part because of marketplace lock-in, and in another large part due to unavailable drivers. These things cannot be changed through "grassroots movement", these need to be recognized as mobile phone companies violations of consumer rights and be treated as such.
I agree that opening up the software side of devices is important, but this is still a huge win.
I and many, many other people don’t mind using a phone or tablet for many years, even with an obsolete OS. But battery life tends to be the #1 factor in this devices ending up in the bin.
In fact, by making battery changes easier with less intensive surgery, it’ll put even more pressure on manufacturers to allow for repurposing them with a different OS.
Maybe mandate a 5-year limit before a device must be allowed to be unlocked allowing alternative software to be installed, thus giving these disposable devices a far longer lifespan.
I had a couple phones I really liked where the battery got puffy - ie, very very bad - while the device was otherwise great. Tried replacing with an ifixit kit, but the screen got borked in the process. Total waste...
I'm still running a pixel 2 which is almost 6 years old now. I had to have the battery replaced 5 years in. Although it's not the most practical you don't have to replace the full device. Manufacturers would prefer you do.
in my experience, it's the charge port that goes. My last two devices, each of which I had for 3 years, the charge port failed before the battery did. I just finished fixing my current one. Although I did decide to do a battery replacement anyways while I had the device open. But that was just because of how hard it is to open them at all. My battery health monitoring app said it was at ~80% health still. And while the charge port hasn't always failed on me in the past, I'm not sure the battery has ever been the reason for me personally, although I'm probably just lucky in that regard.
Basically, I'm not sure that any one "thing" is the thing that always fails. There are multiple common points of failure and generally speaking, phones are hard to service in any manner these days. I personally would gladly give up water and dust protection, as well as thinness in exchange for ease of serviceability. Unfortunately, that seems to be a relatively uncommon set of preferences (although obviously it's probably much more common in places like Hacker News).
> in my experience, it's the charge port that goes.
I have had this problem on a regular basis with all of the iPhones I have owned, and the problem has never been that the charge port is dead, but that dust and/or lint has gathered in it.
The solution is very simple: use a tootbrush or similar, preferably something plastic that won't break, BUT NOT ANYTHING METALLIC, to dig out the dirty stuff. Problem solved.
This is why I only buy phones that support inductive charging. It's really not an expensive feature and it saves so much wear and tear on the charging port.
There are several things that limit the lifetime of a phone:
1. Battery
2. Software
3. Charge port/headphone port
4. eMMC storage runs out of writes
5. Accidental damage
6. Screen scratches
7. Wanting more RAM/storage and faster processing
Batteries are getting better, and we can extend the life of a LiIon battery by about 5X by limiting charging to 80%. If batteries inherently had as short a life as they commonly do in phones, then electric cars would be doomed, but there's no real reason why we can't get phone batteries to last 10 years or more.
The software can only be solved by constant effort. There are certain things that could possibly be done to make it easier, such as arranging the device-specific stuff so that the effort already spent on producing a newer set of software for a newer device can be more easily back-ported to the older devices. I think this will only be solved by legislation, such as a law saying that the software must be updated for X years, or even just a law saying that the support duration must be very clearly advertised with the phone allowing consumers to make a choice.
A USB-C port is rated for a minimum of 10,000 plug/unplug cycles, which should be enough to charge the phone once a day for 30 years. If that isn't actually being achieved then we need to ask why not.
The eMMC storage is a problem with many phones. My phone is just starting to slow to a crawl because its main storage is old and it takes a while for it to perform certain writes (or something - it's hard to get an accurate picture of what is happening in there). There is zero information that a consumer has available when deciding which phone to buy to tell them which ones will have a problem with this. This seems to be a fairly obvious target for a law, similar to the software support duration.
Accidental damage - I remember reading a statistic about how the average phone survives a ridiculously short time before being dropped and broken, and I don't get it. I haven't dropped/broken a phone ever. I guess we just let the people who are constantly dropping their phones pick up the tab on that one.
Screen scratch protection is also getting really good now. My current phone has lived in my pocket for several years, and there's almost zero scratching on the screen. Just don't keep your keys in the same pocket.
In terms of replacing a phone because you want something better - I had a look recently to see about replacing my phone. The ones on the market at a comparable price to what I spent on my current one had specifications that were really not much better at all. It doesn't make sense - if a phone with those specifications is deemed suitable for today's market, then my old one with almost identical specifications should be fine too.
So, I don't really see any barriers that aren't insurmountable to a phone lasting several times longer than they do at the moment. Ten years should be easy, 15 years should be possible. At the moment, it's more like 3 if you're very lucky.
Actually the EU RF, product liability and cyber security regulations rather point into a direction that disallows use of aftermarket firmware that can delay onsolecense and encourages lockdown. Instead of overregulation we need create an economic system that encourages sustainable use of resources. The EU just does what they can do best: regulate
Totally agreed but good regulation needs a vision and common values beyond a common single market (alas we just do more regulations centrally in the fear to get regulatory fragmentation decentrally)
Proper cost attribution of externalities could provide an alternative to regulation... unfortunately the only way we currently have to measure these externalities is regulation. Directly regulating the bad outcome instead of the externalities that contribute to it is less likely to lead to misaligned economic incentives.
Regulation is not a bad thing - though within the US a fair amount of regulations were constructed to increase the barrier to enter a market at the behest of lobbying.
It seems that they are too good at it, to the point of outlawing new competitors and even hobbyists who simply can’t afford to deal with the paperwork; eg see the shit-show that security regulation around OSS.
All firmware should be open source, including drivers and particularly graphics drivers. It boggles the mind that a hardware manufacturer refuses to make available the source of the software that actually runs the hardware you paid for.
IMHO releasing full hardware documentation is far better.
Incidentally, a lot of cheap Chinese phones based on Mediatek have plenty of leaked documentation available, and a thriving aftermarket community as a result of that.
I find it ironic that one of the few phone brands adressing all these issues (replaceable batteries, rootability, 5+ years spare parts sales) happens to be the ultimate "Chinese brand" phone: Unihertz :p
No woke bs marketing, no coorporate white washing, no marketing with "green sustainability": they just do it instead of talking about it.
Huh, why not? I'd love yours too, but battery is also good. What do you do with a superb open source phone where you need to replace device because battery is dead and you cannot replace it? Let's please aim for both and everything!
They made plans to enforce manufacturers to provide updates for longer (3/5 years for OS/security updates) [1]. Though you might argue that 3/5 years is not enough, this seems like a more effective way to elongate the lifespan of an average user's phone who might not be comfortable with installing and using an alternative OS.
Not sure what the latest update on this is. IIRC the planned penalty was to make the manufacturer give full refunds to the consumer for devices that violate the requirement.
I’ve made a similar suggestion on HN before. Have a minimum support period for internet connected devices, and once you stop updating after that minimum, you’re required to unlock the hardware and open source everything.
That can't work, because the suppliers will be bankrupt already. However one could something like Portico, which keeps journals in archive and releases them to the public if the original goes down. Manufacturers could be forced to deposit all the source code for the software they release on their product, and the deposited source code be released to the public after X years if there is no support for security updates any more. The difference being, if they don't comply the EU can withdraw the products from the market _before_ they're sold.
That would be great in theory, but who would actually review and enforce that?
Without really strict rules in place this would be doomed to fail. You would need to have a huge number of people whose job it would be to review every single software/firmware submission.
Would you mandate that companies must deliver code and build scripts that can be built with a single command and produce usable software/firmware?
Otherwise companies would probably submit random archives of plausible looking code that will never be usable because it depends on 100+ proprietary components.
Why don't they sell updates? Even if they open source everything, I'd pay for them to support my phone for longer and I imagine the margins on a SW update outweigh the cost of producing more hardware.
Because given limited resources, companies prefer to spend their resources on what pays the most. Manufacturing updates may be comparable or even more expensive than making new devices.
If this is a priority for you, you could vote with your wallet and purchase a fairphone next time your current phone dies. They provide fairly long software support and always had replaceable batteries.
The battery is still a huge problem, this is just clouding the issue with something else. Batteries wear out and have a fraction of their lifetime in a few years and can be replaced for under $20
Apple mobile devices seem to get deprecated when the hardware is no longer meaningful. The last two deprecation were (a) only 1GB of RAM and (b) 32-bit chips.
Yes but replaceable batteries are a good start and a more pressing issue. A phone with a 4+ year old battery is useless even if you have all the software for it.
> I replaced my iPhone 6 because it was slow, not because battery was bad
iPhone slowness can go hand in hand with batteries going bad, especially in the iPhone 6 days. Apple phones will limit peak performance when it detects the battery voltage can't handle it without too much of a voltage drop. From what I understand its now an opt-out setting, but for most of the iPhone 6's life it wasn't an option.
If you opt out of it your phone will suddenly turn off, which is definitely not an improvement over being slow. Having the opt-out is nonsense and an example of bad regulation.
This isn't the only reason an old phone would be slow though, batteries are not the only consumable component in a phone.
Feature phones weren't a substitute for personal computers. They weren't as necessary of an accessory as it is today. On the other hand, standards governing how those phones worked weren't changing as fast, so, given good care, you could use your phone for 10+ years.
Updates today are a way to force users into buying a new phone (eg. my banking up decided not to support an older version of Android, phone vendor doesn't produce updates -- I have to buy a new device).
There weren't updates because there weren't banking apps which could've forced you to abandon your perfectly functioning device.
> Feature phones weren't a substitute for personal computers. They weren't as necessary of an accessory as it is today. On the other hand, standards governing how those phones worked weren't changing as fast, so, given good care, you could use your phone for 10+ years.
I am quite sure that many people across the African continent and Asian see it differently.
I'm mostly familiar with North Afrika, but I can tell you this: at that time in places like Egypt or Morocco you couldn't access government services from your Nokia, it wasn't a thing. 2FA was unheard of. Contactless payment is still a novelty, but definitely didn't exist at the time prior to smartphones. There weren't banking apps.
Best you could do on your phone is to play snake or send an email.
And if we are talking about places like Zimbabwe... there might have been like a hundred cell-phones in the entire country.
As for Asian countries? -- well, places like Japan or Hong Kong weren't much different from Europe. Places like India or China, by and large, didn't have coverage. Even relatively well-off Russia only had cell towers in and around big cities. In Russia at that time there were very few people able to afford a high-end Nokia phone, but even if they had one, those wouldn't be the people who needed a replacement for a PC, nor would they ever use their phone in such capacity. Due to poor economical situation all electronics were seen as a way to prevent wealth from depreciating. Few people who did buy expensive cell phones had no interest in using their advanced abilities, nor was there anything to use such a phone for.
Its a good precedent to have. There are solutions to the software issue you mention. They're not perfect but for some hardware, they do work.
If the software problem ever gets solved, you WILL want to be able to replace the batteries won't you? You can and should fight both battles since they serve the same purpose.
The precedent is also good for devices other than phones.
Is this really [0] the most [1] important issue [2] that the EU should be focusing [3] on?
Going by HN traffic, it appears that what the EU is for is to redesign the iPhone to get the details right that techies disagree with Applle on. We live in extreme times with some remarkable challenges - the EU is wasting bandwidth on this triviality. And it isn't a phone manufacturer, it is probably not going to make phones cheaper or, on net, better for consumers.
Please EU, behave rationally and focus on creating a peaceful and prosperous environment. Stop generating headlines about backseat driver phone redesigns.
The EU is not one guy sitting in the office trying to find time to deal with one issue at a time.
It’s an intercontinental organisation with 30.000 workers, 705 elected seats in the EU Parliament, and the European Council that sits the heads of state of every EU member state.
It better be able to deal with more than one subject at a time.
Indeed. After the vote of the Parliament, the Council needs to also approve the final text. But in practice the ministers only rubberstamp whatever Coreper (the ambassadors) have approved, and Coreper deals with dozens of matters in any one meeting:
If these are normal times, then we really must question what the hell the EU is doing as part of its normal operations (hint: see the headline at the top of this web page). There are a lot of urgent problems to deal with and political bandwidth is being spent on an obsession by politicians and/or bureaucrats who think they have better design chops than Apple, world's premier category-defining phone designer.
It'd be stupid in the good times. It is still stupid in the current times. Let Apple do what they want and focus on keeping people warm, safe and with a roof over their head - all things that are at risk right now. Spend some time on diplomacy trying to calm the re-arming armies down. In Germany the AfD has gone from nothing to nearly 20% in the polls over the last decade; something is really badly wrong with "normal" in Europe to get that sort of political realignment.
The amount of assumptions you need to defend your anti-EU stance!
First, the EU doesn't have that much power. It's restricted to commerce and a small part of intergovernmental policy. Defense, tax, criminal laws, education, wellfare, etc., are all outside its remit.
Second, this doesn't take that much "political bandwidth." Someone proposes it, they discuss, end of. This is not an attempt at extending the parliament's power, or controversial.
Third, where do you get the idea from that Apple makes the best design decisions for consumers? They're a rather capitalist and very American company. They exist to increase profits and shareholder value.
Fourth, even something that is well designed from one perspective, can be bad from another. Repairability is one such aspect. The EU is not very activist when it comes to ecology, but at least they get this right.
Fifth. The A fucking D. That's partially on the neo-liberals. Their grubby little hands have made life for certain groups hard and taken away any prospect. Hence people turn to extreme protest parties. For another part, it's on extremist politicians, of course, but also those on the "good" side, with their holier-than-thou attitude. That drives people to the wrong side. None of these is anywhere near the authority of the EU. Make the SDP go back to its roots, and vote for it.
If someone decides to buy the phone that is best for them, most likely designer of that phone is going to be Apple.
If you like maybe there is an argument it is Samsung or a Chinese company - but fact is that Europe, as far as real-world results, doesn't have a person on the continent who is willing and able to make a good phone. They certainly don't have someone like that working for the EU.
> First, the EU doesn't have that much power.
Less power they have, the more it matters what they draw attention to.
Companies optimize for profit, that’s it. Capitalism only optimizes for that. Regulations are the means we can mandate some other values taking any kind of priority. Otherwise we would still have coke putting cocaine into our drinks.
Optimising for profit happens to be more effective than what the EU does. Apple can convince bystanders to spend days working hard to trade for a phone. They do that entirely with good design, strong QAQC and persuasive advertising.
The EU gets convinces people to do things with fines and, ultimately, threats of jail time.
Now if one design people want to own and the other design only takes hold because of threats and fines, we ought conclude that the mandatory design is the weaker one. People aren't paying for replaceable batteries. They're paying for tough, cleanly built & waterproof phones. That is why there are sometimes actual queues outside Apple stored as people try to buy iPhones - people really think Apple designs great phones. For the EU to manage that they'd need a man with a truncheon standing off to the side forcing people to line up when they don't want to.
And they're doing this while Europe is being hit by crisis after crisis. This is a terrible time to be trying to reduce the quality of phones in the EU. It is bad enough in a good year. It is a terrible time to be drawing attention away from the actual problems that Europeans are facing. They should be working on making things cheaper and better for EU citizens.
So how exactly would capitalism prevent children from working, improve work safety, make food products only contain safe ingredients? All of these are solved through laws and governance.
Mobile phones are very important for European citizens: there's so much stuff that depends on them... companies require their employees to use them for 2FA, governments use them for logging into various government services, it's the preferred method of interfacing with banks, supermarkets, post office... my son's school has a phone app, which is the only way they communicate school schedule, or stuff like teacher's absence, going on field trips etc.
Apple is just another empire of evil that needs to be regulated in order not to treat its customers like slaves. It's absolutely not a waste of time to make them play nice or gtfo.
Agreed, its not merely the battery. But wireless headsets don't have user replaceable batteries anymore, while the device itself still works. No matter the software, the dying battery killed the product.
So I see it as a starting point, and we need further targeted iterations, including the one you pointed out (thank you!)
Aha..just the matter of forcing obsolescence in order to raise profits in modern economy. Please excercise only on yourself, not on me.
Another thing, it may be useless from your point of view. But most of the people are using phone just for calling - strange isn't it :) ?
My wife is possibly about to be forced to throw away a $8k pair of hearing aids because after 6 years they are no longer supported by the manufacturer's software for hearing care professionals so it's likely she won't be able to get them readjusted.
I have been thinking this a lot! There so many technology that could be still use. Ipad 1 , old phones, i have been salvaging laptops with linux, and apart from video or heavy specs things they work better than new laptops with the microsoft OS.
A million times yes.
My phone practically became useless overnight since banking apps refuse to open on my Android version. No option to update to a newer version, no option to access important accounts without some phone app.
That's a very worthwhile point but one about a different issue. Consider also the possibility that if my device has been bricked but the battery is still doing OK, I might wish to use it in a different device.
If I could control the software and swap out the parts, I would probably still be using my iphone 4, the first device I felt got depreciated out of existence long before it stopped being useful.
Feels like, as per usual, people haven’t read the source text.[1]
In order to ensure that portable batteries that were incorporated into appliances are subject to separate collection, treatment and high quality recycling once those appliances become waste, provisions to ensure the removability and replaceability of batteries in such appliances are necessary. Consumer safety should be ensured, in line with Union law and in particular Union safety standards, during the removal of portable batteries from or the replacement of portable batteries in an appliance. A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it. Commercially available tools are considered to be tools available on the market to all end-users without the need for them to provide evidence of any proprietary rights and that can be used with no restriction, except health and safety-related restrictions.
Nothing stopping manufacturers from using normal fasteners and gaskets to comply while retaining water resistance etc.
Exactly, the subheading 'Sleek slabs could soon be a thing of the past' is bogus.
This is not a requirement to have 'cartridge' user-replaceable batteries, just that you should be able to open the phone and remove the battery (not much emphasis on actually replacing it) with easily available tools, rather than heatguns, solvents, proprietary glass-pullers etc.
See the “and” in the original text (emphasis mine)
> with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools […], or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it.
The only non compliance for my Samsung A40 is the glue: it holds the cover to the body of the phone and the battery to the back of the screen. Everything else is a dozen of small screws and cabling. Do without the glue and everybody can replace the battery. Was the old times 5 seconds battery replacement better? Yes.
> A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it.
I love the EU's focus on consumer protections and I'm all for progressive policies on environmental issues, but this and the USB-C issue strike me as misguided, policies from people who aren't qualified to to make the decisions they are making, and aren't listening to experts.
I'm glad we're getting USB-C on the iPhone, but it wasn't a huge problem and it was probably coming anyway in the next few years. But replaceable batteries? I'm skeptical, and think it could shrink the market and lower the quality for users.
I feel like a much better approach would be to say that phones must work with third party batteries, and manufacturers can't restrict battery replacements to their own repair centres. That increases competition, helps small businesses, and encourages a thriving batter recycling and replacement market, increasing device lifetime. As for USB-C, similar legislation about increasing compatibility and reducing lock-in (neutralising Apple's MFi program for example) could have had similar impact without the downsides of the industry being unable to move forward.
I think the policies are pretty well informed. I do think USB-C was a huge problem, and I don't think it was coming in a few years.
I'm not skeptical of replaceable batteries. I think the policy that forces them to be removable on top of working with 3rd party manufacturers is a good idea.
I don't think replaceable batteries or USB-C requirements restrict the industries ability to move forward.
Edit: You can continue to argue in this thread, but the point of this reply was simply to point out that the parent comment was all thinly veiled opinions with no substance.
Parent commenter, and sure it was opinion, but based in good reasoning.
USB-C wasn't the problem, MFi was. The rumours are that Apple's USB-C implementation will be locked down in similar ways, accessory manufacturers will still need to pay Apple to create certified accessories, and data transfer speeds are going to be restricted to Lightning speeds. USB-C everything is nice, but no non-techies I know like it because it's the new cable that's not compatible with any of their stuff (as much as I advocate for it).
Removable batteries in smartphones just aren't workable. We have too high expectations for battery life, weight, durability, water resistance, and size. It negatively impacts all of these. There hasn't been a mass market smartphone with a replaceable battery in a long time, and if they were that great for customers there would have been. A much better option would be to focus on repairability, it would have almost all the benefits, and effectively none of the downsides.
I'm an Android user, but nearly everyone I know has an iPhone. And not even one of them has an iPhone accessory. So how important is this MFi thing, really? From my perspective, the main annoyance is that my partner (who has an iPhone) needs a special charging cable, and can't use the cables I use for my phone and we both use for our laptops.
And I suspect that's mainly what the EU cared about too: charging cables.
> USB-C everything is nice, but no non-techies I know like it because it's the new cable that's not compatible with any of their stuff
If you're talking about all their current stuff being Lightning, then that problem will work its way out in a few years. If their current stuff is all micro-USB or USB-A, then... what? How is that even possible these days? Even the cheap rechargeable motorized cat toys I've bought on Amazon use USB-C cables to charge.
And if it is micro-USB or USB-A that their other devices use, so what? They'd just be going from one charging cable that only works with iPhones (Lightning) to another that only works with iPhones (USB-C). And as their other non-USB-C devices wear out or become obsolete, and they replace them with new ones that charge using USB-C cables, this problem will also sort itself over time.
MFI may be THE problem. But we will never know because you can’t even plug in non Apple stuff in the phone because they use a proprietary connector.
Once Apple is required to use USB-C and then uses software to block non-MFI connections then the EU will (a) take them to court for trying to undermine the spirit of the legislation (b) if they lose in court pass a new law requiring them to prevent blocking non MFI connections (although they will probably allow them to display scary warning messages).
Yes, I’m sure Apple is going to block non certified devices in USB C phones just like they block non certified devices in USB C iPads and they don’t support stuff like standard USB devices, video over USB etc.
> I don't think replaceable batteries or USB-C requirements restrict the industries ability to move forward.
These ultra thin foldable phones probably couldn’t exist with removable batteries. The thinness required to make it comfortable to use would be hard and so would the structural integrity with a removable backplate.
It would absolutely restrict durability since it’d make waterproof and dustproofing way more challenging, if possible at all.
Removable backs would limit wireless charging hardware like apples MagSafe (which is great!).
As long as we are sharing random opinions - my Samsung s2 and s5 were smaller thinner lighter than modern phones, with 3.5mm and replaceable battery and microsd card. And also had gps and wifi and phone. And were ip67 rated.
Modern phones are going for sexy, that's all. They are large in every dimension but Impractically thin even though everybody adds another 3mm - 6mm of case anyway because they're sleek to the point of unusable. I particularly love when we buy a sexy sleek thin phone and then put an otterbox on it :-)
I agree with you. But also, to be fair, I'm pretty sure in that time phone bodies have transitioned from mostly plastic to mostly metal? I'm sure that has something to do with the weight, and I would guess that the metal shell is probably thicker too?
Why should they be thicker? Metals are resilient and strong. That's why we use them to build all sorts of stuff. I expect metal bodies to be thinner not thicker.
I would imagine that thin plastic is more resistant to permanent deformation than thin metal. Or, in other words, when then metal bends, it tends to stay bent. Thin plastic can more easily bend, but then restore to its original shape.
But I'm not a materials engineer. This is just in my lay experience of how thin materials I've encountered perform.
Same. Was the Samsung Galaxy S3 (which in 2012 had wireless charging and a removable back) not sufficiently thin? It's less than a millimeter thicker than the current Galaxy S23, and I'm not sure that the <1mm of difference in the S23 comes from having a non-removable back (as opposed to the 11 years of advancements in other technologies.)
Wireless charging is stupid and inefficient. If someone tried to sell you a petrol pump which works by spraying a jet of petrol into your car from 5m away would you get it?
“Your customers won’t even have to plug anything into their car. FuelSafe just safely hoses down the car with fuel! Over 45% efficient!”
>"I don't think replaceable batteries or USB-C requirements restrict the industries ability to move forward. "
Compelling the use of USB-C will cause stagnation in connector innovation; there's no point in trying to to create new and more durable/water-proof/wear-resistant/faster connectors. The requirements for replaceable batteries may cause stagnation in other innovations; if we imagine that there'd been similar requirements in the alkaline era, we might never have gotten to Lithium-Ion.
There's no reason why devices can't have such a newer, better port alongside type-c. Until the new port gains traction the presence of type-c will help with compatibility, and presumably once this hypothetical connector has been proven better than type-c the regulation will simply be updated to mandate that instead.
Either a port that's compatible with USB-C charging but has otherwise different pins or electrical characteristics (just like how a USB-A port has 4 pins in USB 2 but 8 pins in USB 3, but is still compatible). Or you just add a second port.
Before we standardized on micro USB, lots of phones had ports easily three times the width of USB-C. We were ok with that back then, so why would two USB-C sized ports next to each other be so bad? In return, all your gizmos and chargers continue to work in the transition period.
Or, just make the new port a barrel connector like a headphone jack, just with more segments. Bonus points if you can plug in an actual headphone and it works. Nobody seemed to have a problem with a headphone jack next to their USB port.
I don’t. It’s all Bluetooth now. I like wireless headphones.
But you should be free to buy them and we can both vote with equally with our wallets.
Go buy phones that have the 3.5mm jacks and send the signal that consumers still want plugs invented in the 1950s. If that’s what you want to signal. You have a great way to tell Apple if you like what they are doing! So do I.
Maybe Europeans like wired headphones over wireless? That’s news to me, but they should vote with their wallets. If you like what a company does, but things that company makes. If you don’t, don’t.
It bugs me to see a government meddle with what customers want to buy.
Don’t rig the system so you get a bigger voice than others. That’s not fair.
This is part of the challenge with these regulations - by definition we're defining a framework based on existential knowledge.
What about batteries that can also be panes of glass that act as the display?
What about ultra low-power devices that are powered kinetically by typical human movement or magnetic perturbations?
None of these currently exist in a commercially viable form, but if we regulate based on our current view of technology do we run the risk of making these innovations more challenging to bring to market? That's the challenging balance that needs to be considered.
The regulation gives manufacturers quite a lot of leeway on how easy it is to replace the battery. You could make the display a battery, just make sure users can replace the display with pull tabs, a set of precision screwdrivers and whatever other commercially available tools you want. And from just skimming the regulation, I don't see how devices would be forced to have a battery. It talks about devices with batteries, and batteries in mobile phones, but if your device doesn't have a battery then this regulation simply doesn't apply.
History is littered with examples of policy creating unintended consequences causing more harm than good. Or at least negating the early good it created over time. It’s usually fine at the start until cracks start to show and policies are often a one way street, that only get reformed many years after the problems become apparent, if at all.
It's also littered with examples of a lack of policy causing untold harms. A light-hearted one would be the time libertarians found out that policy helps keep the bears away[0].
The answer isn't to abandon policy, it's to design it to be flexible and to respond quickly when problems are discovered.
i buy used sub-flagship phones two or three cycles behind. they're much cheaper, they do what i need, they're not too slow for modern software.
but the battery is the worst part. i get a day's life at best. a year in i'm camping by outlets all day if i need to use my phone more than incidentally.
all of these phones would be perfectly good on the secondary market if a battery replacement service didn't cost as much as replacing the phone itself.
i used to swap batteries myself. but it's increasingly difficult to do without damaging the screen as you peel it apart, and at that point the phone is totaled.
I paid $99 to get my iPhone XS Max's battery replaced directly by Apple a few weeks back. That phone is almost 5 years old. I really don't think that $99 is unreasonable.
Affordable replacements are all good and important to have, with a caveat.
Lithium-ion batteries at the $25 pricepoint come from a single well known place of manufacturing and are usually of the unknown quality. They may or may not be safe to use, and there have been precendents of self-ignition and self-explosion to the point that some airlines have banned or have attempted to ban the Li-ion batteries in the carry-on.
A branded $99 battery (all brands) is not 100% immune to the same problems but occurences are much more rare, and typically each such failed specimen is taken back to the manufacturer for an investigation. The only forensic process in existence for failed $25 batteries is called «throw it into the dumpster».
That said, a better QA process by the phone manufacturer does make the $99 battery reasonable. If all suppliers of $25 batteries could guarantee the same rigid QA process for the $25 batteries they supply, that would make the $99 batteries unreasonable.
iFixit sells iPhone XS Max batteries for $35, nearly a third of the cost Apple is charging. $99 may not be a ton in some regions of the world, but it is enough that many are unwilling to spend that kind of money on a 5 year old phone, versus for $35, it's a low enough amount that many might just stick with their phone and replace the battery, leading to less e-waste.
And while $99 may not be a lot in some regions of the world, but it's a significant amount of people's discretionary income in other regions (they may not be buying iPhones but the situation isn't much better for other brands as far as I'm aware.) $99 is also enough to outright buy a new cheap Android phone.
>but it is enough that many are unwilling to spend that kind of money on a 5 year old phone, versus for $35, it's a low enough amount that many might just stick with their phone and replace the battery, leading to less e-waste.
Are there people that find spending $99 on a battery replacement expensive that are really making the decision to replace their whole phone for 5-10x that amount?
My brand new android phone cost me $50, no plan attached or anything like that. Granted, that was a steal but I've never paid more than ~ $300 for my phones and I use them for 3 to 4 years.
My wife and I use to called the cheap slow Android phones that we have our sons when they lost/damage their iPhone - “punishment phones”. They were so slow they were painful.
They've come a looong way. I often find myself surprised at how long my girlfriend's brand new iphone takes to do basic things. I know Apple's A series processors are leagues ahead of what's in my mid range android phone but honestly it often feels like a wash. Granted I'm not playing mobile games or anything, just using maps and browsing reddit and it may often be network latency that I'm feeling not CPU perf.
I imagine that a good chunk of people that can't stand Android are those that did what you're saying: they used a $200 Android phone to replace their flagship iPhone.
Most people aren't spending 5-10x that amount on buying a new phone. Global average selling price of all smartphones was $317 in 2021. Excluding iPhones (only Androids), in 2019, the global average selling price was $269.
And that's the average, likely brought up drastically by the sale of extremely expensive phones. Apple and Samsung's flagships start at $800 and go over double that for their absolute top of the line. Unfortunately I couldn't find the global median selling price of smartphones, but the source above mentions that 58.5% of all smartphones sold during the second quarter of 2019 in Latin America had a price tag of USD$199 or less, and 83% of all smartphones shipped to Africa during the 4th quarter of 2019 had a price tag of $199 or less.
From a quick search, one of the best selling phones right now in India is the Galaxy M13, which is Rs. 9,699, or about USD$118 — barely any more than what Apple charges for a battery replacement in the US (obviously it's not that much for a replacement in India, but it does show how unnecessarily expensive $100 for a battery replacement really is.)
In China, those that can afford it seem to buy iPhones (10.7% of sales), but all the rest of the best selling phones seem to be cheaper phones (next best selling is around ~USD$220, and the ones after that seem to be a little above or below that.)
However, if I'm not mistaken that all is for new phones, and most phone sales worldwide aren't new. While used and refurbished smartphones make up only 24.4% of phone sales in North America as of 2020, they make up 75.6% of phone sales in the rest of the world.
So the average person worldwide is not buying a new phone at all (and thus spending even less than whatever the median selling smartphone price is, let alone the average.) However, the percentage of phone sales that are used is projected to decrease over time (according to the source above.) Not super surprising, given that while flagship phones have ditched removable backs for a while now, in the past few years more and more budget phones don't even have removable backs, and if you have to spend a significant portion of the cost of a new phone on a battery replacement, then that's a risky decision, as you don't know how long the other parts in the phone will last, and that's a lot of money that you're gambling on it. Sure, 3rd party repair shops in developing countries aren't charging you USD$100 for a battery replacement, but the labor can still easily double the cost of getting a new battery.
At $35 (and that's from iFixit, which if I'm not mistaken doesn't even make the batteries — if the companies sold the batteries directly, it'd be even cheaper), a new battery would be a much smaller risk, and near certainly would lead to less e-waste.
I still don't understand the assertion that someone who bought an iPhone (used or otherwise) and finds $100 expensive is throwing away said iPhone and generating e-waste when every other option is both more expensive and riskier. Any "new" used phone is going to come with a battery of undetermined age and quality as well as its own set of potential problems and failures, where as a replacement for your existing phone is a known cost in a known (as much as can be with solid state devices) set of problems.
Certainly I can see them buying an iFixit battery and trying themselves, or paying a 3rd party vendor and taking a risk on that. But there's just no line of logic that makes any sense to me that says "$100 to replace my iPhone battery is expensive, better throw it away and spend even more money to get someone else's second hand phone of unknown state"
> Any "new" used phone is going to come with a battery of undetermined age and quality as well as its own set of potential problems and failures
Not necessarily, as I can't imagine most refurb/used sales worldwide come from individual sellers; most of them are probably sold by businesses, which sometimes provide a warranty and return policy on their used products. Right now, on the Amazon Renewed Store, the unlocked Galaxy S20 FE 5G 128GB is $187.50. Amazon states,
> The product is refurbished, fully functional, and in excellent condition. Backed by the 90-day Amazon Renewed Guarantee.
> - This pre-owned product has been professionally inspected, tested and cleaned by Amazon qualified vendors.
> - This product is in "Excellent condition". The screen and body show no signs of cosmetic damage visible from 12 inches away.
> - This product will have a battery that exceeds 80% capacity relative to new.
> ...
> - This product is eligible for a replacement or refund within 90-days of receipt if it does not work as expected.
So if 2.5 months into using that phone, you feel it doesn't function well, you can return it.
Even for sales from individuals, Swappa (an online user-to-user marketplace for used tech) requires you to list the battery health percentage on iPhones if it's below 80%. They also require that everything functions well and even is in good cosmetic condition. Their standard for "fair" is rather high.
Outside of pawn shops, I imagine most brick and mortar stores aren't selling phones in poor condition. In the US, the phone carriers, Best Buy, and even Apple themselves sell refurb phones, and they don't want to hurt their reputation by selling poor quality products. Apple in particular has high standards for their refurb phones:
> All refurbished iPhone models come with a new battery, new outer shell, are backed by a one-year warranty, have free delivery and returns, and also include:
> - Full functional testing, genuine Apple part replacements (if necessary), and a thorough cleaning
> - The original Operating System or a more recent version
> - All refurbished devices are repackaged in a brand new box with all accessories and cables
I guess anecdotally my iPhone 6S as of recently hasn't been performing well. Would a battery replacement help it? Maybe. But that's not certain (it could be that modern apps are so bloated that its 2015 hardware can't handle it despite most of those apps having essentially 0 new meaningful features in the past 8 years) and I'm surely not going to spend $100 on a nearly 8 year old phone to find out. I've replaced the battery myself before, but last time I broke the screen in the process (something that wouldn't have happened if the phone had a removable back), so I'm hesitant to do it again (I was being careful, and have done plenty of phone repairs at this point, but more than anything the ribbon cables break extremely easily.) But if I could just pop off the back and put a new battery in, I'd be willing to give it a try for $35. But instead I'll probably just deal with it for a little while and then get a different used or refurb phone with better battery health than my own device.
EDIT: another example of an affordable refurb phone: iPhone SE (2nd gen) is $147 in the US from the Amazon Renewed Store and has all the same benefits Amazon guarantees for the Galaxy S20 FE. So for $47 more than a battery replacement, you can essentially try out a "new" used phone for 80 days and determine whether you want to stick with it or return it.
John Gruber also does this a lot. Compared iPhones to luxury goods like an Hermes bag, or even locked down consoles like Playstationd and XBoxes and wonders why, for example, Apple should be prevented from locking down their App Store but Sony and Microsoft are not.
But it’s absolutely not a legitimate comparison. An Hermes bag, or a game console are very specialized devices. A smartphone is almost a necessity to live a modern life these days.
Especially if you step out of the U.S. to more developing countries, where many people don’t own computers, or have email addresses. Everything they do, from basic transactions, to government IDs, to receiving govt benefits, etc happens on the phone.
It’s absolutely legitimate for consumers to have different expectations for such essential computing devices, and for governments to step in when the providers of these devices are acting against their citizens’ interests.
> Especially if you step out of the U.S. to more developing countries, where many people don’t own computers, or have email addresses. Everything they do, from basic transactions, to government IDs, to receiving govt benefits, etc happens on the phone.
at the same price, i'd rather have new old stock than one that's been through god-knows-what plus open heart surgery.
not sure where you're getting your prices, but it doesn't matter. the fact that this is even a point of contention indicates that swappable batteries would make a difference.
Battery is the only part of the phone that is guaranteed to fail with normal use, and making the battery hard to replace is a huge pain for end users (and in turn, to their wallets and the environment). Just pulling off the back plate and using your fingernail to replace the battery has turned to having to heat the screen, insert a wedge under the glass, but not deeper than X mm, scrub away the glue, without beaking the screen, unscewing a zillion screws, removing the mainboard, just to reach the battery, then unglueing the battery and the nfc antennas, inserting a new battery, which is sometimes impossible to buy from an OEM, assembling all together, reapplying glue, sticking it all together and hoping it won't fall apart in the pocket... or paying >100eur for a battery replacement, which is sometimes more than half the price of a new phone.
> Battery is the only part of the phone that is guaranteed to fail with normal use
I hang onto my phones until the software becomes unusable, either because apps drop support for my OS (and I can't update any more) or I get scared into upgrading for security. I've never had a battery fail or even get to the point where it doesn't last a whole day—the software fails first.
My understanding is that it's different with iOS, because Apple is much better at supporting their old phones than most Android manufacturers.
My experience is that it's neither the battery nor the software that fails: It's the phone modem.
Every single one of my Android phones stopped working as phones 3 to 5 years down the line. Couldn't take calls, the phone never became aware of them. Couldn't call anyone, not even emergency services, the phone never connected despite full bars. It's always the fucking phone modem.
I'm still using an Android, but when this one eventually fails (this one's starting to flake out at not even a year old, bought new...) I might seriously move over to an iPhone simply because every single iPhone I've seen others use has apparently never stopped working as phones. That's even if they fried a couple Lightning cables and whatnot.
I'd much rather be able to swap a charged battery for the drained one in my phone especially in such circumstances as when I'm in a foreign country and dependent on my phone (for e.g. safety, to get around) and there's not a iPhone cable or charge point around. It seems like a no brainer, certainly from a consumer benefit perspective. Using batteries as a mechanism for hardware upgrades is ridiculous, instead of the features of the new hardware that should be the compelling, selling point and the way to a value statement that wins hearts and minds.
If a battery lasts a couple of days, I would much rather my phone were waterproof than be able to swap the battery. Having a power bank solves the problem of discharged phone for me, and anyway I almost never have to use it. Being able to drop your phone in the water and pick it up still working is far more valuable to me.
> If a battery lasts a couple of days, I would much rather my phone were waterproof than be able to swap the battery.
You can have both.
> Having a power bank solves the problem of discharged phone for me
There are cases where a power bank isn't a good solution. They big and heavy. Not being able to swap in a fully-charged battery on demand means that I can no longer use my phone for certain things that I used to be able to do.
Seems like it should be possible for the phone (not the battery compartment and battery door, just the rest of the phone) to be waterproof, and for the battery to be waterproof, and the two can contact each other regardless of that contact being in a wet location. After all, we have plenty of electrical wiring methods rated for wet locations, so why not this? Water isn't the very best insulator (especially saltwater and other mineral content, which the contacts would need corrosion resistance for as well) but it should be sufficient at 4VDC.
Wikipedia says that the resistance of water is 0.2 Ω·m for sea water, 2 to 200 Ω·m for drinking water. This is very low and can drain your battery almost immediately.
> protect circuitry (which is inside the battery package) will most likely cut power
I wonder if that's responsible for the experiences folks had way before waterproof phones were introduced: they would drop their phone into water, it would shut off and refuse to boot for a significant amount of time (enough to send them shopping for a replacement) and then they'd try it a week later only to find that it works fine. Accelerated by putting it in a bag with rice or other desiccant.
You’re at least the third person to say this without the disclaimer - only if the rubber flap was securely covering the ports when it was dropped in water.
You repeat this everywhere. The port requiring a flap has no bearing on the waterproofing of the battery which used an entirely separately gasket on the back cover.
You can clearly see here[0] that the gasket on the flap protects only the USB port from water ingress. The battery and sim are protected by the grey gasket on the rear cover.
The opening for the rear speakers in the back cover reinforces the fact that the flap is there to protect the interface of the USB port and its housing. The rear cover does not contact the USB port at all.
Making sure a rear cover has snapped into place is much less prone to failure than acquiring tools and applying heat to a glued on rear cover, de-soldering/disconnecting a battery and evenly re-applying and heating new glue.
Its way easier for the speaker ports, you just seal the drivers well enough and they'll be sealed unless there's just too much pressure. The seal never experiences any mechanical wear, you can practically just glue it around the edge.
Similar thing with the charger/data port. The outside of the port can be completely sealed up with just the electrical connections going through. The port isn't ever opened, there's no mechanical wear of actually going in and out of the sealed area. Glue it all up but leave the electrical connectors exposed and its sealed.
A battery door is a whole 'nother issue. Starting off, its probably going to have considerably more perimeter needing to seal, especially if its like the doors of yore where you popped off a significant part of the back. Then, you'll need this seal to handle a lot of open/close events and be able to handle the dirt and debris which it will be exposed to. Keeping the device's profile thin gets way more complicated with all of these requirements, and the seal will probably still be less reliable than the seals for the charging port and the speakers/mics.
Waterproof phones with replacable batteries might not be waterproof after the replacement - so why don't you just keep the original battery, and have a waterproof phone? Win-win for everyone.
I don't think you properly understood my comment. I am specifically saying: even if replacing the battery makes the phone no longer waterproof, you can just not replace the battery. Nobody comes into your house at night and forces you to install a new battery because your old one isn't good anymore.
I understood your comment. The article implies that the battery has to be _easily_ replaceable, i.e. that you could just take a battery and maybe a screwdriver out of your pocket and replace it.
I don't think it's easy to design a phone that would at the same time a) have easily replaceable battery, and b) be waterproof until the first battery replacement.
It's very nice to be able to replace a battery in the field. I used to carry a spare charged battery and swap it for an instant recharge. That use case is still valuable to me, but isn't possible anymore.
Yes, that is why I'm arguing that even if changing the battery must necessarily break the waterseal, the battery should still be changable. In this hypothetical scenario it would be worth it to leave it open to the individual.
> I'd much rather be able to swap a charged battery for the drained one in my phone especially in circumstances when I'm in a foreign country and dependent on my phone
I don’t deny that this is a valid use case for you, but I’ve absolutely never been in this position.
I carry around a battery phone charger in situations where I’d depend on my phone. If you squint, yes that’s pretty similar, but the big difference is that a USB charger can power my iPhone and my partners android phone without requiring the phones to use standardized batteries internally.
I think batteries should be replacing in a repair sense, but I’m not sure the “pop open the back and swap it on the streets of Tokyo” is a common use case we should legislate against.
Like others said, I would much rather have it be more durable (eg waterproof). Also I’ll add that thinness is a desirable trait (to a point).
Carrying around bulky power banks or worse, chargers to then tie you to sit close to an outlet and wait for the battery to charge, is not entirely ideal when you're on the go, foreign or domestic. It's also less anxiety-inducing to not have to worry about where will I get my next charge and how long will it interrupt my plans for.
Power banks come in different sizes. The bigger ones also allow to recharge your phone several times. There are also small and light ones that contains energy for one full charge or less.
I agree with your point completely but that use case is an edge case, would it be worth it regulating all phone design in order to address such a specific scenario?
Such use cases are normally handled by creating specialty products.
I've got a little 2_000mAh 3.7V (7.4Wh) USB battery pack here that was vendor swag from a conference, a probably 3.7v? 10_000mAh () that I'll then assume is ~37Wh. and a Canon NB-13L 3.6V 1250mAh (4.5Wh battery pack) for my camera.
For mm^3/Wh, the results are:
Small vendor swag power bank:
96 x 21 x 26
52_416 / 7.4
7,083 <-- worst one
Canon battery:
42 x 30 x 9
11_340 / 4.5
2,520 <-- wow that's way less
10,000mAh dual USB power bank:
139 x 22 x 60
183_480 / 37_000
~5 <-- wow
By volume / energy, the big power bank wins by a mile. And tbh its not that huge, similar footprint to my phone and about twice as thick. Plus, it can power two devices at once, which can be pretty handy. It has a bit over twice as much power as my phone's battery. This logically makes some sense, as phones these days are pretty much a battery and a screen with a small logic board tagging along for the ride.
If I'm on the go, I'd much rather have a large battery bank that provides a good bit of flexibility rather than a battery that only works with a single device. This one battery pack can charge my phone, my camera, my wireless mouse, my keyboard, my headphones, my e-reader, and then all the same list of stuff for my spouse. If I got a fancier one, it could even provide extra juice to my laptop. If I only had a battery specifically made for my phone, I'd only be able to swap out my phone battery and all of the rest of my devices would need their own batteries or just be left dead.
On top of that, if I wanted to then charge that battery outside of the phone I'd have to lug some specific charger for that model of battery. Meanwhile if I bothered getting a newer USB-C power pack the same power cable that charges my laptop and my phone and my headphones can also recharge my spare battery along with all the rest of the devices I mentioned. I'm much happier having a 10,000mAh battery pack in my backpack to recharge when needed than needing to think about having a few different batteries around and their related chargers to keep track of. Once this one dies I'll probably
When battery life is a concern, I carry around a small flashlight and a (very) short USB cable. The flashlight can both receive charge (from the wall) and send charge (to the phone) through its USB port.
Lots of high-end flashlights do this. Mine isn't much larger than the 21700 cell it contains. If you want to go smaller you can get a 1850-based flashlight and still almost double the capacity of your phone.
I don't understand. Why won't it fully charge the phone? And you can use the phone while it's plugged in. In all respects it gives you ~2X the number of useful hours at the cost of having to carry around a very small item.
I feel like those rarer circumstances can be handled pretty easily with a portable battery bank, and also pull double duty for any other USB devices you might have.
With my 14 Pro Max I charge my phone every 2-3 days, and I'm not letting it get down to <20% when doing this, either. I'm obviously not making heavy use of it over this time, but even on days when I am out and about and using it more, I'm never in danger of it running out of battery.
Personally, at least, I'll take the sleeker design vs. an easily swap-able battery. Thankfully, it sounds like the EU law doesn't actually require it be replaceable in a tool-less manner, so it sounds like the type of design the iPhone 14 (non-max) uses will qualify.
External power banks charge via USB. Most people don't want to walk around with their phone tethered via 4ft USB cable to a power bank in their backpack.
> but this and the USB-C issue strike me as misguided, policies from people who aren't qualified to to make the decisions they are making, and aren't listening to experts.
You do realise that the EU gave the industry (i.e. the "experts") the task of defining and agreeing on a standard for charging cables? The manufacturers worked on this and agreed on USB-C, all except one US based fruit company.
This is misguided, even though Apple is going to implement USB-C on the iPhone for the EU market, they're still not going to offer it in the US. It's naive to think big companies act in any interest besides their own unless forced.
If it drives an uptick in sales in the EU you can count on it being eventually implemented for customers in the US and elsewhere too. Though it's even possible Apple knows it will help sell the devices better - at least initially, but they prefer to have users more firmly locked into the Apple ecosystem.
> they prefer to have users more firmly locked into the Apple ecosystem.
Every time someone says shit like "locked into the Apple ecosystem", god kills a kitten. Lots of people switch back and forth between iOS and Android.
Nobody's going to go for USB-C on their iPhones if they can get Lightning ports. The Lightning port is far superior mechanically (both more durable and easier to clean from debris) and unlike most Android phones, not attached to the mainboard - so it can be replaced if damaged.
I only claimed it were possible, but it would (pleasantly) surprise me if there were executives at Apple that thought interoperability with competing technologies should be part of their corporate strategy.
Lightning ports may well be technically superior (I can't really judge as I've had dozens of devices using USB-C, 95% of the time with no issues, but relatively few occasions to use lightning ports - thought I do have an iPad that's bricked currently because I can't find a cable for it), but if Apple is unwilling to license the technology to other manufacturers then there's no chance of it ever being any sort of universal standard.
Personally I'd rather hoped that by now we didn't need cables/plugs at all!
I wouldn't really make swooping generalizations like that, just because you like an option doesn't mean everyone is that way. For example I would much rather have USB-C on my iPhone because then I would only ever need one charger cable for everything I need to charge.
> misguided, policies from people who aren't qualified to to make the decisions they are making, and aren't listening to experts.
Ask yourself what kind of game regulators are really playing?
See how many former banking regulators end up working at large banks, same is true for pharma and without even looking probably many other industries. The regulatory system is in place only partially to safeguard people, it is also in place to enforce barriers of entry and it is in place to act as a nice career pathway for it's participants.
One reason I like not having user-replaceable batteries is it makes the phones smaller, or the batteries bigger. I'd rather have an extra 50% capacity and pay $100 to replace the battery once in my phone's life than not have the capacity and go through two replacement cycles.
> the EU was born from authoritarianism and has no democratic value
Oh please. Enlighten us how it's undemocratic and authoritarian.
I would like to reminder before you start that every country joined willingly (and Brexit proved they can leave), its parliament is elected by the population of the member states, and the council of ministers are representatives of each member state democratic elected governments.
> this and the USB-C issue strike me as misguided, policies from people who aren't qualified to to make the decisions they are making, and aren't listening to experts
Experts? <chuckle> In Brussels - just as in Washington - they listen to lobbyists.
Just broadly, let me just echo my full throated support for regulation in this space. Forget the vast majority of the goofy "innovation" arguments I hear, the fact that 3 family cell phones, 2 laptops, Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, and Oculus can all use the same charger makes insanely more sense that what we were doing before.
Single charger is lovely: nowadays whenever I travel I carry a single charger; it charges: my laptop, my work laptop, my phone, my noise cancelling headphones, my wireless iems, my book, my watch.
You can get cables and small dongles that convert USB-C or micro to lightning etc.
You're talking about a few-dollar problem.
I don't want a fragile USB-C port on my phone. The lightning port is a joy to use - reliable both in terms of the retention mechanism and connectivity, and easy to clean of debris.
The Nintendo Switch charger isn't standards compliant, and if you use another charger, it might not be able to keep up with the power draw of the Nintendo Switch.
It will be. Supporting USB PD over USB-C is mandatory if they want to keep selling in EU. Nintendo is more than welcome to subvert EU's requirements and find out how that goes.
The EU gave the industry an ultimatum in 2009: Adopt a common charger voluntarily or we'll regulate to force you to do so. Almost all manufacturers did, first with micro-USB before moving over to USB-C.
Eventually, because Apple decided not to play well with others, they had to follow through and regulate.
lol. do you remember times before microusb? which was also somewhat forced by the EU? so no.. the unification on the USB wasn't all pure force of market...
In some ways (convenience). I think it will also lead to not supplying the device with a charging / data transfer cable to reduce e-waste.
Lighting connector is actually better than USB-C for a phone charger, there is no little contact to snap off inside a lighting port and it’s easy to clean pocket lint out of the lighting port with a tooth pick.
This isn’t the case with USB-C, it’s more fragile and harder to remove debris with damaging it which is why I think apple use it for iPad but not iPhone.
The battery thing is good though, I have seen way too many people using devices with swollen batteries because they are way beyond their useful lifetime.
I don’t know this for sure but I would hope the software on the phone can prevent this on modern devices.
Are you thinking of a magsafe connector? A lightning connector definitely does have a little end that can snap off, and that in my experience (with children) is less robust than a USB-C.
No I’m talking about the port in the phone where you plug the cable in.
With lightening the cable side is the fragile part, with usb-c the male part of the connection is inside the phone’s socket. This is the fragile part of the usb-c connection.
It makes more sense for the fragile part to be on the cable rather than the phone itself because the phone is more expensive and would need a repair but the cable is cheap enough that you can replace it.
Other than this though, usb-c is far superior to lightening with better data speed and power delivery.
Ahh I see. Makes sense. For what it's worth I think the USB-C port is still fairly robust because the fragile part is protected by the port, but I get what you're saying.
No, the rule can not be enacted since it has not been fully adopted - the final (multilingual) text has to be added to the European Council Rules via the plenary voting procedure. This rule will come into effect following that vote.
Mostly a formality IMO. Here's where it can get fairly political even though it's nearly a final (published) rule ... this vote was fairly heavily in-favor, only 20 against IIRC and even fewer abstentions. Some last-minute horse trading can definitely occur and bind it up. My personal opinion is that I think that's almost certain to pass at this point (given the nature of manufacturing in the EU versus say borders or food products) and I definitely would be sourcing screw and battery connector suppliers now if I designed phones.
The downside of this is that discussions are more likely to end up as purely reactive toward change that has already occurred, and disgruntlement among the losers over what feels like a fait accompli can poison discourse. Discussion of legislative issues prior to passage leaves open the possibility of organizing/lobbying for or against a given proposal, should an informed consensus emerge among those discussing the issue.
That's true. It's not a great trade-off. The problem is the tons of low-quality "bill proposal" articles that attract attention even though they tend never to amount to anything.
Very true, given the frequency of performative legislation that it meant to satiate the political appetites of constituents rather than effect real change. On the whole HN seems to do a good job of distinguishing serious from frivolous proposals, though.
Notwithstanding occasional repetition, I think you should let voting and depth of discussion determine whether a report is significant or not. Even when factual or procedural changes are small, a well-written report might provide worthwhile new analysis or perspective on legislative prospects.
To be sure, some time and attention is wasted on repetitive discussions that restate the same issues with breaking any new conversational ground. But complex problems often require multiple attempts at a solution.
On the one hand, maybe a reduction in e-waste. Then again - do you trust your average person to recycle batteries responsibly? At least the phones have some residual trade-in value so people are incentivized to turn them in somewhere.
However, the other challenge is people like buying sketchy cheap batteries off the internet, as we have seen from the recent spree of e-bike fires in NYC apartments so...
> However, the other challenge is people like buying sketchy cheap batteries off the internet, as we have seen from the recent spree of e-bike fires in NYC apartments so...
Sounds like something that should be regulated next.
People replacing their own batteries provides an extra incentive to do so.
I wonder what is the definition of easily removable and replaceable. Does popping a few screws and using a specialized tool qualifies as easy? What about re-sealing the device after to keep the waterproof rating?
> In order to ensure that portable batteries that were incorporated into appliances are subject to separate collection, treatment and high quality recycling once those appliances become waste, provisions to ensure the removability and replaceability of batteries in such appliances are necessary. Consumer safety should be ensured, in line with Union law and in particular Union safety standards, during the removal of portable batteries from or the replacement of portable batteries in an appliance. A portable battery should be considered to be removable by the end-user when it can be removed with the use of commercially available tools and without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless they are provided free of charge, or proprietary tools, thermal energy or solvents to disassemble it. Commercially available tools are considered to be tools available on the market to all end-users without the need for them to provide evidence of any proprietary rights and that can be used with no restriction, except health and safety-related restrictions.
"By the end of 2014, it was reported that sales of the S5 were 40% down on the previous S4 model, prompting management changes at Samsung".
This was the last user replaceable battery mainline Galaxy phone. This was also the same generation of the iPhone 6, which was dramatically thinner than the S5 and it's replaceable battery. The market spoke.
Yeah but the market isn't a goal in and of itself. When the market says to do the thing that'll lead to us burning our limited resources faster in a time of ecological crisis, then it might make sense to nudge it into a more sustainable direction.
> literally something I've never cared or benefitted from
I'm happy for you, for never having lost a phone due to an accidental encounter with water. I haven't lost one recently, but:
- I fumbled an old flip phone while having a night out on the town and dropped it into the toilet.
- I replaced it with a really cute small Kyocera candy bar phone, that my girlfriend at the time didn't notice was still in my pants pocket when she washed my pants (I'm not sure if waterproofing would have saved this...)
- I recently dropped an iPhone 12 into a bathtub full of water and suffered 0 ill effects from it.
If I had to choose between replaceable batteries and waterproofing, I'm not sure which I'd personally choose. I've changed internal batteries in a few phones over the years... it was a bit of a hassle, but kept a $1000 device alive for another year or two. The water-killed phones... there was no bringing them back to life.
I'm around pools and spas a good bit and like having my phone near me to do stuff like control music and be able to respond to events without needing to get out of the water. Pools have killed quite a few of my devices in the past. Just the other day I tripped while working around the pool and fell in (quite dangerous, for sure) and I had my phone in my pocket. If it wasn't waterproof, I'd be out a few hundred bucks from that accident.
I also like to go hiking and camping a good bit. I've lost a few electronic devices from getting caught in a storm. Its nice having the peace of mind that it doesn't matter if I get completely soaked with my phone in my pocket.
Finally, I have kids, and they're of the stage where its fun to throw things in toilets and in sinks.
It probably has measurable impacts at manufacturers’ scale in repairs. Even if you didn’t consciously shower with a phone, it could rain which to a phone is same as owner taking it to a shower.
I use my phone in the pool all the time during the summer, ever since they became water proof. Or take pictures in the lake, etc.
As well, once a day I run my phone under the faucet while I wash my hands and give it a clean. I absolutely want my phone waterproof and happily will trade a user replaceable battery for a waterproof phone.
I think it's pretty necessary. I remember I went to a theme park and wanted to have a good time and got drenched. My new phone was ruined. Just the other day, a friend that tried to throw me into a pool got pulled in with me. He had his phone on him. Though the last one is a bad example, sometimes you want to do something spur of the moment and not worry about ruining your phone.
That comes across as though you're trying to dismiss it as unimportant; it doesn't come across as though you're actually asking the question and willing to listen to the answer. And then, responding to people who answer you with further dismissals of their reasons continues to seem like you're trying to dismiss it as unimportant because you don't use it.
In response to someone saying they don't want to lose an $800 phone to water damage, what value does it add to say "I never buy over $300 phones, and anyway it never happened to me"? Other people do buy expensive phones, and also, whether expensive or cheap, other people do want to not lose them to water damage, and for that matter, other people do want to use them in environments where they're likely to get wet (e.g. pools/showers/baths).
It comes across as though you're trying to say "but you're wrong to want that", which results in the response you are getting.
Apple doesn’t sell many $300 new phones, so it is a useful feature for the phones they do sell.
I’m probably just clumsy, but I’ve dropped my phone into bodies of water twice in 10 years. I also know of 2 people that have dropped their phones in toilets.
The Venm diagram of expensive phones and clumsy people is large enough to make this a useful feature for some.
I wouldn’t mind if the regulation was that a phone company must offer at least one model with detachable battery, but I’d be sad if the amazing advances in waterproof phones were compromised.
Also anywhere that drops below freezing in the winter. Coming indoors with an ice cold phone is going to cause tons of condensation. If the phone isn't sealed (or placed inside a sealed case) then water will get inside.
Next step should be mandatory software updates. For something like 7 years from initial sale. Which would allow 2 years of normal sale cycle and then at end 5 year of support.
Not like that. There's a much simpler solution. Make it mandatory to have written on box just like any other tech spec, the minimum date until when security updates will be provided, the cadence of updates and their nature (e.g. for Android could be upstream updates).
There is already legislative warranty framework around compliance to promised specs. This means if the date is not honored, customers can turn against stores and return the products. Stores can then return against distributors/manufacturers, etc.
Also forbid sales of any network connected devices (phones, tablets, TVs, routers, etc) past that date because it's a wide security risk, particularly for people who are IT analphabets.
You'll then see how spectacularly quickly everyone lines up to security update schedules and standards. They will also find a way to prolong the date for devices that sell well.
Engineers have become experts in selecting components so that they fail right after the warranty period.
Replaceable batteries just means they will make something else weaker instead, preferably something that fries the device once it fails (see https://youtu.be/7cNg_ifibCQ?t=238).
It's too dangerous not to, as nowadays phones (or computers in general) don't really need to be upgraded that often to remain useful. No manufacturer wants a repeat of the 1080Ti.
Wow, Apple engineering a computer to fail destroying all the data after the guarantee and lying to their customers why their computers failed is pretty damning.
NVidia made a video card good enough that people who bought it had no need to upgrade for 4-5 years afterward. It hampered sales of cards for two generations afterward.
It's too good, as long as you don't need 4k, it still runs the newest games at full quality with more than acceptable performance. It has 11GB VRAM. And it's a 6 year old GPU.
I wish you were right but I have zero faith that Apple would ever willingly follow through with this. A depleted battery is an opportunity for them to sell people on a new phone who don't realize they can get the battery replaced. It also totally goes against their whole ethos of non-repair. Mandating USB C was easier because Apple already did that with the Macbooks, so it wasn't that big of a leap. Removable batteries, however, they would claim would require some expensive, impossible redesign.
Regretfully I don't see this coming to fruition. Apple will find a way, by hook, crook, or lawsuit, to get out of it.
Alternatively, it'll be another excuse for them to claim to revolutionize computing to cheers by bringing back the old replaceable battery with some more proprietary stuff and carefully hidden statements about the water resistance not working afterwards.
> Not so long ago some people claimed apple would rather leave the EU market than implement USB-C or open up the app store
It's just a case of Americans underestimating the size of the EU market. But the large corporations that already do business in the EU know very well that they can't leave a market that represents half of their revenue.
Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version.
It seems clear that there will be some downside to the replaceable battery version, whether it's size, cost, weight, ergonomics, water resistance, etc. Will the convenience of having replaceable batteries and not importing be worth those downsides? We'll have to see.
> Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version.
Assuming everything else is close enough.
I know there's an ocean between me and the EU, but importing a phone becomes significantly more difficult than it needs to be based on which cellular frequencies are supported.
Sure, but I'm thinking about stuff like just going to Nordic countries or even the UK. A lot of Europe isn't that far away from a country that doesn't follow EU rules. I was under the impression that you could, for the most part, buy a phone in the US and use it in the EU anyway these days?
Here in Norway (one of the two nordic countries to be not in the EU, the other is Iceland), we adopt more regulations from the EU via EØS (EEA) than most EU countries.
So we're basically part of the EU without the voting rights and toll union benefits..
Besides, our governments and most of the people cross "isle" are very much into the green/circle economy thing. It would get adopted from the EU even without being part of EØS I think.
Personally I think it would be great to be able to have a phone longer, I absolutely hate throwing out working hardware like the 2010 mac pro I used to have but apple decided not to support any more. The funny part is that someone has now made a hack/patch so it runs the newest os x anyway [1]. It was never the hardware that was the issue, just lack of support from apple.
That just doesn't happen because you lose economy of scale. The EU actually has a ton of soft power through this, enough for it to be a term in geopolitics:
Removable batteries with aftermarket suppliers way less costly than factory originals.
Small enough to fit in the pocket easily, or flip form for versatility.
Each battery lasting over 2 weeks and you could stockpile them for extended off-grid use.
External battery chargers included.
Tactile keypads.
Physical connection for external antenna for better reception, as well as audio interface for hands-free car use, analog headgear etc.
Things that made original smart phones smart:
USB at least plus possibly Bluetooth connection for use as a modem or virtual com or ethernet port as an interface to PC for internet access/faxing, as well as mass storage mode so the phone's file system appears no differently than a regular external drive.
Free downloads of manufacturers' PC software to interface phone to PC, for file management, text/picture/video message composition/viewing, personalized backup/restoration, etc.
Removable Memory Stick (Sony) or SD card.
Prices no higher than $500, which itself was too extravagant to be accepted by many, mostly those requiring it for business.
Superior OS compared to either Android or IOS.
Email & internet access provided by cell carrier without need for special mobile consideration on web sites.
Full manufacturer support independent of cell carrier.
Without these a phone can not be very smart.
When the iPhone appeared with exorbitant pricing and lacking the traditional smart features, plus substituting dumb things like non-removable battery, it was too bad people settled for that.
Power users / tech steeped people like us will care a lot about the original cell phones’ antennas, tactile keypads. But 90% of the public don’t care. And the 10% who are people like us cannot continue using our niche products with no interoperability with iOS/Android, if we expect to keep up with the rest of the society that has now been accustomed to a sealed slab.
Basically, I disagree with the premise that people “settled” for it - the majority a car when they were accustomed to riding horses.
Good to see your thoughtful and realistic response.
But I will still point to the way the two surviving OS's are not so interoperable with each other, and a sealed slab is mainly not just the embodiment of planned obsolescence, but disposable electronics by intention. Apple really doubled down as an anti-reuse/anti-recycling company along the lines of Microsoft's influence.
The experience from horses to cars is a good amount of accurate hindsight, and it was only the early adopters who got cars for quite some time. I would say some equivalence is like with the older technology horse the rider could go places the car never will be able to, but the car did get people where most wanted to go and that's where the roads were because people were already going there.
What really did it was getting there faster and the stimulating feeling of speed like never before.
With the iPhone it was bigger more flexible screen real estate and the stimulating ability to "watch TV" anytime on a device you were going to carry all the time anyway.
Once the mainstream saw what the early adopters were doing there was nothing but envy until they were doing it themselves.
Maybe one thing to agree about settling for is the initial neglect for the environmental effect of both transitions.
I wish there were better approaches to solving the problems around replacing batteries. This solution has downsides in terms of size (extra material required to surround the battery) and waterproofness.
I like the features that will have to trade off against replaceable batteries. I wish there were more opportunities for creative solutions to ewaste rather than the specific outcome being regulated.
I blame Apple for everyone's obsession with size. Or really, thinness, as everyone seems to have pop tart phones as thin and fragile as glass--with such a large phone, what value does thinness really add? I'd rather have a less delicate, easily serviceable, thicker phone.
Have you purchased a fair phone? They exist promising that exact product and yet I've never come across a single person that actually purchased what they claim to want.
Personally, I love the thin phones. I'd pay extra for it. It feels better and is easier carried. And the large screen makes it easily readable for my poor eyes.
I would have bought a fairphone in a second if they had camera performance similar to pixel 2/3 or 7. And no, gcam port is not a solution sadly( as usual- people want both nice software and hardware and fairphone has nice hardware but software isn't that good
Whatever the culprit, I would really like my next phone to be thicker than its camera¹. This is such a bullshit design, but every single phone manufacturer adopted it.
1 - Without paying 4 times more. I don't think I can get it even paying 4 times more nowadays, but this was always how phone manufacturers lied about the features they wanted to push, by offering an alternative that costs 4 to 10 times more and using it to show nobody wants it.
They already sell Android phones like this. They're cheaper than iPhones and have more features, like FLIR cameras. Why not just buy this instead of forcing your preferences, which, clearly the majority of people don't agree with, or they'd buy these phones. https://www.catphones.com/en-us/cat-s62-pro-smartphone/
Then your blame would be ill placed. If anything, Apple is to blame for fragile phones. They're the ones that introduced glass rear covers with the 6 I believe. But in terms of thinness, the thinnest phone I recall was the Galaxy S3.
The Samsung Galaxy XCover6 Pro has an IP68 rating (same as Galaxy S23 and iPhone 14) and has a replaceable back (and Samsung sells official OEM batteries for less than $50.) It also has a headphone jack, and is only 1mm thicker than the S23 Ultra.
Unfortunately, replacement parts are hard to come by for the Galaxy XCover6 Pro (Samsung doesn't sell them, iFixit doesn't sell them, and I can't even find certain parts from random sellers online), so it's arguably less repairable than other mainstream phones. An iPhone's battery is significantly more difficult to replace than that of the XCover6 Pro's, but if the screen, camera, speaker, port, buttons, etc. break on an iPhone, it's at least possible to replace them, unlike the XCover 6 Pro, so it's not the device for me and hard for me to recommend to others, as even if one doesn't do repairs themselves, with a more mainstream phone they can pay someone to repair their phone (either at an Apple Store if an iPhone, or some mobile repair shop for popular Android phones.)
I don't drop my phone often, but I've still had an optical image stabilizer that shook the camera violently, a vibration motor that worked sometimes, and a mute switch that worked sometimes, so replacement parts are very important.
But even still, the Galaxy XCover6 Pro is proof that you can have a waterproof phone with a headphone jack and replaceable battery that isn't very thick. If they sold replacement parts and committed to as many years of OS updates as Apple, I'd strongly consider it for my next phone.
Glue in all the gaskets around the electronics and then epoxy the battery terminal wires into the waterproof area. Let the battery get wet if you can get a new one.
This is what phones did previously. The issues with it are an increase in complexity and size (you need to physically seperate the components, have terminals, etc.) and that you still absolutely do not want water to get trapped in the battery compartment and possibly expose the battery to water.
Cameras are also much larger, so there are more options for how to optimally weatherproof them, such as thicker gaskets or moving circuitry to better locations.
The exception is for “appliance specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable”.
I don’t think that phones can count as being specifically designed to operate primarily in such environments, unless it’s specifically an underwater phone or similar.
Can you point to what you mean? My understanding is that the regulation only concerns batteries used for transport, e.g electric scooters. Pretty much all vehicles sold as replacements for GHG-emitting vehicles.
>My understanding is that the regulation only concerns batteries used for transport
The regulation isn't about one thing. It talks about everything from stationary battery energy storage system to portable appliances and yes transport too.
Yes, it makes it very obvious which sites are trying to track my activity and should be avoided and rewards sites that don't by making it obvious that they aren't.
I still do not agree with that rule. Replacable batteries are at odds with water tightness. I would have bought more phones if mine didn't survive water to a great extent.
I think instead the regulation should focus on making parts available and phones reasonably easy to repair. This will most likely include switching out seals, which are needed for the protection from water.
>It has a removable battery and has an IP67 rating so it should definitely be watertight.
Yes, there is a mechanical cover which keeps the very small battery away from moisture. The risk with these mechanical covers is that they deform under pressure and let water enter. It is difficult engineering challenge and anecdotally it didn't work that reliably.
Glueing phones makes the engineering simpler as it removes the need for any kind of screws and mechanical locking mechanism, instead all electrical conponents can be fit very tightly into the interior of the phone.
I think batteries can technically be submerged in water and discharged safely but it's an engineering challenge. As long as the rest of the phone is waterproof I think we are okay.
The next step should be to charge the true price of e-waste. People are entitled to their consumerist obsessions - they just need to pay for cleaning-up the pollution their create for the rest of us.
A phone with replaceable/ugradeable parts and software updates would probably last decades. The disposable culture must come to an end before it disposes all of us.
"Many consumers were vocal about the change but over time, most accepted it as the new norm and moved on. "
I guess. The fact is you really don't have a choice anymore, so what are you going to do? I'm not sure that counts as 'acceptance', more like 'resignation'.
The EU is slowly going to make google's [project ara](https://www.leaflabs.com/project-ara) mandatory despite 20 years of consumers demanding thinner, more water resistant phones
I think the big question is how "easily" replaceable are the batteries. I doubt were going back to external, swappable batteries since those add extra bulk. And that isn't needed since batteries are much better and power banks and chargers are everywhere.
What is needed is a way to easily replace the battery when it gets old. Now, need to take it to repair shop or take chances with DIY. It sounds like proposal includes internal batteries, easily removing back cover, and replacing the battery with connector.
I'm about to replace the swollen battery on 5 year old phone. It wasn't worth paying someone to do it. I'm worried cause I broke a previous phone doing the same repair.
iPhone 14 (non pro) has done this. Leaks indicate it's coming to the 15 Pro, too. Two screws and a plunger can pop off the screen and back battery assembly. https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown
It matters little that on many devices battery is always engaged, even if device is plugged into a wall. My Dell's laptop battery died even though I probably used the laptop disconnected from external power source for less than 10 hours over its lifetime (two years).
Interestingly, I had to physically remove the battery to be able to use it again when plugged into a wall, it wouldn't even turn on with a dead battery, even if connected to power source.
First paragraph in the article: "Among the many changes, the new rules would require batteries in consumer devices like smartphones to be easily removable and replaceable."
The new law seems to exempt some devices by article 11. But I now think the article might just be dated or wrong.
Here's the passage translated by DeepL:
> However, Article 11 explicitly leaves room for more specific rules that ensure a "higher level of environmental and health protection." For smartphones and tablets, the Commission and member states already adopted so-called ecodesign rules in November that give manufacturers a choice: Either they design their smartphones and tablets so that users can replace the battery. Or they install the battery permanently, in which case it must still have at least 83 percent of its capacity after 500 charging cycles and at least 80 percent after 1,000 charging cycles. Smartphones must then also be dustproof and waterproof.
> From the EU Commission's point of view, these special ecodesign rules for smartphones and tablets guarantee a higher level of environmental protection and health protection than the Battery Ordinance. This applies "in particular due to the durability requirements," the Commission informed c't in response to an inquiry. Therefore, the ecodesign rules are applicable, it said. These come into force after a transition period of 21 months and thus earlier than the Battery Ordinance.
From my limited reading, article 11 only applies to devices that are built to be used in wet environments though.
> 2. The obligations set out in paragraph 1 shall not apply where
> ...
> (b) the functioning of the battery is only possible when the battery is integrated into the structure of the appliance.
A smart lawyer could probably argue that a phone can not properly function when exposed to the elements without being integrated into the structure. But I don't know.
On apple devices specifically I've found battery life to be the showstopper. ifruits all the way back to 7 if not longer are still very usable....but that would be a 7 year old battery. Most lithiums start to fade after 2 years.
You can easily have an iPhone battery replaced. The regulation just guarantees that you’ll be able to do it yourself rather than having to use a professional service.
Also a rule to make laptops be completely off when powered off... not just in some 'sleep' state that turns on and overheats while in a bag. I can't imagine how much laptop battery life is wasted away due to this.
I believe that the average replacement rate of smartphones is less than 3 years.
That's one of the reasons manufacturers have given up on (easily) replaceable batteries. It's simpler and allows for slicker design and anyway, most people will buy a new smartphone before the battery reaches its end of life.
The EU is fighting the wrong fight here. It'd be more useful to improve recyclability and actual recycling than to force more complicated phones where it's not needed.
>"I believe that the average replacement rate of smartphones is less than 3 years."
It is probably the same as with PC. Initially each generation was way more powerful and allowed "better" and more powerful applications. But at some point your generic PC has become powerful enough to run nearly everything the average person wants and there are no more reasons to upgrade. Smartphones may have reached the same point.
I remember when we had replaceable batteries, many, with different shape, different spec, different charger. Then someone did invent a universal charger with movable pin. If you want to replace battery on your iPhone, you can actually do it in local repair shops. Powerbank is actually a good product. I don't miss replaceable batteries.
This is stupid. Battery lifetimes has come a long way (1000-2000 cycles are the norm) and will improve in the future. Devices are much denser and are waterproof. There are trade offs and customers have chosen to favor designs that do not require easily replaceable batteries. I wouldn't want to pay the price for having one.
At one point, tech companies should wonder if it is worth serving this market. With all these useless regulations, no wonder there’s no innovation in EU anymore.
Do you know which continent invented and the sole seller of the most precise litography machines? How about lenses? How about the best electrical infrastructure products with even IoT?
The point of the EU directive is too have easily user-replaceable batteries in phones, EV batteries will never be easily user-replaceable as long as they are heavier than what a human can lift.
Swappable EV batteries are not a new thing and Renault (an EU company, thus) has done it for a long time (with mixed success though) but it's totally incomparable with this law on phone batteries.
Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device?
Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.