I used to work for Nokia back when they still made phones. Replaceable batteries were very normal then. Phones were a bit thicker than today but not massively so. These days phones are actually thinner but much larger. I had a "are you happy to see me or is that a Nokia" type Nokia 9300. That was a brick. But it had a full hw keyboard. and flipped open it wasn't that much bigger than a modern smart phone.
You could argue that the trend towards more energy dense batteries and wireless charging could enable new interesting form factors. Recent phones have magnetic connectors for external wireless chargers that snap to the back. Most of bulk and weight of a phone is for accommodating batteries. You could make an argument that making a phone with replaceable batteries is easier than ever. Many cameras have a bulge for the camera. The negative space of the rest of the phone could easily hold a swappable battery. How critical are those 3mm really?
It’s been long enough that people of forgotten what’s it’s like. Cameras still have replaceable batteries, there are several benefits:
I can have two (or more) batteries, if it runs out I just change it. I don’t need walk around with a USB battery pack and cable hanging off the device preventing me from using it properly.
I can put the battery on charge somewhere and leave it, even if not completely secure, because just the battery not the device. This way my expensive device and my data is not at risk.
I can use 40+ year old cameras, because I can just put a new battery in. This is not something you can do with newer device, e.g. and iPod and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
Battery tech moves on. There are now some batteries with charging ports on them. Other batteries offer more capacity than the original ones. Apple even did this once for me, when MacBook Air batteries were fairly easy to replace, I had mine replaced (it wore out) at the shop and they put a slightly bigger one in, which was the standard on the newer models.
I don't think this is where peak battery tech ends up. At current capacities, batteries are becoming genuinely dangerous, and faster charging only amplifies the risk. Charging high-capacity cells outside a temperature-controlled charger is risky, and even reputable chargers shouldn't be left unattended — many workplaces ban it outright (it only takes one fire to make that policy).
Phone batteries are the worst of it: highest power density, fastest charging, odd geometry, and tight space constraints. Manufacturers shrink the phone by offloading temperature monitoring and heat dissipation onto the phone's own electronics and housing — so replaceable, externally rechargeable batteries are tricky to design.
IMO, swappable batteries were a feature because batteries used to suck. In less volume-constrained devices like cameras, swappable batteries still work — but you're trading single-charge runtime for that convenience.
This last point is actually a real killer, an easily swappable battery in a phone probably sacrifices >10% "maximum" capacity in lost space. e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.
The main thing that makes all this hard to do is the form factor.
Give these phone batteries a standard geometry and interface and pretty much all these problems immediately go away. 3 prongs on the battery (ground, positive, data). A standard protocol so the battery can communicate things like SOC or acceptable charge rate with the charger. And viola, you are off to the races.
Yes, this will mean manufacturers will have a hard limit on how thin they can make their phones and a constraint on what designs they can employ.
The fact that pretty much no phones have a replaceable battery says something. And it doesn't mean that all manufacturers are somehow colluding with each. The market is very competitive and pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit. If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. But everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it. And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.
> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!
Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.
Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.
I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.
> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.
There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it.
Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.
Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?
Having a battery pack has its uses though. As crazy as USBC is, you can now get a relatively large amount of power from a battery pack.
There’s a bunch of things that don’t need their own battery if they just drew enough power off USBC. I have an office coffee setup. My grinder and espresso maker have their own batteries. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have a single battery pack and just plug both into USBC saving me a ton of weight. (In fact the Lagom Mini 2 grinder is powered straight off USBC with no internal power.)
For phones and cameras, that need their own power source, a replaceable battery is mostly just an end of life thing for me. Because I’d still have to carry a cable or spare battery around.
These things aren't mutually exclusive. Once upon a time, batteries were generic and fit some standard form-factor. You could swap batteries between devices and often did! You could even connect your device to a pack of batteries, and swap out the batteries within the pack.
and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
I'm quite certain you can find many companies in the far East who will produce cells of exactly the size and shape you want, as long as you're willing to order a minimum quantity. There are also a few semi-standard sizes of prismatic cells available.
That said, having a few truly standard sizes like we had with 1.2/1.5V and 9V batteries would be a good idea. BL-5C and its variants were a de-facto standard for many years too, and apparently are still available new.
I tried to find a phone battery once and found very similar looking ones with prices ranging from expensive to terrifying with everything in between. I don't trust the ones that are to cheap as I don't know how they cut the corners. I don't trust the more expensive ones because they look the same. I cant see the profit margins. I was unable to pick one. I ask a guy with a repair store. He said he always buys from the same shop and the badges look different every time.
Several years ago when I bought a slr, I went with nikon, mainly because their F-mount lenses are mostly compatible back to 1959.
It is a lot of fun to pick up and use nice old glass from garage sales and such. They tend to require manual control, but that is the fun part of taking pictures anyway.
Software security updates seem to be the limit to phone life, not batteries (the latter of which I've had replaced at Apple stores). Apple still seems to have the longest support for security updates.
Some action cameras have replaceable batteries, some don't. I had a perfectly good Contour Roam 2 where the battery died and I still have a Contour Roam 3 with some low capacity battery.
Action cameras seem to have less than a 2h run-time though. One could argue that a replaceable battery is a desired feature on such a device as many users of these cameras participate in activities lasting much longer. They also tend to have replaceable memory for the same reason. And it all is achieved without EU directives as far as I know, just from the pure market demand.
PS. Consumer surveillance cameras, on the other hand, don't have replaceable batteries in general, as they can operate indefinitely off a small solar panel or for months on a charge.
With cameras you don't care about every mm of width, nor about how resistant it is to falls. With phones you do.
I, for one, don't welcome that change. I'd be ok with paying someone a bit extra to replace the battery. I mean, I'd be ok if I had a battery die in my phone in the last 10 years, which I don't remember it did.
Just to be clear replaceable doesn't mean removable/hot-swappable in this context. There doesn't have to be a battery compartment, the battery can still be glued in place. The phone can still be sealed.
Manufacturers only have to make it possible for users to open and close the phone to replace the battery without damage, using common tools.
Personally I’m confused why people say they want a thinner phone while carrying a phone that’s keeps getting larger every model.
When was the last time you kept a phone longer than 2-3 years? That’d explain why you haven’t had one die.
Assuming you do get a new phone regularly, easy battery replacement will probably help the resale value of your own a fair bit - the labour cost of a battery replacement is priced into most older phones on the second hand market.
Not sure what replacable has to do with thickness.
When I bought my first smartpone, a Moto G (1st gen) it was as flat as any phone most people carried around at the time (2014, I think). And the battery was replaceable.
I think also Samsung phones had replaceable batteries then. And this was the case for a few years after. Until it wasn't.
Devices didn't suddenly get thin when batteries were glued in. Why would they?
Most digital cameras above mid ranges are made of painted Magnesium alloy material for both weight and durability. Only cosmetic parts are made of Aluminum and plastics. They don't talk much about those because all the remaining companies in the market are from one same country that don't speak English that isn't China, and there is no differentiation to be made in that area.
We've had thin smartphones with replaceable batteries 15 years ago. That was the standard. Galaxy S5 was the last one in that series, and it's not looking too different from today. It was even IP rated for water!
Batteries also don't really die, but you get shorter and shorter life. When a device that barely could make it through 2 days of use now survives for less than one, an "upgrade" seems nicer than it really would've been if you could just swap the battery.
Both of those things are also important in cameras, there is even sites that compare the size such as https://camerasize.com/. Cameras have got smaller in recent years and it makes the size makes a big difference to whether you take it with you on not or fits in your pocket or not for compact cameras. Ricoh’s gr4 camera is 0.5mm thinner than the previous model (gr3). Cameras are essentially smaller than they would be otherwise because they have replaceable batteries. People who need at more power usually use several batteries rather than use a bigger camera with more capacity.
Cameras also need to withstand drops for similar reasons to phones, it’s in you hand and you could drop it, also tripods can fall over, car mounts fall off etc.
I don't care about every mm of width, and don't understand those that do. A phone up to 3/4" fits into any pocket that a 1/4" one does.
I had multiple android phones with replaceable batteries and many were no thicker than modern phones, especially once you've added the protective case.
I'm an exception for sure but I have not seen much innovation in the phone space that you'd genuinely make me buy a new phone.
Yes, cameras are better now.
But some phones had good cameras years ago.
I bought new phones mainly because of battery decline and/or not getting security updates.
If one of these will be solved, that might change my phone buying behaviour.
I don't care whether a display is called "retina" , whether the next edition comes in the colour "space banana grey while lion tiger snail".
And I don't need to impress someone by proving that I'm able to buy a new phone either.
Such behaviour gives me a good hint what to think about them though.
A phone that will have the battery situation solved is a killer argument.
Then I'd like to have a software distribution on top that it's "mum compatible" and doesn't need nerd knowledge to maintain.
Something that allows to use banking apps.
Let's see how it goes.
Also I hope that there can be third party batteries without DRM-like behaviour.
To me the best "tradeoff" right now is buying used Fairphones from ebay.
It is LineageOS HEAD compatible and has replaceable batteries.
But it has some quirks. Medium performance if even that, non working fingerprint sensor. Camera quality from 2005.
I don't have gapps installed so I'm using my phone without any type of payment/2fa/banking apps. That decision from opsec makes it easily reflashable, so my anti malware strategy is essentially just reflashing the phone every couple weeks :D
My battery usually lasts a week because of using only f-droids chat, navigation, and translation apps for the most part, aside from the browser.
To me, repairability is the feature I value the most in a phone, so I'm kinda willing to compromise on the other features.
Fun fact: Did you know that WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal all restart themselves when you connect to your headphones? If you froze them before, they'll just drain your battery again when you have any bluetooth changes. You can easily verify that by staying in airplane mode and freezing them, then connecting your headphones in airplane mode.
This is not correct. There is no exemption for Apple devices
You seem to referencing from a older exemption for self serviceability if your smartphone can do 1,000 cycles and retain 80% battery. Specifically - B 1.1 (1) (c) (ii) (b) . Here is the link - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Your link says otherwise. From the Article 11 link, ANNEX II, A.1.1.(5):
(a) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for replacement of the display assembly and of parts referred to in point 1(a), with the exception of the battery or batteries, meets the following criteria: [...]
[...]
(c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
(i) meets the following criteria:
— fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
- the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
(ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that:
— the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
— after 500 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
— the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
— the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
---
So manufacturers must make the battery replaceable, or meet all the conditions from (a) for replacing non-battery components, and meet the 1000 cycle / 80% capacity requirement.
> covers exemptions but nothing to do with 1,000 cycles or Apple as far as i can see.
It appears what you're looking for is in B(5)(c)(ii).
> (c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
> (i) meets the following criteria:
> — fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
> — the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
> (ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that
> — the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
> — after 500 full charge cycles the battery must have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
> — the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
> — the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
I was wondering about that. I lost my iPhone 13 mini the other day, did the find my phone beep thing and got a distant beep from my washing machine which was on wash cycle.
Surprisingly the phone was fine and works fine after a brief rinse under the tap. It must be hard to combine that sort of water resistance with easy user changing.
Don't fall for the 'glue cuz of protection' myth - there are and had been water-resistant phones way before Apple started glueing to avoid customers doing their own repairs and them losing out on new sales.
This could be "fixed" right now by a software update that limits the maximum charge level to 80% of capacity. However, this comes at the cost of how many minutes of runtime your phone can operate.
So manufactures might just responds to this by making your phone heavier with a bigger battery that is being under utilized.
Battery capacity of smartphones seems to double every ~8 years. The design space is adding more battery capacity, reducing battery life, or using less power.
This sounds great. I would've loved to have set my phone to charge up to only 60% or 80% of its design capacity to reduce wear. I do this on my laptop.
Honestly we should define 80% as the new "100%" on such batteries and label "charging to full" as "overcharging".
Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.
And what about if 4 years they says that they have dettected a problem in your battery? A new battery should fix that but now you cannot do it properly because it could do 1000 cycles.
This same thing happened to Pixels 6a after 500 cycles.
Then don’t buy a phone from a company with a piss poor record of customer service.
Just looking in maps, there are three Apple Stores within a 45 minute drive from where I live in central Florida.
The situation is worse in my hometown in South GA admittedly, you have to drive 70 miles for same day service for an authorized repair place - mostly Best Buy.
The goal should be reducing e-waste, and honestly this seems reasonable.
I’d rather get the additional structural rigidity, compactness, and weatherproofing that comes from the tight construction and then pay $99 to have Apple professionally install a new battery for me in 3-4 years. Forcing everyone’s iPhone to take all of the tradeoffs of replaceable batteries so some people can save $50 to replace their own battery isn’t a good deal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if forcing all phones to have easily replaceable batteries would result in a net increase in e-waste due to the additional failure modes introduced. Even if batteries were easily replaceable I think most iPhone users would have Apple do it for them anyway.
I’ve also replaced some iPhone batteries myself and it’s really not that bad if you are familiar with taking modern electronics apart. Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
> Forcing everyone’s iPhone to take all of the tradeoffs of replaceable batteries so some people can save $50 to replace their own battery isn’t a good deal.
This sounds like the exact opposite of real life. Every battery ages to the point of uselessness, not every phone gets to take a dive. It's not a stretch to say most phones never see more than some rain or a spilled drink. But the worst part of every discussion on this topic is this false (uninformed) dichotomy that water resistance and easily replaceable battery are mutually exclusive.
> and then pay $99 to have Apple professionally install a new battery for me in 3-4 years
In 3-4 years yes, but how about in 10-15 years? Apple will refuse to take your money then.
> Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
Which is malicious compliance. They should allow the friendly neighborhood repair shop to purchase a toolkit so you can choose who does the repairs for you.
I wonder if this is part of why Apple is behind most competitors in terms of fast charging. Would almost make marketing sense to come out and say it at this point.
Isn't this pretty much what Nothing are doing? At least one of their phones has a different battery rating in India than elsewhere, despite containing the same hardware.
1 Cycle is discharging from 100-0 and charging from 0-100, regardless of how many times the phone is charged, so for a user that averages 50% battery drain each day, 1000 cycles would actually be ~6 years. I have no idea what the actual average is, but I'm betting that 1000 cycles is at least 4 years for the average user and possibly significantly longer.
Aren't today's phone batteries already replaceable with commercially available tools? I can walk into a non-apple store with my iPhone and walk out with a replaced battery 20 minutes later.
This isn't even what drives obsolesce of phones, it's software updates.
If you really want to be able to self-swap your own battery, you can just buy an Android that has a replaceable battery.
Do we need to regulate something that isn't a problem? All regulation has downsides, is it worth paying this price here?
With all due respect, I can buy a kit on iFixit for $55 for an iPhone 16 pro max, including the battery. I’ve replaced my iPhone battery before, aside from the glue being a bit sticky so needing a heat gun it isn’t that difficult.
> This isn't even what drives obsolesce of phones, it's software updates.
Agreed, and software-locking parts, like batteries, to only first-party or authorized third-party repair shops is one of those drivers.
I can see the argument for software locking some components (to cut down on theft) even if I don't appreciate or agree with them - it is at least a valid reason from some perspectives.
Batteries are a wear item though, and will have to be replaced periodically until the device is discarded. Software-locking them to only "Apple and people Apple likes" is unconscionable
You talk about "an Android that has a replaceable battery" as if that was something you could just buy at any store at no inconvenience. Sadly the majority of Android phones no longer have user-replaceable batteries, and only a select few models have official replacement parts available.
I'd be happier if this was something the market took care of, but after 10 years of glued-in batteries that you most likely can't even buy, I think it's time for a regulatory nudge.
In a perfect world, sure. But people also want phones these days that are physically durable, have some degree of waterproofing/water resistance, maximum battery life, etc. Many of the demands and expectations of a modern phone aren't easily compatible with a replaceable battery design that can withstand the incompetence of the average end user.
Engage with the content of his comment instead of resorting to ad hominem.
He's right - the market wants embedded batteries, although perhaps not directly. Embedded batteries have improved price, battery capacity, water proofing, size, and strength. If the consumer really wanted a removable battery and all that that entails then there would be more phones that offered that. The reality is people misjudge what all that entails. By all means, I would love to just make the iPhone battery directly replaceable without any compromises but that's not reality.
How do you feel about the batteries in electric vehicles?
What about wearable devices like a smartwatch, headphones, smart glasses?
Should all these be consumer-replaceable without tools, regardless of the effect on the other things people value in these devices (waterproofing, size and weight, battery life, etc.)?
FYI I do not work for anything close to the consumer tech industry.
Says who? Not all devices can have the same level of repairability by laypeople. What if I complained that todays' CPUs are too miniaturized and that in my time I could swap the individual vacuum tubes in case something went wrong?
Of course the upsides of regulations are worth it. The downsides might cause slight inconvenience to the manufacturer, so that doesn't really matter.
Your next phone will be heavier, bulkier, more expensive, and less reliable as a result of these regulations. It will also probably not run as long between charges.
If bureaucrats in Brussels were better at designing phones than Apple, wouldn't they be doing just that?
What if we regulate batteries even more? i.e. what if, in some magical perfect world, the world get's together and agrees on batteries for phones like how we agree on AA,AAA,D,C batteries? Even more though.. a standard connector, a standard comms bus, a variety of sizes, and they were designed for reuse as efficiently as possible.
Now we can scale up volume, swap them out, be free to purchase from a different manufacturer, and have scaled up recycling services.
I'd settle for requiring the battery specs to be fully available, and that they can't be made difficult to manufacture without good reason.
Ideally, there should be some set of standard protocols/connectors/voltages/sizes, but the manufacturer should only be held to "downward-compliance" with at least one of them, so they can have flexibility in design but still leave a suboptimal standard option available to users as a fallback.
That's an excellent idea! It will work out absolutely great - much like Communism.
Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.
You're thinking of socialism, which is what the EU is doing here (socialism-lite, anyway, as championed by the Social Democrats) and yes, it does work. Free healthcare, free education, and we're working towards decent privacy laws and regulations on big companies. It's far from perfect of course, but comparing it to how pure capitalism is going in the US it's clearly the better system.
Batteries have been used as part of planned obsolescence for too long and a whole small business industry of replacing phone batteries has appeared because of it. Next the EU are going to have to address security patches because its another aspect being used to sell new phones.
I have found out that the main phone providers (Apple, Google, Samsung) have extremely long support period. I really don't get the "planned obsolescence" thing.
As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
>As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
The updates for ios 12 are all security updates, not feature updates, so your comparison to "connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086" doesn't really make sense. The phones stuck on ios 15 are basically unusable because many apps don't support it anymore. At best you can download an older version from a few years ago, but that depends on whether the backend servers were updated. Apps that insist you use the latest version (eg. banking/finance apps) basically unusable.
The EU already requires 5 years of patches since last year. Motorola thinks they have found a loophole, so there are still some, ahem, patches needed to the law.
Do you have more info about this? I recommended Motorola phones to people based on a combination of price, their needs, and expected longevity (at least 5y now with the new update and replacement part requirements). If that's not the case then I want to update my recommendations
I dunno, my wife has has the same iPhone 11 Pro Max since 2020. She had to get the battery replaced once at an Apple store, which I believe cost $99, and it took like thirty minutes and it wasn't that hard.
I'll admit it's a little annoying that I have to pay a hundred bucks to get the battery replaced, but the phone is otherwise fine and still gets updates, so I don't know that I buy that it's "planned obsolescence".
It's planned obsolescence through price. Your wife paid >50% of the phone's value just to replace the battery. Many people won't think that's worth it. It could have been a $30 user replaceable battery.
> Batteries have been used as part of planned obsol[esc]ence for too long and a whole small business industry of replacing phone batteries has appeared because of it.
Note that early phones had replaceable batteries and it was later phones that dropped that feature. The idea wasn't that making the phone impossible to open would compel people to replace their phone faster; it was that given that people didn't keep their phones long enough to wear out the battery, there was no need to make the battery accessible.
Upgrade cycles have slowed down in recent years, the improvements are relatively incremental nowadays. Screens, durability, processors, storage sizes, cameras, even battery life are okay-ish and aren't improving quickly enough to justify the same upgrade rate. Foldables are basically the only big innovation in recent years, but are still a little too fragile and expensive.
This is also reflected in the increasing support durations from major manufacturers.
This might be partially true, but making them inacessible is still a great way approach to planned obsolescence and there's no way this was not part of the motivation. The fact that an entire industry exists to provide replacement batteries is proof of this, as is the fact that Apple offers a £100 battery replacement. They also replace the batteries of all refurbished models they sell, which again wouldn't be necessary if battery life wasn't a concern over the useful life of a phone.
Secondly, what you said may have been true in the past, when smartphones were rapidly evolving and upgrade cycles were short, but people are holding on to their devices for longer now, so its possible its becoming a problem again.
This was true back when Moore's law was the driver of obsolescence. You bought a new phone every year simply because next year's phone was twice as fast.
Now that this doesn't happen, the driver of obsolescence is the battery, which is much less defensible because you can swap it much more easily than "the whole internals of the phone".
I look into my perfect workable Samsung Tab S7+ and remember that it has been an year since the last security update.
Now I rely on a few random individuals who, for all I know could be state agents or a ransomware organization to provide unofficial versions of Lineage so I can keep using it.
Battery isn't the only problem to avoid e-waste, but it's a start.
Aren't security updates the deciding factor for the life of a phone these days? Manufacturers provide updates for 7 years max which is probably less than the battery life.
It's a good move, but that is not enough. My old Chinese phone had a replaceable battery but it lasted so long that after it died, it was not possible to find the replacement. It seems that all phones have batteries with different sizes, and potentially different third pin designation, so even if you find smaller battery, it still can be incompatible because of third pin.
So if you want phones to be usable for longer period, you need to standardize batteries.
> Replacement batteries for any model will have to remain available to users for at least five years after the last unit of the product is placed on the market, the regulation also states.
While standardization would be nice, I can still order batteries for the Samsung phones I've used 15 years ago. Availability might not be that much of an issue with larger brands.
Next, do user installable OS. Phones are the costliest gadgets with a dizzying range of sensors/capabilities and more than enough RAM. Its a shame we can't use them for a decade+, giving it a second life.
A lot of discussion about 'whether its needed' or 'moving a needle'. Batteries were swappable back in the day, and later on someone figured that making battery suck, can drive you to buy a new phone - because it is harder to degrade the rest of the device faster. Then we accepted that you cannot play around the battery, bcs that's the reality of things. So many people won't even think about it - but it does not mean it is not needed. I would love to make my device much better with swapping battery as many time as needed.
But then I think someone will figure out to make these batteries so expensive, that it won't change a thing.
Now they only need to make sure that a supply chain for replacement batteries exists, there is regulation and competition and options remain available for a reasonable price.
There are plenty of old Dell and HP laptops with replaceable batteries which can only be found on eBay or some random seller that does who knows what under the refurbishing process.
Exactly. I had phones and laptops with replaceable batteries in the past. I liked the idea of it, but in practice there was no OEM-quality replacement available by the time I wanted one. The device would have been usable to me still, but not with a random black market battery that may well be a fire hazard.
Having thought about this long term, I think the only solution to this would be mandating standardized battery cells. Rather than every phone model having a bespoke cell that is manufactured once and then obsoleted, they need to have standardized shape and electrical characteristics so that batteries being produced for new phones would also be useful to rehabilitate old phones.
I expect we'll see a spike in cell phone battery fires starting about a year after this goes into effect. Same deal as cheap external battery-powered travel power banks, which are already a problem.
Seems to me like the top goal should be: you can easily replace the most-likely-to-break parts (screen, back, battery, etc) in any local independent repair shop, with genuine parts that have low markups.
I'm confused why that still isn't the case today given all the EU headlines we've seen over the years.
I was looking forward to finally be able to easily switch out (i)Phone batteries again - after 20 years - but turns out the lobbyists managed to get a loophole in the law - exempting Apple & Co from making their phones more repairable / longer live-able.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
Seems entirely reasonable. Embedded batteries have a lot of advantages. Cheaper, higher battery capacity, water proof, smaller, stronger. I think this will largely just make the mid to low tier android market in the EU shittier.
My experience with an Apple battery saying ~81% longevity remaining is that it'll die when it still reports half full and you open a demanding webpage
It's a genuinely hard problem to measure battery capacity with existing smartphone hardware, also because it's a matter of opinion how much to factor in the peak load capacity (how do you count the bottom 40%, where it can't handle peak draw anymore? Should one include half of it because the phone is still usable but in a degraded state?), so I'm not faulting Apple here at all. They choose to display this estimate and it's better than nothing / better than most manufacturers. Just that you can't take it at face value, even if you charged your phone from 0% to 100% for >=1000 days
The exemption is about ensuring customers get what they paid for. It shouldn’t care how the manufacturer achieves that; driving the batteries less hard is an obvious tactic, and actually also makes them safer to use.
I recently did a battery replacement on an iphone mini 13 with some success and some failure. I absolutely killed the screen without cracking it. A little too much pulling with the ifixit reverse clamp.
Had i gone a little slower, it would have been a very easy repair.
Yes, this is the most non-story I have ever seen on this topic. I do not know of any manufacturer who does not claim this, verifiable or otherwise; and even if they can't claim it, all they have to do is one minor purely-software capacity adjustment, which they will gladly do before they will even consider offering removable batteries.
Apple has no chance to claim their batteries can have 80% capacity after 1000 cycles seeing how they never achieved this so far. Lying about it puts them in a world of mass recalls and fraud investigations.
“ If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt”
I mean isn’t that an okay exemption? If the intent is to drive devices to be less disposable and more sustainable… if it incentivizes all mobile phone manufacturers to improve battery longevity, I’d say that’s a win.
I wouldn’t even call it a loophole. The entire purpose of the legislation could be that clause
> the lobbyists managed to get a loophole in the law - exempting Apple & Co
But Apple batteries are already user replaceable? I've replaced my own and batteries come with kits that have all the tools and disposable glue strips and seals.
No shot at all apple batteries can last 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity. Probably can’t even do 300 in my experience. Sounds like an easy lawsuit.
No doubt they will redefine maximum battery capacity to a figure that does achieve 80% over 1000 cycles. If you under-declare maximum capacity then there is a lot of headroom for actual degradation before you start to show degradation to the user.
A battery that can support 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity would be a literal brick. For an example the Vision Pro's battery has extreme over-provisioning and limit how long it would last. (note I know it is removable but that isn't the point).
>The regulation states that batteries must be removable using ‘commercially available’ tools
This is doing a lot of work here. There's enough wiggle room for this to be absolutely meaningless. Anything short of I can slide off the back cover and maybe unscrew two or three screws to replace the battery means that a lot of people are going to end up not being able to replace the batteries.
The rest of that same sentence, " – and that if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased," seems to mitigate that concern, no? I suppose it hinges on what the test for a "specialized tool" is.
EU regulatory bodies haven’t been as blindly sycophantic towards megacorporations in terms of allowing them to skirt by rules set forth by their legislatures, so I would be more optimistic than if this were a development in US law.
Maybe. Maybe not. If my local phone and phone accessories shop can do it for little money in 15 minutes then the current calculus changes for a heck of a lot of people.
Everyone is thinking Apple is the target, but they are actually one of the better companies with this. You can buy first-party replacement parts, tools are available. If you take a look at Chinese or sometimes even Samsung phones it's basically impossible to get replacement parts and if you do it may need other parts like the glass back to be replaced as it's impossible to remove it without breaking it.
That reads true. While replaceability is definitely a good thing, but whether it will end up being a good thing for the average user (and not lead to some further price hikes in the EU market) remains to be seen.
That is a very American view of law that has burned American companies again and again.
In EU law, the intent matters, not the letter of the law. No silly loophole lawyering.
To quote:
>When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
I just spent a few hours [this past weekend] trying to replace a battery on an old iPod Touch and botching it (I'll blame my crappy soldering iron). Everything about that was a massive pain, prying the case open, dealing with all the glue inside, de-soldering the old battery.
I thought I did everything right but then the thing wouldn't turn on. Could be a bad battery (ordered on Amazon so zero guarantees). Then when I tried to de-solder and re-solder my new battery the pads came off it. Very annoying.
One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
Your experience is not at all what I see out there. Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day. They hate having to set up a new phone when their old one is totally fine other than the battery.
For the people I know that do upgrade their phones regularly, they typically want to give their old phone to someone who would love a usable phone, but can't afford a new one. Giving a phone with a shot and non-replaceable battery effectively destroys the value of the gift.
I know many people who can't afford to by new, and they avoid buying older or used phones because they fear the battery may be shot.
We obviously have different opinions regarding what most people want... totally fine.
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day
I don't disagree with this, but I also think it's because the battery often dies around the time most people would consider upgrading anyway. The battery isn't the only reason people upgrade, it's just a forcing factor.
If batteries normally last 3-5 years, I don't think we're going to start seeing most people keep their phones for 7-10 years. I still think we're going to see people upgrading around the 3-5 year mark. I would point to the current market as evidence of this. An iPhone battery replacement is somewhere between $50-$100 right now which is drastically cheaper than a new iPhone and yet we still see the 3-5 year upgrade cycle. Maybe making it something you can do at home in a few minutes will result in a few more people just choosing to replace the battery vs the entire phone, but I don't see it drastically changing things since a cheap alternative to replacing the phone already exists and yet we still see the 3-5 year replacement cycle.
I can't speak to the experience with Android but Apple offers both in-store battery replacement or Mail-in battery replacement for $70-120 which to me seems very reasonable. Could it be cheaper? Sure, maybe I guess? But $70-120 is a lot less than a new phone. And this way we don't need to compromise the shell of the phone with seams and things that can fail.
It's now possible to carry a spare battery or two, instead of lugging a portable power bank and slowly charging your phone. This is great news for outdoorsy types, travel, long bicycle rides, hiking, and so on.
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day.
Most people I know get a new phone when they can't take the cracked screen anymore, or when they completely lose the phone. Or because a pretty new one came out and they upgraded two years ago so it's "time". That's most people.
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day
Getting the battery replaced is already trivial and cheap. Revealed preference is that most people say they want it, but don't. This won't even decrease the cost or difficulty (you'll still need a screwdriver).
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day.
I am not sure if your statistic is correct or people giving you excuses to get the latest model. If we speak iphones, flipping the battery is cheap and fast process, incomparable with the hassle of doing re-setup.
I am not sure if the process is equally or more simple with android phones though, but in my circle noone buys new phone because of the battery (often the battery is used as excuse to get a newer model).
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
I have experience saying the exact opposite, although this was a few years ago.
OnePlus set up a marketing booth on my campus in 2018 or 2019 or so, and they did exactly this, with a large sign asking people what they want out of a phone. They asked passerbys what they want out of a phone, and they let people put their requests on a board.
When I put my request up, I wasn't the first one to request replaceable batteries and a headphone jack. (At the time, OnePlus had removed the jack from their most recent phone, after advertising their previous phone in comparison to Apple's jackless phone).
I think phone manufacturers will figure it out once it is a requirement. Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure. Are we in a better place because the EU forced it. You betcha. That's the point.
I don't love everything the EU does (cookie banners!?) but this is one where I have confidence that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
As others have noted, most people do not replace their phones every two years anymore, there just isn't any big reason to.
Cookie banners is malicious compliance. The ultimate goal being for you yo think it was bad legislation instead of how every company is fucking you for your privacy.
> Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure.
Doubt. They have already switched over every other line they had.
I believe it was more of a marketing stunt, they calculated that n% of customers will be upset with the change, so they waited for the EU ruling so now they can just point these n% to blame the EU who will take the blame instead of them.
I like usb C more than lightning but I think legislation is terribly suited. If people only wanted usb c then just don’t buy an iPhone? But this is from my US idealistic view and distrust of over regulation.
Anyways, Apple was working on an iPhone with usb C in 2022 and said they were going to do it anyways* so I don’t see it as some massive win that shows the prowess of the EU legislative body.
Granted this may have shaved a couple of years off of the timeline but at what cost of legislation (monetary, attention, and time cost)!?
Everyone moving to USB-C was the same standard, though; now you can use the same charger with your phone, laptop, tablet, other random gadgets, etc. If you forget your charger you can buy one virtually anywhere, or borrow someone else's, since they're all the same.
Everyone moving to "battery must be replaceable without tools" doesn't do anything useful for most users. Yeah, now you can carry an extra battery on a camping trip, I guess, though you could also carry a portable USB-C charger and use it for more than just your phone. It isn't particularly useful that it doesn't take tools to replace the battery when it starts failing, five years after your phone was discontinued, if you can't find a replacement battery for that exact model.
Apple was a key member of the USB-C consortium, it was always planned to be their universal connector. They waited on switching to avoid public backlash about "why are you switching wires when I already bought all of these wires?". They generally give connectors 10 years before changing them (see 32-pin 2003 - 2012 etc). Doesn't invalidate your larger point, but it incorrectly describes the history of USB-C adoption by Apple.
I moderate /r/flashlight. Something I've seen a substantial increase in over the past few years is people who are surprised to learn that it's possible to have a built-in charger in combination with a field-replaceable battery. It doesn't take much explaining; it just hadn't occurred to them because the devices they're used to don't work that way.
People don't change batteries in their phones now because they'd need a heat gun and a soldering iron and they'd have even chances of starting a fire, breaking the phone, or succeeding in changing the battery without prior experience using those tools. A shop could do it reliably, but the shop will charge 100€ because it's time-consuming and error-prone. A 3-5 year old phone is often not worth 100€.
When a battery change costs 25€ and takes 5 minutes, people will do it all the time even if they don't know that today.
Still no real upgrade for hexbright, which is a shame.
I wish they were still being made. Fortunately, mine are still fine, and I expect to be able to repair them should they break. (xtal is a common failure point apparently)
Standard battery type is nice, but also has microusb charging port, the part that didn't age well.
Perhaps new circuit boards (with usb-pd charging, usb-c connector and mems oscillator) will be the way forward. It's definitely easier to order a pcb than the housing.
It used to be true that it made sense to replace your phone every few years because new ones were so much better. But like... I have a Pixel 8 and there's not really anything in a newer phone that's compelling enough to spend any money on...
Funnily enough I'm looking at getting a new phone because my pixel 6 battery no longer lasts 9am until 6pm without a mid-day charge -- I looked at the latest pixels (10) and they looked neat, but expensive; so took a look at the 9's, and saw they're basically exactly the same at 60% the price; then looked at the 8's and they're basically the same except 40% the price...
I agree, but also battery life has significantly improved over the last decade. Every phone I or my friends have replaced recently has been because the screen has broken. I would put good money on this being true for most people.
I think if the EU really wanted to reduce phone waste they'd make it easier or cheaper to fix screens. Still, this doesn't seem like a terrible move. I bet you can make it relatively easy to replace batteries without compromising much. Look at the Macbook Neo for example.
I honestly know I could “optimize” my phone replacement schedule based on resale values of phones etc, but for the last ~15ish years I just replace my iPhone when the battery starts shitting itself (3-5 years each in my experience)
This is going to be harder, or, at least, harder to replace your current phone with something objectively better. RAM and Flash shortages / high prices are likely going to last for years, wars are additionally jeopardizing production of electronic components, and the current crop of mobile devices is already insanely powerful. It's going to be pretty hard to sell most people an upgrade that feels meaningful when it's going to be like 30% more expensive.
Running AI locally could be a big selling point for an upgrade, but see the problems with RAM and general production capacity overload. I's not going to be a mass-market thing.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
But what if you asked the right question, "what is the biggest problem with your phone?"
Most would answer, "the battery dies too soon. It doesn't last all day like it used to."
> you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery"
Before that, you wrote "One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are" and it's exactly what I could say here. Not everyone has lots of money and for some people extending the life of their phones is important. They really do wish they could replace the battery without hassle and without paying a shop to do it.
With the storage cost crisis which will make future phone more expensive I'm sure a lot of people will wish they could prolong the lifetime of theri current device with a battery swap.
> I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Possibly true, and equally true of the screen, the charging port, or any other component.
"Repairability" isn't a feature people list unprompted, it's a property they notice the moment a £5 part bricks their phone.
The street-corner survey tells you what people currently notice, not what they'd value if the option existed.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new phone
In a market where batteries are glued in and replacement costs a meaningful fraction of a new device, of course people upgrade on that timeline. Change the cost structure and the behaviour changes with it.
Fair point that we'd want data, but the original claim rests on the same intuition, just pointed the opposite way.
The broader framing (that repairability is an idiosyncratic preference being imposed on a majority who don't want it) gets this backwards. Most people don't want to care about repairability, in the same way most people don't want to care about food safety standards. They want the option to exist without having to think about it. That's what the law provides.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Are you sure about this? I've heard this complaint from a lot of non-tech people who are old enough to remember flip phones with replaceable batteries. It might be age related.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone.
Not true. In recent years smartphones do not advance much, and would be perfectly fine to keep working if not for the dying battery.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
The degree of "possible" varies greatly depending on the available expertise and spare parts. Right now in EU it's cost prohibitive for both coz the special labor required is expensive and almost no official spare parts for consumers. So of coz this will be no data to support your claim.
I think the data for your last sentence does exist. When Apple was forced to replace broken batteries on the 12, lots of people opted to replace the phone and there was a corresponding drop in iPhone sales.
It’s a pretty commonly used canonical example of revealed preferences.
I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.
In fact, the only place I would ever expect somebody to claim otherwise is here.
I'd love thick phone with big battery, the current ones are already thin enough to be uncomfortable without a case, but the available models seem to be "ok if you want battery you want some rugged brick 3 android versions behind with everything else worse"
> I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.
Well, yes it's quite easy to argue against strawmen. I don't know anyone who would favor a built-in shoehorn over a replaceable battery either.
Although on your waterproof point, that's just a single dimension metric used for comms. It's not really about specifically descending to 100m. A 100m rated device responds better to water. In a general sense, it's more robust. Even if I don't go diving.
I know plenty. But not among the 18-20 year olds that do not know it any different, sure. But certainly my grandpa. Just thinking that you do not need a power-bank and just bring an extra battery on a longer trip will get millions of people interested.
Counter-point - people might not know what they want until they experience it.
Yeah, for someone that changes phone every 3 years or earlier, that's not a desired feature.
But many people did that change precisely because battery got weak, and there have been less and less reasons to keep on the most modern model for a while now.
I appreciate such a law very much. I find it very irritating how people always want new phones. And I think there are three major reasons to upgrade to a new phone:
1. lifestyle
2. software updates
3. battery capacity
While it is hard to change the first, the other two can be influenced by laws. And while the second is rather complex, the third is quite simple. Since the manufacturers have few incentives to produce phones with replaceable batteries, there are very few options on the market to choose from. Most have other major limitations, like slow CPU/GPU, crappy cameras, or else.
So eliminating one factor of unnecessary waste is absolutely a good idea. I just hope it doesn't backfire in some weird way. And I don't say that replaceable batteries don't come at a cost, they do. But that cost is much lower than many assume and not that easy to measure, because currently, you can compare only apples with oranges.
Are laws typically enacted to compel companies to follow consumer demand? I think that’s what the market itself is best at.
Instead this law is designed to provide the public with a good everyone can benefit from - less waste of valuable electronic components polluting our environment.
And even if those same consumers would choose a thinner phone over a replaceable battery, they will probably also enjoy being able to fully charge it more often for less money.
Half of cellphone users hold onto phone for 3+ years and experience battery degradation, and cell phone battery life is the #1 complain/concern about cellphone users. They might not immediately demand swappable batteries (particularly if they're too young to have ever owned a cellphone with swappable batteries) but I suspect if you prompted them, that the response rate would be very high, and that this isn't just an echo chamber concern.
I think that’s the wrong way of framing it. If, before the launch of the iPhone, you asked what people wanted from their phones you’d be there a very long time before anyone described something like an iPhone (no buttons, capacitive touch interface, etc). And yet, once they were offered it, people flocked to it.
This regulation is targeted to devices with poor battery lives. Just because it hasn’t occurred to people to ask for the feature doesn’t mean they won’t appreciate it.
That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.
But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.
This doesn't require the battery to be replaceable. It requires either the battery to still be good after 1000 charges or for it to be replaceable, either one.
Although some of this depends on how you define replaceable.
A quick google will show you’re relying too much on your own views of what people desire for phone improvements.
This law will lead to much needed changes and improvements in a mature and arguably stale market.
> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Yes, and if you asked every passerby what feature they would like to add to the streets, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish there were more accessibility ramps".
Luckily for us, we're not governed by "passerby" people.
E.g. most peoples don't really think or ask that their tap water be free of cholera and other harmful substances, and yet we might want to make sure that continues to be the case. So it's not strong argument worth arguing about.
The real argument is - how much a compromise a replaceable vs non-replacable battery is. And I suspect the biggest part of non-replaceable batteries is actually superficial vanity considerations (gee, is it 7mm or 6.5mm), and planed obsolescence making more money. But the technical aspects are still a valid debate.
Me and partner are both on iPhone 14 Pro. And this is more than powerful and sufficient for our daily use, except the battery is around 82%. I'd happily replace the battery right now for a more powerful one.
You can pay Apple to replace it for you, and the cost is not that high. £90 or so.
If the battery swap fails, you’ll get a as-new replacement phone and you also won’t be charged.
In exchange for this monetary cost and the inconvenience of leaving your phone at an Apple Store for 1 hour; you get peace of mind and a highly rated water/dust proof phone.
(Seriously, I’ve seen people diving with iPhones - no case - recording videos.)
>compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
What sort of compromise do you envision? I mean, toasters still have a crumb tray on the bottom that open so you can clean them even though no one does. Am I "missing out" on sleek, streamlined toaster designs because manufacturers feel they have to put a door in the bottom?
The biggest problem with my phone is that it took too long to find one that isn't comically large (I have an iPhone 13 Mini). The second biggest problem is that the battery is not what it used to be. It lasts 2 days on a full charge instead of 3. The battery will need to be replaced in a few years.
I feel like I will be using this phone until it crumbles to dust. Apple shows no interest in making decently sized phones. I would support the EU enacting legislation to enforce at least one phone in each lineup to be no bigger than 60 mm x 125 mm. (iPhone Mini is ok, but it's still bigger than what I prefer.)
Smaller and lighter phones are an accessibility concern. Miniaturization has been the goal for computers since they were invented. It is incomprehensible that designers and manufacturers are reversing course. My options right now are basically do nothing or replace my phone with a watch.
I used to be in this camp, and before we had the charge limit and power saving mode it was true, but now? I'm no longer sure.
Like, I've had my phone for 6 years now and the battery is still going strong with the 80% charge limit always on throughout its lifetime. Meanwhile the USB-c port is shot to fuck and disconnects constantly, it can't connect to 5G, leaving me without a connection in lots of locations cause there are no fallback towers, and the OS support has basically been over for a year now. Cameras are no longer up to snuff either and I could use a storage upgrade.
My previous phone had a replacable battery, which I replaced once before the GPS and wifi chip died and turned it into an air gapped brick. Everything else seems to fail at a similar rate.
Still it's not really about if it lasts as long or not. It's about having the right to repair devices and to reduce waste at large. First batteries, then displays, main boards, etc. Each law builds on the previous one as precedent.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone
Why? My phone works almost perfectly still three and a half years after I bought it. Except the battery lasts shorter.
If I go to battery health in settings it says:
> Important Battery Message
> Your battery's health is significantly degraded.
An Apple Authorised Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity.
> Find Your Service Options
Aside from my current phone, I also have a very old iPod Touch. That old iPod Touch would have been usable still as well, if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes somewhere around 10 minutes of active use until it goes from full charge to zero charge. In other words, unusable for bringing with me anywhere plainly because of the battery.
Replaceable battery would have been great. Both for my iPhone and my iPod Touch. Even if it meant they would have been a bit thicker than they currently are.
The battery in my iPhone 11 pro (6.5 years old) is still basically fine as long as I charge it every day. None of my previous smart phones were able to keep enough charge to be useful after 3-4 years.
"…by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone."
Why? There have been few new features in recent years and new phones have restrictions not wanted by many. Google is closing the Android ecosystem and making it more proprietary so I'll keep my phone as long as I'm able.
The non-replaceable battery has to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on consumers. It's great that it's about to be broken.
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
Not really. The battery just needs to have a connector rather than soldered, and no other things blocking the battery once the back-case is opened. Realistically, a service shop will do the replacement like how watch-batteries are typically replaced.
I don't know, I see people every day using old smartphonereachinfg for a power outlet everywhere they can because their phone do not last a day. Most think going to a shop to ask them to replace the battery will cost an arm.
I think that law doesn't even go far enough, they should standardize a battery format. When like me you are used to open smartphones and replace batteries you realize how very similar they are all in footprint and could be compatible with each other with very minimal effort. If there were only a couple of standardized formats you could find new batteries in every small shop/airports whatever and easily have spares. Chance is that other electronic devices or toys would also adopt them.
I had a perfectly fine iPhone 11 I bought new. The first thing I replaced in it was battery. I had to pay for “genuine” Apple battery + certified laboratory. The price was higher than the price of my iPhone as second hand, but I liked this phone.
Then I sold it, because I ran out of 64GB space. If I could add an sd card, I would probably use this phone longer, instead of contributing to consumerism and creating more e-waste.
I wish that people would think about sustainability and using their devices for longer rather than chasing “new and shiny” every year Apple releases the “best iPhone we ever made”
> asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, [...] before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'....Henry Ford
Nobody cares about repairability....until they are hit hard by it.
Anecdote: Around 5y ago, the lightning connector of my wife's iPhone died after 3y usage.
We brought it to an Apple Store and the official answer was "Sorry, we don't fix that on this model. Here is a 200€ discount on a new one"... The phone was still worth >900€ at the time.
Let's be clear: This kind of commercial practice are unacceptable both ecologically and ethically speaking. It is terrible customer service.
A lot of high end phones (outside Apple) at the time would have their USB-C port fixed in matter of few hours for <100€ in any random "I Fix it" store.
With the battery no longer a concern, more people will opt to buy used phones rather than cheap new phones.
Som even if most people change phone before the battery gets really bad (I doubt that this is really the case), the end result will still be that fewer new phones will be purchased.
Now we just need a law that requires hardware makers unlock their devices when they stop providing updates.
Modern iPhone batteries are basically user replaceable are they not? They are metal encased and the adhesive can be electronically disabled. They don't seem "worse" to me?
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
Sometimes we have to acknowledge the externalities of our lifestyle and take things down a notch.
Even if most throw out their old phones, now at least it'll be trivial to shuck these devices to get the battery for recycling, while sending the device for refurb or further recycling.
A key component to effective recycling is separation, and this is one step in that direction
More replaceable batteries can have secondary effects that most people would probably like though - like the ability to by a used phone on ebay/FB marketplace that doesn't have an abysmal battery.
So I guess newer iPhones and iPad allow you charge up to 80%, which extends battery life, for idiosyncratic reasons? I’m sure there must have been a reason and demand for that.
I guess I run my iPhone on low battery mode a lot, due to idiosyncratic reasons too. Maybe I do.
Apple battery replacement costs anywhere from $70 (for a ~$400 phone) to $120 (for a ~$1000+ phone). In many global markets you can get a brand new phone for that much.
I'm curious about the environmental argument here. At face value it makes sense, but is there some hard data that shows that there is a meaningful number of consumers that buy new phones only (or "mostly") because of battery degradation?
The article (granted, probably not the best source of information) has some numbers like "number of phones sold", but doesn't actually tackle the crux of the issue: how many of those phone sales would be prevented by having user swappable batteries?
My previous phone was refurbished and was great in all ways except for battery life. I have now bought a new phone that I wouldn't have bought if batteries were replaceable.
Having said that, I do like having waterproof phones, and I expect this rule would make that harder.
In last 5 years or so me and my wife have purchased 5 new phones. Except for one, where the phone slipped from a flat countertop due to having a glass back, in all other cases the reason was battery life getting worse, with no other issues with the phone at all. So I have to disagree with you here.
With the replaceable batteries the people at least have a choice. Without the option for a battery swap you had to buy a new device and throw away a otherwise totally fine one.
I currently have a 12 mini, but I'd love to go back to the iphone 4 size, or even a blackberry curve. Would be fine for comms, and I suspect I'd spend less time doom-scrolling on it.
> this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
Okay, you're claiming two things: (i) replaceable batteries will compromise some other features, and (ii) most people want those features more than they want a replaceable battery.
Can you name 3 of those features? I personally can't.
If we run this experiment and most people say they wish they could replace their battery would you concede you are actually the one with idiosyncratic preferences?
most of the time I replace my phone because the battery degraded so badly and a replacement is expensive.
Its not enough by itself that the phone has amassed scratches and is 20% slower or has a 30% worse camera optic than the current generation, or that updates will only continue for a year or two more.
But the slowdown (associated with battery degradation btw) and fact that it doesn’t get me through a whole day definitely move the needle into me buying a new phone.
No one cares, and having replaceable batteries is not gonna make any difference software and hardware support as usual will drive most people to upgrade their phones or their computers or anything else electronic for that matter.
Owner of an 11Pro iPhone soon to be obsolete after seven years. I probably will upgrade sometime in the next two years nine years with the same electronic device is long enough.
I got my moneys worth. very satisfied with the longevity and resale value of most of the Apple products in comparison to the competition.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone.
Extreme consumer brain coupled with privilege. Billions of people can’t afford a new phone every couple years, they buy things and use them until they are past the point of repair, only buying a replacement when they have no other choice.
Can you honestly even say this year’s new flagships, or any from the last decade, represent meaningful improvement for most people outside the tech bubble and influencer sphere? Smartphones have been “good enough” for a long time.
"Normal people" (tiresome and unnecessarily reductive meme) do not necessarily care about how it's implemented, but they certainly care about planned obsolescence, which is the target of this law. It just another way to enforce reasonable service life and reduce e-waste. That's the goal of this regulation.
Right to repair has never been about requirement to repair. Obviously we can't force people to repair their phones instead of buying a new one, because that would involve replacing the market economy with a planned economy. This would be extremely difficult to pull off and would be wildly unpopular.
At the same time, 5.78 billion people have a smartphone worldwide. It is obviously wildly unsustainable to live in a world where 5.78 billion people have to throw away their old phone and buy a new one every 2-3 years. However, phone manufacturers have figured out that if they force people to, they can amass ridiculous levels of wealth because the demand for new phones would be constantly high. So obviously the incentives here are completely wrong. This has happened before with lightbulbs in the 20th century and is a legitimate form of market failure that needs to be resolved, as it wastes a lot of consumer spending to replace what consumers already had (like the parable of the broken window).
For many years since phone manufacturers started gluing phones together with a consumable part inside, consumers have been denied the ability to replace their battery. Where the option does exist, it's often very inconvenient, difficult, or with a price inflated to be nearly as expensive as buying a new one.
Phones stopped advancing significantly many years ago. Phone manufacturers now re-release practically the same phone with slight CPU and camera improvements, something completely unheard of until relatively recently. Lately the main marketing trend for new phones has been AI, but this is a nonsense trend because most of modern AI runs in the cloud, and very few are actually utilizing any local AI features, so the only "AI" thing about the phone is just a preinstalled ChatGPT-like app you can get on any other phone. So clearly they have run out of things to improve, and things to market around. In a normally functioning market, this would mean phones have become a solved technology and we can stop replacing our phones as often, maybe once every 10 years if you're careful with your phone. But this is not what we see precisely because phone manufacturers have been manufacturing problems that are most easily solved by buying a new phone, which they will push people to do whatever way they can for profit. The phone industry has failed to regulate itself, and so this is why we are seeing a push for this type of regulation.
Apple is about to deprecate the iphone 11/SE 2020 version. Am gonna repurpose them as webcams given the 12MP camera put in there is arguably better than the brand new ones they put on new macs.
The phone now has a limited lifespan though because of this prior stupidity where eventually am gonna get into spicy pillow territory. At that point the phone prematurely dies.
We are going into a period where we are throwing away devices with 12mp+ cameras, and processors arguably faster than most desktops. It was arguable when the phones were old and legacy, but at this point the cameras on there are stupidly good.
We need these phones to be repurposed for a second life and actually capture their manufacture energy costs.
Frankly, if Apple allowed old iphones to be used for server usage, it is kind of crazy how efficient per dollar that would be.
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
I challenge you to give me an example of how this law might result in a phone that is worse for most people.
This law does not require a slide-off phone cover. It does not require a screwed-on backplate. It does not forbid the use of chemical adhesives. It does not stipulate how a phone should or shouldn't be designed.
It basically just requires the manufacturer to offer replacement batteries and to enable the replacement to be done with commercially available tools. I'd wager the overwhelming majority of phones are already compliant, pending availability of a replacement battery from the manufacturer.
I'm quite confident I could replace the battery on my Sony Xperia 1 iii with a heat gun and my basic iFixit toolkit.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby if they want their phone to have a replaceable battery, I don't think you would be there very long before receiving a "yes". I think that's a more honest framing of the question.
> I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone
How could they replace their batteries if they wanted to, unless the manufacturer makes it possible? The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
At the very least, we'd need only data showing that that number is non-zero. From where did you get the idea that we need to prove "most" people would choose to take advantage of this option?
> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.
Consumers may not know that a feature is something they want until they don't have it anymore.
Invert the situation. If every iPhone in history had a replaceable battery, until 2027 when the newest iPhone did not have a replaceable battery, I think we can all agree that the uproar would be significant.
I provide food and services for the homeless in my area working with friends outside of any non-profit. That the phone people get from non-profits become unusable in some number of months is a big complaint. Batteries dying is significant part of this (lack of security updates is another part). Replaceable batteries are something that a lot of people would want (especially the option to have several batteries).
Just as much, there's a certain HN complaint form that basically goes "any complaint about the crap that sold now is just programmer/civil-rights-fan/etc idiosyncrasy, real people want exactly this crap 'cause markets never lie".
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.
It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".
Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.
I think you're plain wrong. I have never talked to anyone in my life about phones who didn't want replaceable batteries and wasn't annoyed by the throwaway culture. It's a top priority for the people I know, though by far not important enough for most of them to go for something like a Fairphone.
However, these preferences don't really matter anyway because nobody is forced to replace the battery and not buy a new phone when their phone has replaceable batteries.
Following the bottle-cap madness, I don't think any current data shows the actual issue was resolved. Even worse, the effect on marine life is still not measured, and afaik reduction of harm was the primary goal. Instead of brutally high fines on fishing net waste, we got bottle-cap madness.
We have so much experience with scientific method, yet these massive decisions are adhoc, that's how the whole world works. We never tested what would happen by allowing mass production of plastic, or phones, or whatever, so these antipatches are going by the "feels" as well, with no individual taking responsibility for failures.
A bit off topic, but I recently had a drink that didn't have the attached bottle cap while travelling abroad, and my god, was it a minor annoyance to have to hold the bottle cap in my hand while drinking. I also almost dropped it because I expected it to stay attached. Funny how fast we adapt.
There is monitoring of beach pollution but data publication is typically delayed, like, we know it went down by 30% from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021, we will have data on a regulation that went into force in late 2024 only in a few years.
I envision somone keeping a phone long time, not updating it and evtualluy the spying hooks get obsolete and so phone gets more secure, as tech companies move on with new apis and drop support for the old ones. This might be the biggest win. Ms still has customers using win95
It would take a great deal of lawmaking to make phones more worse, for most people, than phone manufacturers and mobile app developers already do. You want to talk about idiosyncratic preferences, really? Here?
Buddy. You are on the Hacker News. It's like you wanted to get skewered on purpose. Of course we want replaceable batteries! Anyone over the age of 30 will remember the convenience of throwing another charged battery in your car/backpack/briefcase and heading out for the day. Carefree. Also, what a treat to be able to properly restart or power off my phone (no, I mean REALLY power it off) by ripping out the battery!
What's next, having TV remote controls with non-removable rechargeable batteries, for the "convenience"?! Gimme a break. I love tech progress, but leave your hands off my removable batteries! And my 3.5mm audio jack, now that I think about it! :-)
> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are.
Least self-aware HN user out there.
Do you really think the European commission got lobbied hard by HN folks?
This law will make phones better for most people, who would rather keep their phone for a decade rather than having to every three years buy a new phone optimized for some vanity metric that looks good on Engadget reviews.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Not my experience at all. The (few) non-tech people I've talked to about phones soon getting batteries again like it. People believe the idea that non-removable batteries are a conspiracy by the phone companies to sell you more phones the same way cartels manipulated the lightbulb market (Phoebus cartel).
My own hesitation with HM echo chamberification is federation. Nobody cares. And until you can point to a concrete benefit to end users, you should stop and think about why you’re pushing it this hard.
But I don’t think this is the case with phone batteries. I’ve had many conversations with friends and family that came down to replace the battery or upgrade the phone.
I feel the same way about soldered on CPUs, RAM and SSDs in laptops and other computers. The benefits of doing this are marginal at best. We all know the real reason is forced obsolescence.
We all know this is why battery replacement is hard too.
what are you on about? most people i know have 4 year old phones which are just fine and want only the battery changed. my phone was 6 years old this year and it hurt me that I had to change it because of the battery. otherwise it was a perfectly fine phone.
I certainly understand the value of replaceable batteries. OTOH, I'm concerned about what this will mean for how many common upper end phones are IP67 submersion rated. I don't want that to go back to being a feature only of clunky super expensive phones, and I would rather have IP67 over a replaceable battery.
Now, if I'm lucky, they will mandate both a replaceable battery and that the phones be ip55 or better, after battery replacement.
What good is a replaceable battery if the device becomes obsoleted by changing communication standards first? How long before 4G and 5G are phased out? What if we could have forward compatibility in our mobile network protocols?
Recently replaced the battery and charging port of my Fairphone. 5 screws, two plucked components, done. Hopefully this means that soon you won't have to buy a specific company's phone for this marvelous experience.
The Fairphone 5 is only IP55 rated (dust protected, and water droplet resistant). Most flagship phones are IP68 rated (fully dust sealed, and water submersible). IP68 phones are sealed with a single-use adhesive gasket, and replacing battery requires breaking (and replacing) this seal. If the seal is improperly applied, the phone is no longer protected from dust or water.
There is also a middle ground of IP67 from the Samsung Galaxy S5. I'm personally fine with the Fairphone level (they clearly prioritise easy and frequent disassembly; that's their entire brand) but for someone who wants to be able to submerge it just below the surface and walk through pouring rain for hours, that would be enough
While this is a good step forward, it feels like complaining about the 0.025% of plastic from straws in the ocean while ignoring the 75% of plastic from fishing nets.
I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
Useful life of most of the cars is on par with their battery longevity, as long as you have proper thermal management and your usage patterns are not outliers.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
Cars have basically unlimited useful life because every component (arguably with the exception of the frame) can be repaired. It's surprisingly affordable to rebuild an engine and make it as good as new. I can buy a car made in the 50s today, that's a 70 year old car. And I can keep servicing it and keep it going for another 70 years.
The main enemy of cars is rust, but for that there are cost effective mitigations now. The real reason people ditch cars is always they get tired of the old car and want something more modern, not because the car is at the end of its "useful life".
Batteries are not like that. They actually have a useful life that degrades over time, which makes them non-servicable.
What I would like to see is serviceable batteries, where you can replace individual damaged cells and keep the battery going. Everyone would benefit from that, especially the used EV market, which would help stem the massive depreciation hits EV buyers are facing now.
Why not ask me my motivations instead of assuming them?
I'm not fine with the range; I bought an EV to stop burning fossil fuels, my 24-year-old RAV4 was on its last leg, and there was a $6K bonus for trade-ins (my RAV4 would have been about $5k in parts).
Because I want to explore the interior of BC, drive across Canada on fewer charges, visit family, go on road trips, etc. Just yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to charge my Kona. It's a long and boring story, but suffice to say our charging infrastructure here sucks, and is not as simple, quick, or convenient as "tap-to-pay" (with a credit card) at petrol stations.
> Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
FWIW, that is actually a thing you can do. It is mostly done for SUVs and pickups since the primary use case for the extra range is off-pavement driving and the upgrade is simpler.
That will probably come when EV marketshare is higher and innovation plateaus. I definitely appreciate the phone thing as someone typing from an iPhone SE. I also think phone batteries degrade faster than cars, right? I think my phone is from 2022 and I’m definitely starting to feel it.
I don't see how that's even remotely comparable. It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one. You will be able to buy a new battery for your car, that's already guaranteed in the EU - but it will be the same capacity as what you got.
I don't know why is this even an argument really, like.....in a petrol car, do you expect to be able to fit it with a bigger fuel tank after 10 years? or a more powerful engine? Until very recently even software updates to the infotainment weren't really a thing, if you wanted a newer interface you had to change the entire car(I'm not saying this was a good thing, just that generally the expectation is that the product will work the way it was when you bought it).
> It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one.
That was totally a thing for phones in the past. Depending on the model you could get a larger pack that had a bulge on the back of the device to have extra battery time. There was a similar thing with a number of laptops.
I do agree its kind of a questionable thing on something like a car. I imagine packaging concerns would really get in the way of adding a bit extra.
Disagree. I want a replaceable battery in my phone. They can get to extensible memory next. And it's not because you don't care about something that you should remove this freedom from me. And don't tell me that the market will self regulate in the best interests of the consumer or other nonsense like that.
It's not for me at least. Nobody can prove their inner intent to you but most people will know from themselves that their actions are sometimes misunderstood (especially when something worked/came out badly) but that they genuinely mean well
I worry that this ends up, like other EU consumer-protection regulation, as an own goal.
- The cheapest phones available in the EU (and purchasable online) all have glued-in batteries, not swappable ones. Forcing consumers to use phones with swappable batteries may just mean that the bottom of the market disappears, and consumers will be left paying more for their phones. And would they rather pay less or have swappable batteries?
- This will cause some cascade of engineering changes, which will make phones thicker or less waterproof. Again, it's not clear to me that the tradeoff is being fairly reflected here.
- efficient vaccuums
- efficient bulbs
- no roaming costs if somebody leaves a message on your voicemail
- insurance companies and banks can't charge you as they see fit
- toxic free food
- toxic free meat
- farming without killing the rest of the living things
- Best of all: China and USA can't dictate the rules everytime
Like the experience of opening any website for the last decade and being greeted with a cookie popup is more the direction the parent comment was intending I'm assuming.
Some regulations are good, some are bad, all have second and third order effects that need to be weighed against benefits.
I have never used a phone without easily replaceable battery (where "easily" means no screwdriver necessary, just pop the backcover and pull the battery out). It just happened this way, but I think I'd refuse to buy one anyway, as aside of obvious repairability and maintainability issues having the battery sealed in is also a big factor that makes dropping the phone so dangerous. When I drop my phone, the battery is easily set free to disperse its kinetic energy away from more fragile parts of the device, so it's much harder to break the phone this way. I have made some small dents and scratches from drops over the years, but no serious damage.
Yeah this is what I don’t get. People are actually blowing hundreds of dollars on new phones rather than having Apple (not the cheapest option certainly) replace the battery for $89
They should have standardized 3 to 5 battery sizes (and their connectors, voltages, etc.), so that the same battery could be used across many different devices, which would bring down the cost even more.
How about computers to have replaceable SSDs? There's no point you can exchange the battery when the hard-soldered SSD dies first. (I had more dead SSDs than batteries)
They (Samsung, Apple, etc.) should never have been allowed to glue it behind the screen. Threaded fasteners and a silicone gasket cover is good enough for 99.999% of the public use-case.
Via firsthand observation of people in the world. Go ahead and check the number of people on the street that need the edge case of using the phone under IEC standard 60529. Now go ahead and check out how many people on the street want to be able to replace their battery.
This is a bad development. This is likely the end of waterproof phones in the EU market. Customers preferred phones that had non-removable batteries. Previously all phones had replaceable batteries. This is due to market forces.
As long as it does not make the phone bigger or compromise the water resistance, I support the requirement.
But it is not super high on my list. Every 2 or 3 years I pay less than $100 to have a new OE battery installed, takes about an hour. There are other features I would put a higher priority on - like a good small phone option now and again.
Same but from the other side. The new phone (without SD, removable battery, or headphone jack) is already acquired and laying in my drawer, but I have yet to bite into the lemon and start making the switch. Too damn convenient compared to the abstract threat of software updates... I'm dreading the new situation so much
This must be paired with strong lithium battery import regulation. Even the highest quality OEM batteries can fail in dangerous ways (See many models of Samsung, Surface or Macbook). Cheap, dangerous Chinese imports must be eliminated as an option, because the secondhand owners doing this replacement will likely buy the cheapest replacement battery available on the market.
Will this affect the water-resistance of current iPhones? I thought that was why the batteries are not easily replaceable by users, because of the seals/gaskets.
Most wristwatches provide much stronger water resistance while still being very user serviceable with a $20 watch tool kit. Whatever the phone makers are peddling are mostly excuses.
There are multiple watches, cameras, etc., with a lot of physical buttons even, all with replaceable batteries and weather-resistant (or even better, water proof). This is a bad excuse.
water resistance + easily battery exchange for repairs is very viable (AFIK always had been, too.)
like this law isn't about users causally replacing batteries like on very old phones
but about an repair shop easily and without risk of breaking your phone being able to replace it without only holding on your phone for idk. 10 minutes
So that you can just drop by (once they have the replacement parts) wait a moment and have a new battery.
This means in the worst case something like needing to a add a bit of additional seal/wax/glue or similar to improve sealing is very much fully viable (Id the sealing agent is generally buy able.)
It just is something you have to design in from the get to go. And it's easier to not do so at all. And maybe if you obsess if your phone is 1/10mm smaller or not that gets in your way too. And not doing so is more profitable as people will buy successor products more likely, even if just very slightly more likely.
But in general? That really isn't the problem.
Also even if it where the problem. What is better? Having a less waterproof phone, but not needing to buy a new one for another one or two years or having to buy one now?
While I'd be perfectly content with an IP67 iPhone with interchangeable battery, the current iPhones are IP68 which is a significant step up in dust/water ingress protection. IP68 devices generally require a sealant, IP67 normally doesn't, making it easier to do a battery hatch etc.
Removing it is one of the most annoying things ever in a phone. Yes, Bluetooth is getting better, but the jack always works perfectly. Why can't we have both?
The IP rating will degrade the moment they bring it back. The jacks will either corrode or let water inside the phone and kill it entirely. Nobody wants to deal with that giant hole.
This is about user replaceable batteries, which is subtly different for me. Batteries that can be replaced by a shop, with some specialized tools and knowledge are important to me from a sustainability perspective since that extends the life of the phone.
Batteries that can be popped out and replaced by your average consumer are something beyond that, and have certain consumer benefits like being able to bring along a backup or something, but aren't that important to me.
I hate to say it, but the lack of removable batteries serves a purpose. It wasn't done just because 'screw consumers'.
It was done because:
* It makes phones massively easier to waterproof
* It allows for larger batteries
* It allows for more compact and lighter phones
Consumers, based on what they buy, have shown again and again that they want these features.
It also simplifies manufacture and lowers costs, which everyone likes.
I like removable batteries. If I had the option, I'd get a phone with that feature. But I know that I am certainly in the minority, as is almost everyone in this thread.
It's also worth pointing out that these days, battery and software have advanced to the point where degradation is quite slow in many cases. The phone will often outlive its useful life due to specs rather than battery.
In order to have my iPhone 11's battery replaced by my local apple authorised repair shop, inexplicably I have to leave my phone with them for days. Since the phone is old they have to order the battery from Apple and that could take up to a week, according to them. Of course it's impossible to stay without my phone for a week+ so my only option is to buy a new phone if I want to fix my battery capacity issues.
There aren’t any 3rd party repair shops close to me that are in Apple’s Independent Repair Provider network, so if I were to choose a random repair shop my only real option with them would be a battery from a 3rd party manufacturer, which I’ve had bad experiences with before. I wouldn’t mind as much if I could easily replace it again myself if it started swelling like last time.
This is good. I recently had to replace a generally working phone because the battery was dying and there was no cost effective & reliable means of replacing.
A proper gasket and screws needs to be the standard solution here.
It seems like the whole world could massively benefit from this much like the other great innovation out of the EU -- the Common Charger Directive (aka USB-C).
- rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
- availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
Thank you, EU, for having the courage to pass the pro-consumer regulations that my own government lacks. Often, as happened when the iPhone got rid of the proprietary Lightning connector, the benefits extend well beyond your borders.
The right to repair legislation the EU passed is heartening. Now, let's see if they actually enforce it.
There is a shocking amount of apathy on the part of people who think this doesn't affect them because they personally have no desire to use their car out of warranty or to take a car to an independent mechanic. It affects them because it affects resale price, which affects depreciation which hits their pocketbooks directly. Even if they lease the car.
There is a reason that EVs are getting hammered and even ICE vehicles are seeing steeper depreciation curves, and that's because they are becoming more disposable and harder to repair. People are talking about "useful life" of a car as if this was a disposable consumer device, and not a durable good that can be repaired and maintained for decades as long as the ability to replace components is out there. Toyota famously said "Our mission is to build cars that last for 30 years in the third world" and what do you know Toyotas don't depreciate nearly as much as other cars and people still pay 5 figures for 20 year old landrovers.
We also used to build toasters and refrigerators that easily last 50, 60 years or even 100 years if properly maintained. There is no reason cars can't do the same, and for some cars this is possible, but not for modern cars and certainly not for modern EVs. This can change.
[offtopic] Ive always wondered why a conversion has not been offered ( by someone ) for apple phones to make, it so the battery can be replaced by end user? It would be a case modification somehow. Some kind of new "back"
You mean the kind of "first" that comes right after shattered screens, worn batteries, and loose charging ports? :P
I agree in spirit though: storage chips wearing out seems to be common from my limited experience and it would be good if you could solder on, or slide in, a new chip with some standard procedure
So Apple will skip the iPhone 18 replaceable battery? I will wait another year to upgrade my 7-year-old phone, but I wouldn't buy 18 if they don't include this.
Both options have pros and cons but IMHO the cons for replaceable are more.
Since 2020 phone hardware and especially battery has become much better, reliable and long lasting, at least at not dirt cheap ones. It will fail long after the screen brakes or the software updates stop. And a replaceable battery degrades the design.
On the other side a new battery makes an old phone like new. But again it only costs 15-20E to change it in a non-repl phone.
The only real reason to promote battery repl is to reduce e-waste.
So this means no iPhone Air 2 in Europe? I can hardly see Apple wiggle around the special tools requirement when these batteries are glued and sealed shut in the devices.
[edit] didn’t see the fine print with the cycles requirement etc. so it seems Apple etc is still safe.
Aside from an easily swap-able battery I would love for an iPhone with a double thickness screen that was less susceptible to cracking and built-in rubber bumpers so I wouldn't need a case.
And next we could have mandatory security patching for 5 years to make it worth replacing the battery on an old phone. I would say right to repair should apply to the firmware/OS as well.
Earlier this year I downgraded my S24 ultra to an iphone 13 mini and then to the first gen iphone SE. I replaced the battery myself on the SE and couldn't be happier. Less screen time and more IRL time. People should just use less of their phones and for battery longevity they should not let their phones go daily below 20%.
No one on this planet should use their phone more than 2 hours per day. Period. More is just plain stupid.
It's interesting to see almost all the exact sentiment. I think barring some niches, most people are happy with USB-C transition.
I understand the scepticism but the expectation of "perfection" from regulators (incremental improvement disliked) while fanfare for incremental startup / tech improvement is a weird, cognitive dissonance of HN
It probably makes things easier, but its unlikely that the industry that found a way to make foldables waterproof couldn't figure out a way to put rubber gaskets on battery covers. And in fact, they did, there were several devices introduced in the transition period that had both features.
Rubber gaskets wear out. Best practice is to replace them every time you open the cover. We can put them in, but the replacement battery better come with the gasket because you can't safely replace the battery without a new gasket.
Galaxy S5 was IP67-rated (1 metre depth, 30 minutes) and had a user-replaceable back cover / battery
Also a notification LED, OLED screen, bezels to pick the device up by, headphone jack, unlockable, a continuous light sensor... peak smartphone, save perhaps for the meager 200 Hz accelerometer refresh rate (modern phones have 500 Hz usually, I have no idea what for but I personally love toying with FFT plots)
Yes and don't forget consumer preferences. This is Hacker News where they are still clamoring for a "small smartphone" because everything else is too big. Shocker, small phones don't sell. Neither do bulky ones when compared to sleek iPhones.
Not sure if I should be repeating the same answer below each instance of the question but here goes: See the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example as having a good waterproofing rating and user-replaceable battery
Every post about the EU here gets absolutely flooded by negative comments of people who tell me that whatever the EU proposed won't work, governments shouldn't do these things, the proposed legislation is ineffective, it doesn't go far enough, they're just trying to extract money from our successful American companies, and so on and so forth. It's just a neverending diarrhoea of anti-government anti-European underbelly sentiment.
That sounds like seeing a pattern where there is none (apophenia). Do you have examples of posts that wouldn't be downvoted outside of times where Europe/Africa is awake, or that weren't only because it was posted outside of said hours?
This might be shifting us closer to worse overall design/performance to accommodate swapability. The pouch cells are very fragile, with the phone itself being the physical protection for the cell. If end users begin to handle these, you likely have to add additional packaging to the cell which increases the overall dimensions or reduces total capacity to maintain the same size.
Maybe it's for our own good, maybe we have to suck it up and lose a little capacity to meet sustainability goals. Or maybe this won't do much for the environment.
I am not sure people actually care that much about dimensions.
Most phones today only look thin on promotional material. With the massive camera bump that is sometimes thicker than the phone itself, and the way most people use cases, in the end, you have quite a brick. Also a glass back panel, which to me is one of the worst materials for that purpose, but it looks good on the store stand.
So to me, a removable battery will not affect the phone dimensions as much as it will affect the look, which may piss off the marketing guys, and I take it as a positive!
Seriously, bring back the removable plastic back covers, plastic may look cheap, but to me, it is the best material, and if you put on a case, as most people do, you won't even see it!
Obviously it helps with the design to embed. But it's also obvious so hard to replace batteries are by design to make those phones throw away after the 1000cycle or whatever batties last.
A good middle ground would have been to enforce an easy to replace specification..but then we are up to interpretation.
I know a common refrain with my friends is "IDGAF about an extra few centimeters, give me an audio jack". I think consumers are down for thicker phones if they get something for it. In this case, a phone that lasts longer
I think most (all?) would already comply. What laptop do you see as not having a user replacable battery? Even MacBook can be swapped out pretty easily [1].
I won't name brands, but there are lots of low cost "tablet with keyboard" laptops with glued battery. Just a couple of months ago I had to ditch one.
Anyway, if most comply, why not make it mandatory? Or are these kind of directives only aimed at picking fights with manufacturers?
Note that I am not suggesting that all laptops should have USB-C chargers, that's a separate directive. I mean user replaceable batteries available for at least 5 years, without requiring major surgery to replace.
MacBooks are not easy at all. I did it twice and it's an annoying, dangerous mess (danger of tearing the battery open). Apple won't even bother with it. If you want an "official job", they will just replace the whole top shell including the keyboard, because they can't be bothered to remove the glue. And of course it's expensive because of that.
Considering that this, and other, regulation is officially aimed at reducing e-waste, the EU should commit to publish independent data on the amount of e-waste and phones replacement rates now and every year afterwards in order to measure the real world impact.
Too often, including in HN comments, those regulations are presented as "obviously" good policies. Well, data are better than assumptions.
I don't know if this is standard, but at least for some previously enacted electronics regulations I know they look into the real-world effects. I think I was looking for information on how they calculate the battery life for the new smartphone energy labels (e.g. is the browsing test over WiFi or the LTE/NR modem) when I found some document about how much energy they're expecting to save with this regulation. It showed a base path of expected energy consumption development, and then how the regulation is expected to modify that
The shaded area is the effect that they think is attributable to regulations, e.g. -2.2TWh electricity per year in the category of phones and tablets when comparing 2010 and 2030
As another example, for "Servers and data storage products" they expect almost no change due to regulation: the consumption is expected to go from 48 to 67 TWh (2010 till 2030) and that it would have been 70 TWh without regulations. If I'm reading it right, this small improvement would be due to the 2019 "information requirement ... including the maximum allowed operating temperature for the equipment ... to stimulate data centres to choose equipment that supports higher operating temperatures, to enable further reduction of the cooling load."
Page 42 shows that they also take into account 'additional acquisition costs' (how much more expensive devices are because of this, I think that means?), but that this added expense is well below the energy costs that would have been incurred otherwise. Of course, that's what I'd say too about my regulations :) but I don't know of another information source for this so this is the best info I have atm
I don't think hackers (in the Hacker News sense of the word) are generally iphone users, considering apple's hostility and condescension towards customers, fighting consumer rights forced by regulators, and device lock-down. People who already compromised on that for a status symbol would probably take the shiny new toy over functionality, sure
> The move comes amid EU-wide efforts to cut the continent’s carbon footprint and tackle mounting waste [...]
...
> [...] if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased.
So if a family buys several phones and tablets that all use the same specialized tool to change their batteries they end up with several identical specialized tools?
From a reducing waste perspective wouldn't it be better to just require that the tool be available for free for some reasonable amount of time such as however long the manufacturer is required to support the device?
I honestly would not have upgraded my iPhone 13 Pro if I could have just swapped the battery. That phone seemed to get better battery life than current models.
I recently bought a Supernote Manta. It's an e-ink writing tablet. Guess what: it has a back which can be opened, and its innards are easily accessible. I could pop in an SD card, and the battery can be replaced, too. It's thin and light.
We are being gaslighted by Apple. They keep telling us that it's impossible to have a thin and light device with a user-replaceable battery, or even, heaven forbid, an SD card slot. I beg to differ: there are some compromises (it won't be as seamless perhaps and Jony Ive or whoever won't be able to wax poetic about the materials), but it can be done.
I would imagine something similar is true for waterproofing. There are certainly ways to have a separate battery and phone, with a waterproofed connector.
If this happens, all phones worldwide will have replaceable batteries. It makes no financial sense to have EU and non EU models of phones with seperate manufacturing lines...
I mean, I paid like $100 to have apple do it on my iphone 13 mini. It took a few hours and my phone works approximately like new. If a $800 phone's battery lasts 4 years, it's very much worth $100 to get even a couple more years out of it...
Next time I will also by previous generation rather than the newest model.
Now all we need is that they honor the requirement for at least one physical nano-SIM so that we are not beholden to carriers to do something as simple as switching phones when travelling--or in an emergency.
They’re just going to change the software for thebattery so that it only charges to 80% capacity so that it meets the requirement of 1000 cycles no one is actually getting replaceable batteries.
Edit: commercially available tools. All right so you just sell that tool on your shop.
Nfc tags don't have battery and they draw power from the em waves of the scanner. Maybe in a few centuries we will power our phones using the cell towers.
This is idiotic. What's next, disallowing unified memory or SoC with packaged memory? These people think they know better than world experts on these matters.
and now these voices from right wing, that EU is a communistic union resonate more and more.
Now they tell you what to do and how to do.not by market forces.
if anyone can replace the phone, it's much harder to track how it was recycle with phone with battery. same with cars btw.
they trying to change the world by just issuing the order. That usually never works fine.
Damn, recently I had a phone with a battery that wasn’t properly glued and it would turn off when shaken. I hope this doesn’t become the norm from now on.
Never had this issue with several cellphones I had in ye olden times when all cellphones had removable batteries. All it takes is a properly designed connector.
Yeah, none of my Nokias with a removable back cover and battery had that issue. What you realistically might've had was instead that you dropped your phone on the floor and the battery came flying out.
I am simply not a fan of this type of legislation. It reminds me of CA bullet button. I also don’t quite understand the purpose. Official retail cost from Apple in the US ~$120. Third-party you can usually get it around $60. Sure the battery does not have quick accessibility but I can replace it pretty cheaply.
Agreed. This rule will likely be irrelevant in 5-10 years when battery technology improves, and it has such a huge carve out (batteries that maintain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles are exempt) every phone manufacture can get around it. Phone makers can meet this regulation by artificially limiting battery capacity through software to protect battery health. Or they could put in a 10,000 mAh battery and only allow the user to use 8,000 of it, and use the rest as buffer.
A better example is the EU cookie consent law. The intent was to make websites stop using cookies, but what resulted was websites didn't change anything except put up annoying consent banners, and made the internet experience worse.
Sure but how does this legislation help that? Not to mention that would mean labor is going to be a lot cheaper so the largest cost may be the battery itself. That $60 would come down.
Phone manufacturers should be able to seal their phones to prevent unwanted substance egress and to compete on aesthetics. They should also make the seal breachable with consumer-grade hand tools like a hairdryer, suction cup, and plastic wedges.
The inside of the phone should use standard screws and securing mechanisms, and batteries should not be glued to the phone.
I actually really like what Apple's been doing with its new batteries by sealing them in metal. That way if a user is being careless and accidentally slips a screwdriver under the back of their phone, the risk that they puncture their battery and start a fire is greatly reduced.
It secures the most dangerous component of your device in a way that makes it easy for anyone to remove and replace safely. I'm sure Apple has a robot to rip the battery out of its case at its recycling plant, and if the phone gets dropped in a lake or something, if that battery eventually catastrophically fails, at least it's wrapped in a suit of armor.
Yikes, I don't live in the EU, but I absolutely don't want this. Maybe I'm mistaken and they could have achieved the same with removable batteries, but my phone is completely waterproof, dustproof, and has survived more than a few hard drops with no case. I would definitely take that over a replaceable battery. Again, I acknowledge they might not be mutually exclusive.
As the law is written, the latest iPhones, for example, would be compliant (battery is replaceable with commercially available tools under the self-repair program), and they are completely waterproof and dustproof. Some manufacturers now use glued seals for their phones and would probably need to change their approach in design, but I think the majority would be okay with minimal changes.
Like others have pointed out, if phones can certify using batteries with 1000 cycles of charge above 80%, they'll also be exempt, so this will likely only affect very cheap models.
With respect, maybe read the article? You're against it, because you didn't read what is being mandated and instead just invented worst-case scenarios instead. You're against your own Strawman.
The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools, if the manufacturer requires specialist tools then they must provide them for free.
Essentially they're banning specialized tools, and mandating that repair shops and consumers must be able to purchase replacement batteries for "at least five years."
For context the iPhone was already altered to be compliant with this law and none of the issues you raised were notably worse in the iPhone Air, or 17.
This likely will eliminate specialist software to "sync" batteries, and non-standard screws/attachment mechanisms.
> The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools
That's exactly what he's against, plus the premise "Making batteries removable prevents them from being waterproof, dustproof, and collision resistant". Which may be true or false, but not a straw man.
I used to work for Nokia back when they still made phones. Replaceable batteries were very normal then. Phones were a bit thicker than today but not massively so. These days phones are actually thinner but much larger. I had a "are you happy to see me or is that a Nokia" type Nokia 9300. That was a brick. But it had a full hw keyboard. and flipped open it wasn't that much bigger than a modern smart phone.
You could argue that the trend towards more energy dense batteries and wireless charging could enable new interesting form factors. Recent phones have magnetic connectors for external wireless chargers that snap to the back. Most of bulk and weight of a phone is for accommodating batteries. You could make an argument that making a phone with replaceable batteries is easier than ever. Many cameras have a bulge for the camera. The negative space of the rest of the phone could easily hold a swappable battery. How critical are those 3mm really?
It’s been long enough that people of forgotten what’s it’s like. Cameras still have replaceable batteries, there are several benefits:
I can have two (or more) batteries, if it runs out I just change it. I don’t need walk around with a USB battery pack and cable hanging off the device preventing me from using it properly.
I can put the battery on charge somewhere and leave it, even if not completely secure, because just the battery not the device. This way my expensive device and my data is not at risk.
I can use 40+ year old cameras, because I can just put a new battery in. This is not something you can do with newer device, e.g. and iPod and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
Battery tech moves on. There are now some batteries with charging ports on them. Other batteries offer more capacity than the original ones. Apple even did this once for me, when MacBook Air batteries were fairly easy to replace, I had mine replaced (it wore out) at the shop and they put a slightly bigger one in, which was the standard on the newer models.
I don't think this is where peak battery tech ends up. At current capacities, batteries are becoming genuinely dangerous, and faster charging only amplifies the risk. Charging high-capacity cells outside a temperature-controlled charger is risky, and even reputable chargers shouldn't be left unattended — many workplaces ban it outright (it only takes one fire to make that policy). Phone batteries are the worst of it: highest power density, fastest charging, odd geometry, and tight space constraints. Manufacturers shrink the phone by offloading temperature monitoring and heat dissipation onto the phone's own electronics and housing — so replaceable, externally rechargeable batteries are tricky to design. IMO, swappable batteries were a feature because batteries used to suck. In less volume-constrained devices like cameras, swappable batteries still work — but you're trading single-charge runtime for that convenience.
This last point is actually a real killer, an easily swappable battery in a phone probably sacrifices >10% "maximum" capacity in lost space. e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.
The main thing that makes all this hard to do is the form factor.
Give these phone batteries a standard geometry and interface and pretty much all these problems immediately go away. 3 prongs on the battery (ground, positive, data). A standard protocol so the battery can communicate things like SOC or acceptable charge rate with the charger. And viola, you are off to the races.
Yes, this will mean manufacturers will have a hard limit on how thin they can make their phones and a constraint on what designs they can employ.
> e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.
alternatively, i can trade more bulk for more battery. if its got a connector, why cant i put a bigger batter in the slot that sticks out?
The fact that pretty much no phones have a replaceable battery says something. And it doesn't mean that all manufacturers are somehow colluding with each. The market is very competitive and pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit. If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. But everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it. And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.
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> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!
Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.
Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.
I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.
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> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.
There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
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Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it.
https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-sy...
It means that everybody copies Apple.
Just like 3.5mm headphone jacks and MicroSD card expandable storage.
They're hard to find even on lower end devices any more, despite more ports being a premium/pro feature in other market segments.
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Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.
Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?
Ah yes, “market knows best”.
Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.
Having a battery pack has its uses though. As crazy as USBC is, you can now get a relatively large amount of power from a battery pack.
There’s a bunch of things that don’t need their own battery if they just drew enough power off USBC. I have an office coffee setup. My grinder and espresso maker have their own batteries. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have a single battery pack and just plug both into USBC saving me a ton of weight. (In fact the Lagom Mini 2 grinder is powered straight off USBC with no internal power.)
For phones and cameras, that need their own power source, a replaceable battery is mostly just an end of life thing for me. Because I’d still have to carry a cable or spare battery around.
These things aren't mutually exclusive. Once upon a time, batteries were generic and fit some standard form-factor. You could swap batteries between devices and often did! You could even connect your device to a pack of batteries, and swap out the batteries within the pack.
and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
I'm quite certain you can find many companies in the far East who will produce cells of exactly the size and shape you want, as long as you're willing to order a minimum quantity. There are also a few semi-standard sizes of prismatic cells available.
That said, having a few truly standard sizes like we had with 1.2/1.5V and 9V batteries would be a good idea. BL-5C and its variants were a de-facto standard for many years too, and apparently are still available new.
I tried to find a phone battery once and found very similar looking ones with prices ranging from expensive to terrifying with everything in between. I don't trust the ones that are to cheap as I don't know how they cut the corners. I don't trust the more expensive ones because they look the same. I cant see the profit margins. I was unable to pick one. I ask a guy with a repair store. He said he always buys from the same shop and the badges look different every time.
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I cannot wait until I can carry a spare battery in my wallet again
Too scary to sit on a battery and possibly breach it. Keep em on your belt like batman.
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I carry USB-battery pack or my MagSafe battery. At night I use pass through charging.
Works just as well.
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There are benefits and downsides. Consumers and companies can make these decisions just fine.
> I can use 40+ year old cameras
Apple winces.
Several years ago when I bought a slr, I went with nikon, mainly because their F-mount lenses are mostly compatible back to 1959.
It is a lot of fun to pick up and use nice old glass from garage sales and such. They tend to require manual control, but that is the fun part of taking pictures anyway.
Software security updates seem to be the limit to phone life, not batteries (the latter of which I've had replaced at Apple stores). Apple still seems to have the longest support for security updates.
Nah, they'll just make the battery an external MagSafe accessory like the Air.
user replaceable batteries and blue bubbles are the 2 greatest threats to Apple
Some action cameras have replaceable batteries, some don't. I had a perfectly good Contour Roam 2 where the battery died and I still have a Contour Roam 3 with some low capacity battery.
Action cameras seem to have less than a 2h run-time though. One could argue that a replaceable battery is a desired feature on such a device as many users of these cameras participate in activities lasting much longer. They also tend to have replaceable memory for the same reason. And it all is achieved without EU directives as far as I know, just from the pure market demand.
PS. Consumer surveillance cameras, on the other hand, don't have replaceable batteries in general, as they can operate indefinitely off a small solar panel or for months on a charge.
My GoPro hero 4 black still going strong. Probably one of the greatest cameras ever made. They kind of hurt themselves with how good it was lol
With cameras you don't care about every mm of width, nor about how resistant it is to falls. With phones you do.
I, for one, don't welcome that change. I'd be ok with paying someone a bit extra to replace the battery. I mean, I'd be ok if I had a battery die in my phone in the last 10 years, which I don't remember it did.
Just to be clear replaceable doesn't mean removable/hot-swappable in this context. There doesn't have to be a battery compartment, the battery can still be glued in place. The phone can still be sealed.
Manufacturers only have to make it possible for users to open and close the phone to replace the battery without damage, using common tools.
Personally I’m confused why people say they want a thinner phone while carrying a phone that’s keeps getting larger every model.
When was the last time you kept a phone longer than 2-3 years? That’d explain why you haven’t had one die.
Assuming you do get a new phone regularly, easy battery replacement will probably help the resale value of your own a fair bit - the labour cost of a battery replacement is priced into most older phones on the second hand market.
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Not sure what replacable has to do with thickness.
When I bought my first smartpone, a Moto G (1st gen) it was as flat as any phone most people carried around at the time (2014, I think). And the battery was replaceable.
I think also Samsung phones had replaceable batteries then. And this was the case for a few years after. Until it wasn't.
Devices didn't suddenly get thin when batteries were glued in. Why would they?
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> care about every mm of width
I think you mean thickness?
Extra width is sold as a feature.
I don’t understand the obsession with reducing thickness.
Why is a thinner phone more desirable than a thicken one?
Most digital cameras above mid ranges are made of painted Magnesium alloy material for both weight and durability. Only cosmetic parts are made of Aluminum and plastics. They don't talk much about those because all the remaining companies in the market are from one same country that don't speak English that isn't China, and there is no differentiation to be made in that area.
We've had thin smartphones with replaceable batteries 15 years ago. That was the standard. Galaxy S5 was the last one in that series, and it's not looking too different from today. It was even IP rated for water!
Batteries also don't really die, but you get shorter and shorter life. When a device that barely could make it through 2 days of use now survives for less than one, an "upgrade" seems nicer than it really would've been if you could just swap the battery.
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Both of those things are also important in cameras, there is even sites that compare the size such as https://camerasize.com/. Cameras have got smaller in recent years and it makes the size makes a big difference to whether you take it with you on not or fits in your pocket or not for compact cameras. Ricoh’s gr4 camera is 0.5mm thinner than the previous model (gr3). Cameras are essentially smaller than they would be otherwise because they have replaceable batteries. People who need at more power usually use several batteries rather than use a bigger camera with more capacity.
Cameras also need to withstand drops for similar reasons to phones, it’s in you hand and you could drop it, also tripods can fall over, car mounts fall off etc.
I don't care about every mm of width, and don't understand those that do. A phone up to 3/4" fits into any pocket that a 1/4" one does.
I had multiple android phones with replaceable batteries and many were no thicker than modern phones, especially once you've added the protective case.
The main issue of paying someone to teplace the battery is procuring the battery in the first place.
For example, good luck finding good apple batteries in regions where there is no official apple service.
Most Chinese parts are inferior: for example rates for max 500 cycles instead of 1000
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I'm an exception for sure but I have not seen much innovation in the phone space that you'd genuinely make me buy a new phone.
Yes, cameras are better now. But some phones had good cameras years ago. I bought new phones mainly because of battery decline and/or not getting security updates.
If one of these will be solved, that might change my phone buying behaviour.
I don't care whether a display is called "retina" , whether the next edition comes in the colour "space banana grey while lion tiger snail".
And I don't need to impress someone by proving that I'm able to buy a new phone either. Such behaviour gives me a good hint what to think about them though.
A phone that will have the battery situation solved is a killer argument. Then I'd like to have a software distribution on top that it's "mum compatible" and doesn't need nerd knowledge to maintain. Something that allows to use banking apps.
Let's see how it goes. Also I hope that there can be third party batteries without DRM-like behaviour.
To me the best "tradeoff" right now is buying used Fairphones from ebay.
It is LineageOS HEAD compatible and has replaceable batteries.
But it has some quirks. Medium performance if even that, non working fingerprint sensor. Camera quality from 2005.
I don't have gapps installed so I'm using my phone without any type of payment/2fa/banking apps. That decision from opsec makes it easily reflashable, so my anti malware strategy is essentially just reflashing the phone every couple weeks :D
My battery usually lasts a week because of using only f-droids chat, navigation, and translation apps for the most part, aside from the browser.
To me, repairability is the feature I value the most in a phone, so I'm kinda willing to compromise on the other features.
Fun fact: Did you know that WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal all restart themselves when you connect to your headphones? If you froze them before, they'll just drain your battery again when you have any bluetooth changes. You can easily verify that by staying in airplane mode and freezing them, then connecting your headphones in airplane mode.
Anyone know how much harder water resistance gets with replaceable batteries?
If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt from this, which is exactly what Apple implemented a few years ago.
Low cost phones will be most affected.
This is not correct. There is no exemption for Apple devices
You seem to referencing from a older exemption for self serviceability if your smartphone can do 1,000 cycles and retain 80% battery. Specifically - B 1.1 (1) (c) (ii) (b) . Here is the link - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Article 11 of the new regulation (https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...) covers exemptions but nothing to do with 1,000 cycles or Apple as far as i can see.
Your link says otherwise. From the Article 11 link, ANNEX II, A.1.1.(5):
(a) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for replacement of the display assembly and of parts referred to in point 1(a), with the exception of the battery or batteries, meets the following criteria: [...]
[...]
(c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
(i) meets the following criteria:
— fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
- the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
(ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that:
— the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
— after 500 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
— the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
— the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
---
So manufacturers must make the battery replaceable, or meet all the conditions from (a) for replacing non-battery components, and meet the 1000 cycle / 80% capacity requirement.
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> This is not correct. There is no exemption for Apple devices
It was not said that Apple was exempted. What was said is that Apple complied with the exemption rules.
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> covers exemptions but nothing to do with 1,000 cycles or Apple as far as i can see.
It appears what you're looking for is in B(5)(c)(ii).
> (c) From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement:
> (i) meets the following criteria:
> — fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
> — the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
> — the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
> (ii) or, as an alternative to point (i), ensure that
> — the process for battery replacement meets the criteria set out in (a);
> — after 500 full charge cycles the battery must have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 83 % of the rated capacity;
> — the battery endurance in cycles achieves a minimum of 1 000 full charge cycles, and after 1 000 full charge cycles the battery must, in addition, have in a fully charged state, a remaining capacity of at least 80 % of the rated capacity;
> — the device is at least dust tight and protected against immersion in water up to one meter depth for a minimum of 30 minutes.
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> B 1.1 (1) (c) (ii) (b)
Written by the sub-sub-sub subcommittee…
Europe will fall to the Russians, if the Russians can ever find it under all the piles of disused regulations.
I was wondering about that. I lost my iPhone 13 mini the other day, did the find my phone beep thing and got a distant beep from my washing machine which was on wash cycle.
Surprisingly the phone was fine and works fine after a brief rinse under the tap. It must be hard to combine that sort of water resistance with easy user changing.
Putting the battery outside the water insulation zone might work for that, it's a sealed pouch anyway.
Don't fall for the 'glue cuz of protection' myth - there are and had been water-resistant phones way before Apple started glueing to avoid customers doing their own repairs and them losing out on new sales.
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Conformal coating is a little more expensive than gasketing, but it works much, much better under pressure. Motorola does this.
Third parties offer new iphone batteries so it's clearly replaceable commercially
This could be "fixed" right now by a software update that limits the maximum charge level to 80% of capacity. However, this comes at the cost of how many minutes of runtime your phone can operate.
So manufactures might just responds to this by making your phone heavier with a bigger battery that is being under utilized.
Battery capacity of smartphones seems to double every ~8 years. The design space is adding more battery capacity, reducing battery life, or using less power.
This sounds great. I would've loved to have set my phone to charge up to only 60% or 80% of its design capacity to reduce wear. I do this on my laptop.
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Honestly we should define 80% as the new "100%" on such batteries and label "charging to full" as "overcharging".
Psychologically, people understand charging a battery to "125%" (or whatever) a lot better: Do it when you really need to but if you do it all the time it wears down the battery a lot faster.
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Samsung phones let you limit them to 80% charge. I've had this enabled since I got my current phone.
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And what about if 4 years they says that they have dettected a problem in your battery? A new battery should fix that but now you cannot do it properly because it could do 1000 cycles.
This same thing happened to Pixels 6a after 500 cycles.
Then don’t buy a phone from a company with a piss poor record of customer service.
Just looking in maps, there are three Apple Stores within a 45 minute drive from where I live in central Florida.
The situation is worse in my hometown in South GA admittedly, you have to drive 70 miles for same day service for an authorized repair place - mostly Best Buy.
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Where did you see this? Can't see that in the article or a quick search on the rules PDF.
The goal should be reducing e-waste, and honestly this seems reasonable.
I’d rather get the additional structural rigidity, compactness, and weatherproofing that comes from the tight construction and then pay $99 to have Apple professionally install a new battery for me in 3-4 years. Forcing everyone’s iPhone to take all of the tradeoffs of replaceable batteries so some people can save $50 to replace their own battery isn’t a good deal.
I wouldn’t be surprised if forcing all phones to have easily replaceable batteries would result in a net increase in e-waste due to the additional failure modes introduced. Even if batteries were easily replaceable I think most iPhone users would have Apple do it for them anyway.
I’ve also replaced some iPhone batteries myself and it’s really not that bad if you are familiar with taking modern electronics apart. Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
> Forcing everyone’s iPhone to take all of the tradeoffs of replaceable batteries so some people can save $50 to replace their own battery isn’t a good deal.
This sounds like the exact opposite of real life. Every battery ages to the point of uselessness, not every phone gets to take a dive. It's not a stretch to say most phones never see more than some rain or a spilled drink. But the worst part of every discussion on this topic is this false (uninformed) dichotomy that water resistance and easily replaceable battery are mutually exclusive.
> and then pay $99 to have Apple professionally install a new battery for me in 3-4 years
In 3-4 years yes, but how about in 10-15 years? Apple will refuse to take your money then.
> Apple will send you the entire toolkit if you want complete with a return label.
Which is malicious compliance. They should allow the friendly neighborhood repair shop to purchase a toolkit so you can choose who does the repairs for you.
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What if they don't? What if there are manufacturer errors? What if they burn your battery with updates along the way?
> What if there are manufacturer errors?
Typically that's subject to some sort of recall or remediation through a service centre?
I wonder if this is part of why Apple is behind most competitors in terms of fast charging. Would almost make marketing sense to come out and say it at this point.
Are they behind? AFAIK the Pixel and the iPhone both typically charge in the ~25W range but can support up to ~45W.
> Low cost phones will be most affected.
Not really. Take a 4000 mAh rated cell, advertise it as "rated for 3500 mAh" and that's it.
Isn't this pretty much what Nothing are doing? At least one of their phones has a different battery rating in India than elsewhere, despite containing the same hardware.
Isn't like most of the new phones claim at least 1000 cycles?
Funnily enough I've had a "low cost phone" with replaceable batteries (the "old school way")
So it does not seem a big deal
1000 cycles is barely 3 years, that's far too low a number
1 Cycle is discharging from 100-0 and charging from 0-100, regardless of how many times the phone is charged, so for a user that averages 50% battery drain each day, 1000 cycles would actually be ~6 years. I have no idea what the actual average is, but I'm betting that 1000 cycles is at least 4 years for the average user and possibly significantly longer.
Cycles are not days. My 7 month-old phone is currently sitting at 55 cycles. At that rate it would take me ~10 years to reach 1000 cycles.
It isn't quite that linear in practice but realistically it will still be at least 5+ years.
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6-7 years for me on the current phone, double on the previous one. 7 years is a good limit.
Wish they'd have implemented it before the iPhone 14 Pro launched. I'm at 624 cycles right now and my phone's gone below 80% fucking ages ago.
Apple’s replacement program is $99 for out of warranty battery replacement
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My battery’s at 70%, I could replace it for $50, but I consider it a feature to get me off my goddamn phone more.
> The regulation states that batteries must be removable using ‘commercially available’ tools
I’m pretty sure that’s more or less already the case, so…
[flagged]
Is 1000 cycles above 80% even possible without gimping the device like apple does with all its hardware?
Aren't today's phone batteries already replaceable with commercially available tools? I can walk into a non-apple store with my iPhone and walk out with a replaced battery 20 minutes later.
This isn't even what drives obsolesce of phones, it's software updates.
If you really want to be able to self-swap your own battery, you can just buy an Android that has a replaceable battery.
Do we need to regulate something that isn't a problem? All regulation has downsides, is it worth paying this price here?
They're taking "commercially available" to mean things like a screwdriver - not a $1000 phone disassembly machine.
With all due respect, I can buy a kit on iFixit for $55 for an iPhone 16 pro max, including the battery. I’ve replaced my iPhone battery before, aside from the glue being a bit sticky so needing a heat gun it isn’t that difficult.
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> This isn't even what drives obsolesce of phones, it's software updates.
Agreed, and software-locking parts, like batteries, to only first-party or authorized third-party repair shops is one of those drivers.
I can see the argument for software locking some components (to cut down on theft) even if I don't appreciate or agree with them - it is at least a valid reason from some perspectives.
Batteries are a wear item though, and will have to be replaced periodically until the device is discarded. Software-locking them to only "Apple and people Apple likes" is unconscionable
You talk about "an Android that has a replaceable battery" as if that was something you could just buy at any store at no inconvenience. Sadly the majority of Android phones no longer have user-replaceable batteries, and only a select few models have official replacement parts available.
I'd be happier if this was something the market took care of, but after 10 years of glued-in batteries that you most likely can't even buy, I think it's time for a regulatory nudge.
This one is pretty cool, it has a swappable battery plus an internal battery so you can swap the battery without shutting down the device.
https://rugone.net/products/xever-7
People shouldn't have to go to a special store or buy special tools requiring special skills to change a battery.
In a perfect world, sure. But people also want phones these days that are physically durable, have some degree of waterproofing/water resistance, maximum battery life, etc. Many of the demands and expectations of a modern phone aren't easily compatible with a replaceable battery design that can withstand the incompetence of the average end user.
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Engage with the content of his comment instead of resorting to ad hominem.
He's right - the market wants embedded batteries, although perhaps not directly. Embedded batteries have improved price, battery capacity, water proofing, size, and strength. If the consumer really wanted a removable battery and all that that entails then there would be more phones that offered that. The reality is people misjudge what all that entails. By all means, I would love to just make the iPhone battery directly replaceable without any compromises but that's not reality.
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I'd rather my phone be waterproof than have a battery I can replace myself
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How do you feel about the batteries in electric vehicles?
What about wearable devices like a smartwatch, headphones, smart glasses?
Should all these be consumer-replaceable without tools, regardless of the effect on the other things people value in these devices (waterproofing, size and weight, battery life, etc.)?
FYI I do not work for anything close to the consumer tech industry.
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Says who? Not all devices can have the same level of repairability by laypeople. What if I complained that todays' CPUs are too miniaturized and that in my time I could swap the individual vacuum tubes in case something went wrong?
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> If you really want to be able to self-swap your own battery, you can just buy an Android that has a replaceable battery.
Those don't really exist anymore.
> Do we need to regulate something that isn't a problem?
It is a problem and needs to be regulated.
> All regulation has downsides, is it worth paying this price here?
Of course the upsides of regulations are worth it. The downsides might cause slight inconvenience to the manufacturer, so that doesn't really matter.
Of course the upsides of regulations are worth it. The downsides might cause slight inconvenience to the manufacturer, so that doesn't really matter.
Your next phone will be heavier, bulkier, more expensive, and less reliable as a result of these regulations. It will also probably not run as long between charges.
If bureaucrats in Brussels were better at designing phones than Apple, wouldn't they be doing just that?
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What if we regulate batteries even more? i.e. what if, in some magical perfect world, the world get's together and agrees on batteries for phones like how we agree on AA,AAA,D,C batteries? Even more though.. a standard connector, a standard comms bus, a variety of sizes, and they were designed for reuse as efficiently as possible.
Now we can scale up volume, swap them out, be free to purchase from a different manufacturer, and have scaled up recycling services.
Phones would be hard because manufacturers want to fill every square mm of it, but we can start with power tools batteries...
Power tools have lots of empty space in the battery case already, and most just use 18650s. We could mandate making the cells directly reachable.
Phones are definitely a more difficult use case.
I'd settle for requiring the battery specs to be fully available, and that they can't be made difficult to manufacture without good reason.
Ideally, there should be some set of standard protocols/connectors/voltages/sizes, but the manufacturer should only be held to "downward-compliance" with at least one of them, so they can have flexibility in design but still leave a suboptimal standard option available to users as a fallback.
That's an excellent idea! It will work out absolutely great - much like Communism.
Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.
You're thinking of socialism, which is what the EU is doing here (socialism-lite, anyway, as championed by the Social Democrats) and yes, it does work. Free healthcare, free education, and we're working towards decent privacy laws and regulations on big companies. It's far from perfect of course, but comparing it to how pure capitalism is going in the US it's clearly the better system.
Batteries have been used as part of planned obsolescence for too long and a whole small business industry of replacing phone batteries has appeared because of it. Next the EU are going to have to address security patches because its another aspect being used to sell new phones.
I have found out that the main phone providers (Apple, Google, Samsung) have extremely long support period. I really don't get the "planned obsolescence" thing.
As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
>As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
The updates for ios 12 are all security updates, not feature updates, so your comparison to "connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086" doesn't really make sense. The phones stuck on ios 15 are basically unusable because many apps don't support it anymore. At best you can download an older version from a few years ago, but that depends on whether the backend servers were updated. Apps that insist you use the latest version (eg. banking/finance apps) basically unusable.
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Indeed you can still get a battery replaced by Apple for an old iPhone 6.
The updates often require more power. Which drains the battery more than it was designed for. Which helps shorten the life of the device.
BTW: DOS was supported until 2001, and Win95 could boot DOS standalone.
Machines were roughly doubling in performance every year back in 2000.
Nowadays they are doubling in performance every... 5 years?
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The EU already requires 5 years of patches since last year. Motorola thinks they have found a loophole, so there are still some, ahem, patches needed to the law.
Do you have more info about this? I recommended Motorola phones to people based on a combination of price, their needs, and expected longevity (at least 5y now with the new update and replacement part requirements). If that's not the case then I want to update my recommendations
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I dunno, my wife has has the same iPhone 11 Pro Max since 2020. She had to get the battery replaced once at an Apple store, which I believe cost $99, and it took like thirty minutes and it wasn't that hard.
I'll admit it's a little annoying that I have to pay a hundred bucks to get the battery replaced, but the phone is otherwise fine and still gets updates, so I don't know that I buy that it's "planned obsolescence".
It's planned obsolescence through price. Your wife paid >50% of the phone's value just to replace the battery. Many people won't think that's worth it. It could have been a $30 user replaceable battery.
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Wow that’s ridiculous compared to a user replaceable battery
Imagine you can order a battery from Apple for $20 and you swap it in 1 minute: less money, less time, user satisfaction++.
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> Next the EU are going to have to address security patches because its another aspect being used to sell new phones.
They already are. 5 years of updates is now the legal minimum in the EU. https://www.osnews.com/story/142500/new-eu-rules-mandate-fiv...
> Batteries have been used as part of planned obsol[esc]ence for too long and a whole small business industry of replacing phone batteries has appeared because of it.
Note that early phones had replaceable batteries and it was later phones that dropped that feature. The idea wasn't that making the phone impossible to open would compel people to replace their phone faster; it was that given that people didn't keep their phones long enough to wear out the battery, there was no need to make the battery accessible.
That was true 15-20 years ago. Nowadays changing the phone is basically because:
1) battery dying / not lasting enough
2) shattered glasses whose replacement costs 35-40% of the cost of the phone new (for budget/mid-range phones, not everybody has iPhones)
distant 3rd) not enough free internal storage
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Upgrade cycles have slowed down in recent years, the improvements are relatively incremental nowadays. Screens, durability, processors, storage sizes, cameras, even battery life are okay-ish and aren't improving quickly enough to justify the same upgrade rate. Foldables are basically the only big innovation in recent years, but are still a little too fragile and expensive.
This is also reflected in the increasing support durations from major manufacturers.
This might be partially true, but making them inacessible is still a great way approach to planned obsolescence and there's no way this was not part of the motivation. The fact that an entire industry exists to provide replacement batteries is proof of this, as is the fact that Apple offers a £100 battery replacement. They also replace the batteries of all refurbished models they sell, which again wouldn't be necessary if battery life wasn't a concern over the useful life of a phone.
Secondly, what you said may have been true in the past, when smartphones were rapidly evolving and upgrade cycles were short, but people are holding on to their devices for longer now, so its possible its becoming a problem again.
Batteries on early cell phones needed to be replaced multiple times a day. I remember talk time of like 10 minutes on my motorola StarTec.
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Nowadays batteries seem to be doing pretty good, though. I've got a galax s20 fe, and the battery is still fine after 5 years.
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This was true back when Moore's law was the driver of obsolescence. You bought a new phone every year simply because next year's phone was twice as fast.
Now that this doesn't happen, the driver of obsolescence is the battery, which is much less defensible because you can swap it much more easily than "the whole internals of the phone".
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I look into my perfect workable Samsung Tab S7+ and remember that it has been an year since the last security update.
Now I rely on a few random individuals who, for all I know could be state agents or a ransomware organization to provide unofficial versions of Lineage so I can keep using it.
Battery isn't the only problem to avoid e-waste, but it's a start.
Aren't security updates the deciding factor for the life of a phone these days? Manufacturers provide updates for 7 years max which is probably less than the battery life.
It's a good move, but that is not enough. My old Chinese phone had a replaceable battery but it lasted so long that after it died, it was not possible to find the replacement. It seems that all phones have batteries with different sizes, and potentially different third pin designation, so even if you find smaller battery, it still can be incompatible because of third pin.
So if you want phones to be usable for longer period, you need to standardize batteries.
From the article
> Replacement batteries for any model will have to remain available to users for at least five years after the last unit of the product is placed on the market, the regulation also states.
Using a 5 year old phone is common these days. I still see plenty of home button iPhones in the wild.
While standardization would be nice, I can still order batteries for the Samsung phones I've used 15 years ago. Availability might not be that much of an issue with larger brands.
As long as those unused batteries you can find are fresh a 15 year old unused battery would be doa
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The system like iOS is still closed. Once Apple ends support for a device, being able to swap a battery won’t help much
It feels like life got nerfed when I lost the ability to just swap in my extra battery when my phone died.
Next, do user installable OS. Phones are the costliest gadgets with a dizzying range of sensors/capabilities and more than enough RAM. Its a shame we can't use them for a decade+, giving it a second life.
A lot of discussion about 'whether its needed' or 'moving a needle'. Batteries were swappable back in the day, and later on someone figured that making battery suck, can drive you to buy a new phone - because it is harder to degrade the rest of the device faster. Then we accepted that you cannot play around the battery, bcs that's the reality of things. So many people won't even think about it - but it does not mean it is not needed. I would love to make my device much better with swapping battery as many time as needed.
But then I think someone will figure out to make these batteries so expensive, that it won't change a thing.
In case of Fairphone, which already has swappable batteries, this did not manifest: the batteries cost, depending on the model, between €39 and €59.
Now they only need to make sure that a supply chain for replacement batteries exists, there is regulation and competition and options remain available for a reasonable price.
There are plenty of old Dell and HP laptops with replaceable batteries which can only be found on eBay or some random seller that does who knows what under the refurbishing process.
[delayed]
Exactly. I had phones and laptops with replaceable batteries in the past. I liked the idea of it, but in practice there was no OEM-quality replacement available by the time I wanted one. The device would have been usable to me still, but not with a random black market battery that may well be a fire hazard.
Having thought about this long term, I think the only solution to this would be mandating standardized battery cells. Rather than every phone model having a bespoke cell that is manufactured once and then obsoleted, they need to have standardized shape and electrical characteristics so that batteries being produced for new phones would also be useful to rehabilitate old phones.
I expect we'll see a spike in cell phone battery fires starting about a year after this goes into effect. Same deal as cheap external battery-powered travel power banks, which are already a problem.
Seems to me like the top goal should be: you can easily replace the most-likely-to-break parts (screen, back, battery, etc) in any local independent repair shop, with genuine parts that have low markups.
I'm confused why that still isn't the case today given all the EU headlines we've seen over the years.
I was looking forward to finally be able to easily switch out (i)Phone batteries again - after 20 years - but turns out the lobbyists managed to get a loophole in the law - exempting Apple & Co from making their phones more repairable / longer live-able.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
Seems entirely reasonable. Embedded batteries have a lot of advantages. Cheaper, higher battery capacity, water proof, smaller, stronger. I think this will largely just make the mid to low tier android market in the EU shittier.
Citation needed.
All of those can be achieved with replaceable batteries.
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It's like saying you were looking forward to shooting and killing an invader but unfortunately no one invaded your house and that made you sad.
What proportion of devices would need to meet this 80% rule? 50%? 90%? 99%? Could make a huge difference
My iPhone 14 is 1081 days old, charged every night, battery capacity is reported as 81%. So in Apple's own measurements this is possible.
I guess there is some built in spare capacity, but that may still qualify for the exemption?
My experience with an Apple battery saying ~81% longevity remaining is that it'll die when it still reports half full and you open a demanding webpage
It's a genuinely hard problem to measure battery capacity with existing smartphone hardware, also because it's a matter of opinion how much to factor in the peak load capacity (how do you count the bottom 40%, where it can't handle peak draw anymore? Should one include half of it because the phone is still usable but in a degraded state?), so I'm not faulting Apple here at all. They choose to display this estimate and it's better than nothing / better than most manufacturers. Just that you can't take it at face value, even if you charged your phone from 0% to 100% for >=1000 days
If you charge every night from say 50%, that's not a full cycle.
The exemption is about ensuring customers get what they paid for. It shouldn’t care how the manufacturer achieves that; driving the batteries less hard is an obvious tactic, and actually also makes them safer to use.
> If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt
Is there a definition for a cycle? 80->85%? 33->72? 22-83? 87->96? Would each of these be a "cycle"?
A battery cycle is a full discharge/charge cycle (100 -> 0 -> 100). Going from 70% to 20% and then charging back to 70% is half a cycle.
I recently did a battery replacement on an iphone mini 13 with some success and some failure. I absolutely killed the screen without cracking it. A little too much pulling with the ifixit reverse clamp.
Had i gone a little slower, it would have been a very easy repair.
Yes, this is the most non-story I have ever seen on this topic. I do not know of any manufacturer who does not claim this, verifiable or otherwise; and even if they can't claim it, all they have to do is one minor purely-software capacity adjustment, which they will gladly do before they will even consider offering removable batteries.
What a disappointment.
Apple has no chance to claim their batteries can have 80% capacity after 1000 cycles seeing how they never achieved this so far. Lying about it puts them in a world of mass recalls and fraud investigations.
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“ If a battery can do 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity it is exempt”
I mean isn’t that an okay exemption? If the intent is to drive devices to be less disposable and more sustainable… if it incentivizes all mobile phone manufacturers to improve battery longevity, I’d say that’s a win.
I wouldn’t even call it a loophole. The entire purpose of the legislation could be that clause
> the lobbyists managed to get a loophole in the law - exempting Apple & Co
But Apple batteries are already user replaceable? I've replaced my own and batteries come with kits that have all the tools and disposable glue strips and seals.
That is not "user replaceable" by any reasonable definition.
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No shot at all apple batteries can last 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity. Probably can’t even do 300 in my experience. Sounds like an easy lawsuit.
No doubt they will redefine maximum battery capacity to a figure that does achieve 80% over 1000 cycles. If you under-declare maximum capacity then there is a lot of headroom for actual degradation before you start to show degradation to the user.
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A battery that can support 1000 cycles and remain above 80% capacity would be a literal brick. For an example the Vision Pro's battery has extreme over-provisioning and limit how long it would last. (note I know it is removable but that isn't the point).
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I would wager that batteries that powered down at 20% and that halt charging at 80% would be significantly prolonged.
If Apple resorts to those tactics, then there is no limit in moving the goalposts.
In the meantime, my daily driver here in reality land: https://i.imgur.com/8yEEJVb.png
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>The regulation states that batteries must be removable using ‘commercially available’ tools
This is doing a lot of work here. There's enough wiggle room for this to be absolutely meaningless. Anything short of I can slide off the back cover and maybe unscrew two or three screws to replace the battery means that a lot of people are going to end up not being able to replace the batteries.
The rest of that same sentence, " – and that if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased," seems to mitigate that concern, no? I suppose it hinges on what the test for a "specialized tool" is.
EU regulatory bodies haven’t been as blindly sycophantic towards megacorporations in terms of allowing them to skirt by rules set forth by their legislatures, so I would be more optimistic than if this were a development in US law.
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You can buy a soldering kit for 100$ USD. That doesn't mean normal people are going to be able to use them.
I'd rather force larger companies to offer battery replacement at cost + shipping.
I have no real interest and opening up my own devices and messing with batteries, but I have no problem paying the manufacturer $100 for service.
In that context it seems like "specialized" means "not commercially available", no?
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Maybe. Maybe not. If my local phone and phone accessories shop can do it for little money in 15 minutes then the current calculus changes for a heck of a lot of people.
Isn't that already the case though?
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Everyone is thinking Apple is the target, but they are actually one of the better companies with this. You can buy first-party replacement parts, tools are available. If you take a look at Chinese or sometimes even Samsung phones it's basically impossible to get replacement parts and if you do it may need other parts like the glass back to be replaced as it's impossible to remove it without breaking it.
That reads true. While replaceability is definitely a good thing, but whether it will end up being a good thing for the average user (and not lead to some further price hikes in the EU market) remains to be seen.
I presume it means "don't even try doing the printer ink DRM thing".
better than glued.
Heat guns and pryers are commercially available. I don't think this will change anything there.
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That is a very American view of law that has burned American companies again and again.
In EU law, the intent matters, not the letter of the law. No silly loophole lawyering.
To quote:
>When interpreting EU law, the CJEU pays particular attention to the aim and purpose of EU law (teleological interpretation), rather than focusing exclusively on the wording of the provisions (linguistic interpretation). This is explained by numerous factors, in particular the open-ended and policy-oriented rules of the EU Treaties, as well as by EU legal multilingualism. Under the latter principle, all EU law is equally authentic in all language versions. Hence, the Court cannot rely on the wording of a single version, as a national court can, in order to give an interpretation of the legal provision under consideration. Therefore, in order to decode the meaning of a legal rule, the Court analyses it especially in the light of its purpose (teleological interpretation) as well as its context (systemic interpretation).
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2017/5993...
And lose water resistance…
I just spent a few hours [this past weekend] trying to replace a battery on an old iPod Touch and botching it (I'll blame my crappy soldering iron). Everything about that was a massive pain, prying the case open, dealing with all the glue inside, de-soldering the old battery.
I thought I did everything right but then the thing wouldn't turn on. Could be a bad battery (ordered on Amazon so zero guarantees). Then when I tried to de-solder and re-solder my new battery the pads came off it. Very annoying.
One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
It's okay to have idiosyncratic preferences (I certainly do), but people should recognize that this law will make phones _worse_ for most people, because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone, and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone. At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
Your experience is not at all what I see out there. Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day. They hate having to set up a new phone when their old one is totally fine other than the battery.
For the people I know that do upgrade their phones regularly, they typically want to give their old phone to someone who would love a usable phone, but can't afford a new one. Giving a phone with a shot and non-replaceable battery effectively destroys the value of the gift.
I know many people who can't afford to by new, and they avoid buying older or used phones because they fear the battery may be shot.
We obviously have different opinions regarding what most people want... totally fine.
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day
I don't disagree with this, but I also think it's because the battery often dies around the time most people would consider upgrading anyway. The battery isn't the only reason people upgrade, it's just a forcing factor.
If batteries normally last 3-5 years, I don't think we're going to start seeing most people keep their phones for 7-10 years. I still think we're going to see people upgrading around the 3-5 year mark. I would point to the current market as evidence of this. An iPhone battery replacement is somewhere between $50-$100 right now which is drastically cheaper than a new iPhone and yet we still see the 3-5 year upgrade cycle. Maybe making it something you can do at home in a few minutes will result in a few more people just choosing to replace the battery vs the entire phone, but I don't see it drastically changing things since a cheap alternative to replacing the phone already exists and yet we still see the 3-5 year replacement cycle.
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I can't speak to the experience with Android but Apple offers both in-store battery replacement or Mail-in battery replacement for $70-120 which to me seems very reasonable. Could it be cheaper? Sure, maybe I guess? But $70-120 is a lot less than a new phone. And this way we don't need to compromise the shell of the phone with seams and things that can fail.
https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement
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It would seem that "different opinions are out there" is not really a good basis for "one opinion enforced by EU directive", though.
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It's now possible to carry a spare battery or two, instead of lugging a portable power bank and slowly charging your phone. This is great news for outdoorsy types, travel, long bicycle rides, hiking, and so on.
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> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day.
Most people I know get a new phone when they can't take the cracked screen anymore, or when they completely lose the phone. Or because a pretty new one came out and they upgraded two years ago so it's "time". That's most people.
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day
Getting the battery replaced is already trivial and cheap. Revealed preference is that most people say they want it, but don't. This won't even decrease the cost or difficulty (you'll still need a screwdriver).
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Even going directly to Apple for out-of-warranty battery replacement is almost always way cheaper than getting another phone.
> They hate having to set up a new phone when their old one is totally fine other than the battery.
That is why I have the battery replaced every few years.
Most people I know get a new phone because the marketing works on them and they lie that it's about the battery.
They all know about Apple's battery replacement programme that's been around for years now
And iCloud backups makes setting up a new phone trivial
> Most people I know only get new phones because their battery will no longer get them through the day.
I am not sure if your statistic is correct or people giving you excuses to get the latest model. If we speak iphones, flipping the battery is cheap and fast process, incomparable with the hassle of doing re-setup.
I am not sure if the process is equally or more simple with android phones though, but in my circle noone buys new phone because of the battery (often the battery is used as excuse to get a newer model).
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> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
I have experience saying the exact opposite, although this was a few years ago.
OnePlus set up a marketing booth on my campus in 2018 or 2019 or so, and they did exactly this, with a large sign asking people what they want out of a phone. They asked passerbys what they want out of a phone, and they let people put their requests on a board.
When I put my request up, I wasn't the first one to request replaceable batteries and a headphone jack. (At the time, OnePlus had removed the jack from their most recent phone, after advertising their previous phone in comparison to Apple's jackless phone).
I think phone manufacturers will figure it out once it is a requirement. Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure. Are we in a better place because the EU forced it. You betcha. That's the point.
I don't love everything the EU does (cookie banners!?) but this is one where I have confidence that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
As others have noted, most people do not replace their phones every two years anymore, there just isn't any big reason to.
Cookie banners is malicious compliance. The ultimate goal being for you yo think it was bad legislation instead of how every company is fucking you for your privacy.
They’re winning.
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I also want headphone jacks back - which I'm sure will be less popular here than batteries. We used to have waterproof phones with both.
I'm not sure about the rules around required ability but I'd like that too
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> Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure.
Doubt. They have already switched over every other line they had.
I believe it was more of a marketing stunt, they calculated that n% of customers will be upset with the change, so they waited for the EU ruling so now they can just point these n% to blame the EU who will take the blame instead of them.
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The EU did not force USB-C on the iPhone. Apple switched to USB-C years before it became mandatory.
I like usb C more than lightning but I think legislation is terribly suited. If people only wanted usb c then just don’t buy an iPhone? But this is from my US idealistic view and distrust of over regulation.
Anyways, Apple was working on an iPhone with usb C in 2022 and said they were going to do it anyways* so I don’t see it as some massive win that shows the prowess of the EU legislative body.
Granted this may have shaved a couple of years off of the timeline but at what cost of legislation (monetary, attention, and time cost)!?
# https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-pushes-back...
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Everyone moving to USB-C was the same standard, though; now you can use the same charger with your phone, laptop, tablet, other random gadgets, etc. If you forget your charger you can buy one virtually anywhere, or borrow someone else's, since they're all the same.
Everyone moving to "battery must be replaceable without tools" doesn't do anything useful for most users. Yeah, now you can carry an extra battery on a camping trip, I guess, though you could also carry a portable USB-C charger and use it for more than just your phone. It isn't particularly useful that it doesn't take tools to replace the battery when it starts failing, five years after your phone was discontinued, if you can't find a replacement battery for that exact model.
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> Are we in a better place because the EU forced it. You betcha. That's the point.
Speak for yourself, I've gained nothing but annoyance. (I'm willing to accept a theoretical greater good argument - but I'm not precisely sold)
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Apple was a key member of the USB-C consortium, it was always planned to be their universal connector. They waited on switching to avoid public backlash about "why are you switching wires when I already bought all of these wires?". They generally give connectors 10 years before changing them (see 32-pin 2003 - 2012 etc). Doesn't invalidate your larger point, but it incorrectly describes the history of USB-C adoption by Apple.
I moderate /r/flashlight. Something I've seen a substantial increase in over the past few years is people who are surprised to learn that it's possible to have a built-in charger in combination with a field-replaceable battery. It doesn't take much explaining; it just hadn't occurred to them because the devices they're used to don't work that way.
People don't change batteries in their phones now because they'd need a heat gun and a soldering iron and they'd have even chances of starting a fire, breaking the phone, or succeeding in changing the battery without prior experience using those tools. A shop could do it reliably, but the shop will charge 100€ because it's time-consuming and error-prone. A 3-5 year old phone is often not worth 100€.
When a battery change costs 25€ and takes 5 minutes, people will do it all the time even if they don't know that today.
re: flashlights.
Still no real upgrade for hexbright, which is a shame.
I wish they were still being made. Fortunately, mine are still fine, and I expect to be able to repair them should they break. (xtal is a common failure point apparently)
Standard battery type is nice, but also has microusb charging port, the part that didn't age well.
Perhaps new circuit boards (with usb-pd charging, usb-c connector and mems oscillator) will be the way forward. It's definitely easier to order a pcb than the housing.
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It used to be true that it made sense to replace your phone every few years because new ones were so much better. But like... I have a Pixel 8 and there's not really anything in a newer phone that's compelling enough to spend any money on...
Funnily enough I'm looking at getting a new phone because my pixel 6 battery no longer lasts 9am until 6pm without a mid-day charge -- I looked at the latest pixels (10) and they looked neat, but expensive; so took a look at the 9's, and saw they're basically exactly the same at 60% the price; then looked at the 8's and they're basically the same except 40% the price...
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I agree, but also battery life has significantly improved over the last decade. Every phone I or my friends have replaced recently has been because the screen has broken. I would put good money on this being true for most people.
I think if the EU really wanted to reduce phone waste they'd make it easier or cheaper to fix screens. Still, this doesn't seem like a terrible move. I bet you can make it relatively easy to replace batteries without compromising much. Look at the Macbook Neo for example.
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same, my iphone 13 mini was great except for the fact i had to charge it twice a day in the end.
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I honestly know I could “optimize” my phone replacement schedule based on resale values of phones etc, but for the last ~15ish years I just replace my iPhone when the battery starts shitting itself (3-5 years each in my experience)
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> most people are going to want a new a phone.
This is going to be harder, or, at least, harder to replace your current phone with something objectively better. RAM and Flash shortages / high prices are likely going to last for years, wars are additionally jeopardizing production of electronic components, and the current crop of mobile devices is already insanely powerful. It's going to be pretty hard to sell most people an upgrade that feels meaningful when it's going to be like 30% more expensive.
Running AI locally could be a big selling point for an upgrade, but see the problems with RAM and general production capacity overload. I's not going to be a mass-market thing.
>Running AI locally could be a big selling point
Actually will push a lot of people away. I don't want any hardware that has special relationships with AI LLM's.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
But what if you asked the right question, "what is the biggest problem with your phone?"
Most would answer, "the battery dies too soon. It doesn't last all day like it used to."
> you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery"
Before that, you wrote "One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are" and it's exactly what I could say here. Not everyone has lots of money and for some people extending the life of their phones is important. They really do wish they could replace the battery without hassle and without paying a shop to do it.
With the storage cost crisis which will make future phone more expensive I'm sure a lot of people will wish they could prolong the lifetime of theri current device with a battery swap.
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> I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Possibly true, and equally true of the screen, the charging port, or any other component.
"Repairability" isn't a feature people list unprompted, it's a property they notice the moment a £5 part bricks their phone.
The street-corner survey tells you what people currently notice, not what they'd value if the option existed.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new phone
In a market where batteries are glued in and replacement costs a meaningful fraction of a new device, of course people upgrade on that timeline. Change the cost structure and the behaviour changes with it.
Fair point that we'd want data, but the original claim rests on the same intuition, just pointed the opposite way.
The broader framing (that repairability is an idiosyncratic preference being imposed on a majority who don't want it) gets this backwards. Most people don't want to care about repairability, in the same way most people don't want to care about food safety standards. They want the option to exist without having to think about it. That's what the law provides.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Are you sure about this? I've heard this complaint from a lot of non-tech people who are old enough to remember flip phones with replaceable batteries. It might be age related.
My old flip “feature phone” could go about two weeks on a charge. I miss that.
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> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone.
Not true. In recent years smartphones do not advance much, and would be perfectly fine to keep working if not for the dying battery.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
The degree of "possible" varies greatly depending on the available expertise and spare parts. Right now in EU it's cost prohibitive for both coz the special labor required is expensive and almost no official spare parts for consumers. So of coz this will be no data to support your claim.
I think the data for your last sentence does exist. When Apple was forced to replace broken batteries on the 12, lots of people opted to replace the phone and there was a corresponding drop in iPhone sales.
It’s a pretty commonly used canonical example of revealed preferences.
I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.
In fact, the only place I would ever expect somebody to claim otherwise is here.
I'd love thick phone with big battery, the current ones are already thin enough to be uncomfortable without a case, but the available models seem to be "ok if you want battery you want some rugged brick 3 android versions behind with everything else worse"
I don't know a single person that would dive with their phone or care about the thiness of the bezel.
> I don't think any single person I know would say they would exchange replaceable batteries for a 1mm thinner phone, waterproof up to 100m instead of 10m, or a $5 difference in price.
Well, yes it's quite easy to argue against strawmen. I don't know anyone who would favor a built-in shoehorn over a replaceable battery either.
Although on your waterproof point, that's just a single dimension metric used for comms. It's not really about specifically descending to 100m. A 100m rated device responds better to water. In a general sense, it's more robust. Even if I don't go diving.
I know plenty. But not among the 18-20 year olds that do not know it any different, sure. But certainly my grandpa. Just thinking that you do not need a power-bank and just bring an extra battery on a longer trip will get millions of people interested.
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> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are.
<proceeds to state opinions contrary to what the overwhelming majority of elected representatives of the people of Europe just expressed>
Were you trying to prove your own point?
Counter-point - people might not know what they want until they experience it.
Yeah, for someone that changes phone every 3 years or earlier, that's not a desired feature.
But many people did that change precisely because battery got weak, and there have been less and less reasons to keep on the most modern model for a while now.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
I don’t understand. If we want to see the data we do need to make batteries replaceable.
I appreciate such a law very much. I find it very irritating how people always want new phones. And I think there are three major reasons to upgrade to a new phone:
1. lifestyle
2. software updates
3. battery capacity
While it is hard to change the first, the other two can be influenced by laws. And while the second is rather complex, the third is quite simple. Since the manufacturers have few incentives to produce phones with replaceable batteries, there are very few options on the market to choose from. Most have other major limitations, like slow CPU/GPU, crappy cameras, or else.
So eliminating one factor of unnecessary waste is absolutely a good idea. I just hope it doesn't backfire in some weird way. And I don't say that replaceable batteries don't come at a cost, they do. But that cost is much lower than many assume and not that easy to measure, because currently, you can compare only apples with oranges.
Are laws typically enacted to compel companies to follow consumer demand? I think that’s what the market itself is best at.
Instead this law is designed to provide the public with a good everyone can benefit from - less waste of valuable electronic components polluting our environment.
And even if those same consumers would choose a thinner phone over a replaceable battery, they will probably also enjoy being able to fully charge it more often for less money.
Half of cellphone users hold onto phone for 3+ years and experience battery degradation, and cell phone battery life is the #1 complain/concern about cellphone users. They might not immediately demand swappable batteries (particularly if they're too young to have ever owned a cellphone with swappable batteries) but I suspect if you prompted them, that the response rate would be very high, and that this isn't just an echo chamber concern.
I think that’s the wrong way of framing it. If, before the launch of the iPhone, you asked what people wanted from their phones you’d be there a very long time before anyone described something like an iPhone (no buttons, capacitive touch interface, etc). And yet, once they were offered it, people flocked to it.
This regulation is targeted to devices with poor battery lives. Just because it hasn’t occurred to people to ask for the feature doesn’t mean they won’t appreciate it.
That's an odd reply since by that argument they also flocked to a phone with no replaceable battery, which was pretty standard in the 2000s.
But you could be right. I guess this will be an experiment to watch: If EU consumers show a strong preference for replaceable batteries once they become more widely available, we can expect manufacturers to start offering it in other markets as well.
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We had replaceable batteries in phones for years. There's no reason battery replacement has to involve 20 steps and require ungluing the screen.
Exactly, this isn't something new. It was removed for no reason other than aesthetics and possibly to force users to buy a new device every few years.
May I remind you that the fist few iPhones were not water proof, yet the battery was not removable.
Laptops are not waterproof but those batteries are also no longer removable.
There are even fully water resistant (and IP rated phones) currently made with replaceable batteries. Best of all worlds
This doesn't require the battery to be replaceable. It requires either the battery to still be good after 1000 charges or for it to be replaceable, either one.
Although some of this depends on how you define replaceable.
A quick google will show you’re relying too much on your own views of what people desire for phone improvements. This law will lead to much needed changes and improvements in a mature and arguably stale market.
> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are. If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Yes, and if you asked every passerby what feature they would like to add to the streets, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish there were more accessibility ramps".
Luckily for us, we're not governed by "passerby" people.
Non-technical users might not be aware of much.
E.g. most peoples don't really think or ask that their tap water be free of cholera and other harmful substances, and yet we might want to make sure that continues to be the case. So it's not strong argument worth arguing about.
The real argument is - how much a compromise a replaceable vs non-replacable battery is. And I suspect the biggest part of non-replaceable batteries is actually superficial vanity considerations (gee, is it 7mm or 6.5mm), and planed obsolescence making more money. But the technical aspects are still a valid debate.
Me and partner are both on iPhone 14 Pro. And this is more than powerful and sufficient for our daily use, except the battery is around 82%. I'd happily replace the battery right now for a more powerful one.
You can pay Apple to replace it for you, and the cost is not that high. £90 or so.
If the battery swap fails, you’ll get a as-new replacement phone and you also won’t be charged.
In exchange for this monetary cost and the inconvenience of leaving your phone at an Apple Store for 1 hour; you get peace of mind and a highly rated water/dust proof phone.
(Seriously, I’ve seen people diving with iPhones - no case - recording videos.)
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>compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
What sort of compromise do you envision? I mean, toasters still have a crumb tray on the bottom that open so you can clean them even though no one does. Am I "missing out" on sleek, streamlined toaster designs because manufacturers feel they have to put a door in the bottom?
The biggest problem with my phone is that it took too long to find one that isn't comically large (I have an iPhone 13 Mini). The second biggest problem is that the battery is not what it used to be. It lasts 2 days on a full charge instead of 3. The battery will need to be replaced in a few years.
I feel like I will be using this phone until it crumbles to dust. Apple shows no interest in making decently sized phones. I would support the EU enacting legislation to enforce at least one phone in each lineup to be no bigger than 60 mm x 125 mm. (iPhone Mini is ok, but it's still bigger than what I prefer.)
Smaller and lighter phones are an accessibility concern. Miniaturization has been the goal for computers since they were invented. It is incomprehensible that designers and manufacturers are reversing course. My options right now are basically do nothing or replace my phone with a watch.
>and by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone
That remains to be seen. This could accelerate cultural change around desiring shiny new toy being seen as cool
I used to be in this camp, and before we had the charge limit and power saving mode it was true, but now? I'm no longer sure.
Like, I've had my phone for 6 years now and the battery is still going strong with the 80% charge limit always on throughout its lifetime. Meanwhile the USB-c port is shot to fuck and disconnects constantly, it can't connect to 5G, leaving me without a connection in lots of locations cause there are no fallback towers, and the OS support has basically been over for a year now. Cameras are no longer up to snuff either and I could use a storage upgrade.
My previous phone had a replacable battery, which I replaced once before the GPS and wifi chip died and turned it into an air gapped brick. Everything else seems to fail at a similar rate.
Still it's not really about if it lasts as long or not. It's about having the right to repair devices and to reduce waste at large. First batteries, then displays, main boards, etc. Each law builds on the previous one as precedent.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone
Why? My phone works almost perfectly still three and a half years after I bought it. Except the battery lasts shorter.
If I go to battery health in settings it says:
> Important Battery Message
> Your battery's health is significantly degraded. An Apple Authorised Service Provider can replace the battery to restore full performance and capacity.
> Find Your Service Options
Aside from my current phone, I also have a very old iPod Touch. That old iPod Touch would have been usable still as well, if it wasn’t for the fact that it takes somewhere around 10 minutes of active use until it goes from full charge to zero charge. In other words, unusable for bringing with me anywhere plainly because of the battery.
Replaceable battery would have been great. Both for my iPhone and my iPod Touch. Even if it meant they would have been a bit thicker than they currently are.
Modern phones have 7 years of software support, but the battery lasts only around 3 years.
The battery in my iPhone 11 pro (6.5 years old) is still basically fine as long as I charge it every day. None of my previous smart phones were able to keep enough charge to be useful after 3-4 years.
Pixel 8 is nearly 3 years old. Battery is still perfectly fine.
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"…by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone."
Why? There have been few new features in recent years and new phones have restrictions not wanted by many. Google is closing the Android ecosystem and making it more proprietary so I'll keep my phone as long as I'm able.
The non-replaceable battery has to be one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on consumers. It's great that it's about to be broken.
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
Not really. The battery just needs to have a connector rather than soldered, and no other things blocking the battery once the back-case is opened. Realistically, a service shop will do the replacement like how watch-batteries are typically replaced.
I don't know, I see people every day using old smartphonereachinfg for a power outlet everywhere they can because their phone do not last a day. Most think going to a shop to ask them to replace the battery will cost an arm.
I think that law doesn't even go far enough, they should standardize a battery format. When like me you are used to open smartphones and replace batteries you realize how very similar they are all in footprint and could be compatible with each other with very minimal effort. If there were only a couple of standardized formats you could find new batteries in every small shop/airports whatever and easily have spares. Chance is that other electronic devices or toys would also adopt them.
I had a perfectly fine iPhone 11 I bought new. The first thing I replaced in it was battery. I had to pay for “genuine” Apple battery + certified laboratory. The price was higher than the price of my iPhone as second hand, but I liked this phone.
Then I sold it, because I ran out of 64GB space. If I could add an sd card, I would probably use this phone longer, instead of contributing to consumerism and creating more e-waste.
I wish that people would think about sustainability and using their devices for longer rather than chasing “new and shiny” every year Apple releases the “best iPhone we ever made”
The ideal phone for me:
> asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, [...] before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses'....Henry Ford
Nobody cares about repairability....until they are hit hard by it.
Anecdote: Around 5y ago, the lightning connector of my wife's iPhone died after 3y usage.
We brought it to an Apple Store and the official answer was "Sorry, we don't fix that on this model. Here is a 200€ discount on a new one"... The phone was still worth >900€ at the time.
Let's be clear: This kind of commercial practice are unacceptable both ecologically and ethically speaking. It is terrible customer service.
A lot of high end phones (outside Apple) at the time would have their USB-C port fixed in matter of few hours for <100€ in any random "I Fix it" store.
The battery is the exact same shit.
With the battery no longer a concern, more people will opt to buy used phones rather than cheap new phones.
Som even if most people change phone before the battery gets really bad (I doubt that this is really the case), the end result will still be that fewer new phones will be purchased.
Now we just need a law that requires hardware makers unlock their devices when they stop providing updates.
Modern iPhone batteries are basically user replaceable are they not? They are metal encased and the adhesive can be electronically disabled. They don't seem "worse" to me?
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
Sometimes we have to acknowledge the externalities of our lifestyle and take things down a notch.
Even if most throw out their old phones, now at least it'll be trivial to shuck these devices to get the battery for recycling, while sending the device for refurb or further recycling.
A key component to effective recycling is separation, and this is one step in that direction
More replaceable batteries can have secondary effects that most people would probably like though - like the ability to by a used phone on ebay/FB marketplace that doesn't have an abysmal battery.
So I guess newer iPhones and iPad allow you charge up to 80%, which extends battery life, for idiosyncratic reasons? I’m sure there must have been a reason and demand for that.
I guess I run my iPhone on low battery mode a lot, due to idiosyncratic reasons too. Maybe I do.
Apple battery replacement costs anywhere from $70 (for a ~$400 phone) to $120 (for a ~$1000+ phone). In many global markets you can get a brand new phone for that much.
I'm curious about the environmental argument here. At face value it makes sense, but is there some hard data that shows that there is a meaningful number of consumers that buy new phones only (or "mostly") because of battery degradation?
The article (granted, probably not the best source of information) has some numbers like "number of phones sold", but doesn't actually tackle the crux of the issue: how many of those phone sales would be prevented by having user swappable batteries?
My previous phone was refurbished and was great in all ways except for battery life. I have now bought a new phone that I wouldn't have bought if batteries were replaceable.
Having said that, I do like having waterproof phones, and I expect this rule would make that harder.
In last 5 years or so me and my wife have purchased 5 new phones. Except for one, where the phone slipped from a flat countertop due to having a glass back, in all other cases the reason was battery life getting worse, with no other issues with the phone at all. So I have to disagree with you here.
With the replaceable batteries the people at least have a choice. Without the option for a battery swap you had to buy a new device and throw away a otherwise totally fine one.
I am using mobile phones since 1996, I will gladly accept the "worse" experience.
And no, I don't want a new phone just because the battery wears out, it did not lost the ability to do phone calls and SMS in the process.
We are on the year of Android 17, my oldest device still runs Android 12 perfectly well, with the apps I care about.
A lot of people buy new phones only because their battery doesn't get through the day anymore.
Very ironic, you almost got it, post.
Screen and battery replacements are by far the number one repair service that people avail. The data is clear. I'm afraid you're completely wrong.
How about you ask people if they want a non-swappable battery for 1 mm less thickness?
Can I have a thicker phone but narrower
I currently have a 12 mini, but I'd love to go back to the iphone 4 size, or even a blackberry curve. Would be fine for comms, and I suspect I'd spend less time doom-scrolling on it.
> this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want in order to provide something that most people don't want.
Okay, you're claiming two things: (i) replaceable batteries will compromise some other features, and (ii) most people want those features more than they want a replaceable battery.
Can you name 3 of those features? I personally can't.
> because this law will force phone manufacturers to compromise the things that most people want
Hopefully this will help bring the headphone jack back.
If we run this experiment and most people say they wish they could replace their battery would you concede you are actually the one with idiosyncratic preferences?
most of the time I replace my phone because the battery degraded so badly and a replacement is expensive.
Its not enough by itself that the phone has amassed scratches and is 20% slower or has a 30% worse camera optic than the current generation, or that updates will only continue for a year or two more.
But the slowdown (associated with battery degradation btw) and fact that it doesn’t get me through a whole day definitely move the needle into me buying a new phone.
Everything you just described as "what people want" translated in my brain to "what they're programmed to want".
Some products on the market are there to address some inherent need or desire people have; some are for more manufactured needs/desires.
To me the intent of this law looks to put a floor on the environmental cost of providing for the manufactured variants.
Given that probably one in twenty people you'd meet would have between 5 and 10% of battery left: probably most of those.
(and yes, I know that power banks exist)
Case in point: 8% battery left, going down to 7% typing this comment.
you act like making batteries disposable will fundamentally alter the usability of the phone.
I think most people who are capable of figuring out how buying a new phone impacts their financial goals would be in favor of this
I don’t know what’s with tech people and their insistence that most people who use tech are mindless zombies.
I think most americans are happy to have usb-c on their Iphones.
No one cares, and having replaceable batteries is not gonna make any difference software and hardware support as usual will drive most people to upgrade their phones or their computers or anything else electronic for that matter.
Owner of an 11Pro iPhone soon to be obsolete after seven years. I probably will upgrade sometime in the next two years nine years with the same electronic device is long enough.
I got my moneys worth. very satisfied with the longevity and resale value of most of the Apple products in comparison to the competition.
> by the time batteries wear out, most people are going to want a new a phone.
Extreme consumer brain coupled with privilege. Billions of people can’t afford a new phone every couple years, they buy things and use them until they are past the point of repair, only buying a replacement when they have no other choice.
Can you honestly even say this year’s new flagships, or any from the last decade, represent meaningful improvement for most people outside the tech bubble and influencer sphere? Smartphones have been “good enough” for a long time.
"Normal people" (tiresome and unnecessarily reductive meme) do not necessarily care about how it's implemented, but they certainly care about planned obsolescence, which is the target of this law. It just another way to enforce reasonable service life and reduce e-waste. That's the goal of this regulation.
Right to repair has never been about requirement to repair. Obviously we can't force people to repair their phones instead of buying a new one, because that would involve replacing the market economy with a planned economy. This would be extremely difficult to pull off and would be wildly unpopular.
At the same time, 5.78 billion people have a smartphone worldwide. It is obviously wildly unsustainable to live in a world where 5.78 billion people have to throw away their old phone and buy a new one every 2-3 years. However, phone manufacturers have figured out that if they force people to, they can amass ridiculous levels of wealth because the demand for new phones would be constantly high. So obviously the incentives here are completely wrong. This has happened before with lightbulbs in the 20th century and is a legitimate form of market failure that needs to be resolved, as it wastes a lot of consumer spending to replace what consumers already had (like the parable of the broken window).
For many years since phone manufacturers started gluing phones together with a consumable part inside, consumers have been denied the ability to replace their battery. Where the option does exist, it's often very inconvenient, difficult, or with a price inflated to be nearly as expensive as buying a new one.
Phones stopped advancing significantly many years ago. Phone manufacturers now re-release practically the same phone with slight CPU and camera improvements, something completely unheard of until relatively recently. Lately the main marketing trend for new phones has been AI, but this is a nonsense trend because most of modern AI runs in the cloud, and very few are actually utilizing any local AI features, so the only "AI" thing about the phone is just a preinstalled ChatGPT-like app you can get on any other phone. So clearly they have run out of things to improve, and things to market around. In a normally functioning market, this would mean phones have become a solved technology and we can stop replacing our phones as often, maybe once every 10 years if you're careful with your phone. But this is not what we see precisely because phone manufacturers have been manufacturing problems that are most easily solved by buying a new phone, which they will push people to do whatever way they can for profit. The phone industry has failed to regulate itself, and so this is why we are seeing a push for this type of regulation.
Apple is about to deprecate the iphone 11/SE 2020 version. Am gonna repurpose them as webcams given the 12MP camera put in there is arguably better than the brand new ones they put on new macs.
The phone now has a limited lifespan though because of this prior stupidity where eventually am gonna get into spicy pillow territory. At that point the phone prematurely dies.
We are going into a period where we are throwing away devices with 12mp+ cameras, and processors arguably faster than most desktops. It was arguable when the phones were old and legacy, but at this point the cameras on there are stupidly good.
We need these phones to be repurposed for a second life and actually capture their manufacture energy costs.
Frankly, if Apple allowed old iphones to be used for server usage, it is kind of crazy how efficient per dollar that would be.
> this law will make phones _worse_ for most people
I challenge you to give me an example of how this law might result in a phone that is worse for most people.
This law does not require a slide-off phone cover. It does not require a screwed-on backplate. It does not forbid the use of chemical adhesives. It does not stipulate how a phone should or shouldn't be designed.
It basically just requires the manufacturer to offer replacement batteries and to enable the replacement to be done with commercially available tools. I'd wager the overwhelming majority of phones are already compliant, pending availability of a replacement battery from the manufacturer.
I'm quite confident I could replace the battery on my Sony Xperia 1 iii with a heat gun and my basic iFixit toolkit.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby if they want their phone to have a replaceable battery, I don't think you would be there very long before receiving a "yes". I think that's a more honest framing of the question.
> I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences. But that's nonsense, because the law doesn't actually require people to replace batteries rather than replacing their phone
How could they replace their batteries if they wanted to, unless the manufacturer makes it possible? The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
> At the very least we'd need to see some data that shows that most people replace batteries when it is possible to do so.
At the very least, we'd need only data showing that that number is non-zero. From where did you get the idea that we need to prove "most" people would choose to take advantage of this option?
> The goal is not to force individuals to not replace their phones, but rather to provide that as an option at all, for those who want it.
But my point is that you need to recognize that in so doing, you are taking away the option of having other things, such as waterproofing, larger batteries, smaller/lighter phones, etc. There is no free lunch.
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Consumers may not know that a feature is something they want until they don't have it anymore.
Invert the situation. If every iPhone in history had a replaceable battery, until 2027 when the newest iPhone did not have a replaceable battery, I think we can all agree that the uproar would be significant.
bookmarking this to revisit after couple years.
How the hell can we have more data on people replacing their batteries if the batteries are not user replaceable?
Most people want new phones because of shit software updates and marketing not because out of necessity.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change...
... the answer would depend on which street corner you asked.
> people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are
Yes, they are. They also tend to state that "most people" agree with them. This is called subjectivity.
Totally agree. It makes you wonder who the EU polled regarding this initiative? Who initiated it and why?
I provide food and services for the homeless in my area working with friends outside of any non-profit. That the phone people get from non-profits become unusable in some number of months is a big complaint. Batteries dying is significant part of this (lack of security updates is another part). Replaceable batteries are something that a lot of people would want (especially the option to have several batteries).
Just as much, there's a certain HN complaint form that basically goes "any complaint about the crap that sold now is just programmer/civil-rights-fan/etc idiosyncrasy, real people want exactly this crap 'cause markets never lie".
This is not about charging your phone.
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
I doubt most people wouldn't even think that this is a thing they can wish for or that this is even within realm of possibility.
It has to be explicitly named as an option - as, I'm afraid, people have forgotten that you can have "nice things".
Also I feel rather uncomfortable every time somebody purports to be representitive of or know that "most people" want.
I think you're plain wrong. I have never talked to anyone in my life about phones who didn't want replaceable batteries and wasn't annoyed by the throwaway culture. It's a top priority for the people I know, though by far not important enough for most of them to go for something like a Fairphone.
However, these preferences don't really matter anyway because nobody is forced to replace the battery and not buy a new phone when their phone has replaceable batteries.
Following the bottle-cap madness, I don't think any current data shows the actual issue was resolved. Even worse, the effect on marine life is still not measured, and afaik reduction of harm was the primary goal. Instead of brutally high fines on fishing net waste, we got bottle-cap madness.
We have so much experience with scientific method, yet these massive decisions are adhoc, that's how the whole world works. We never tested what would happen by allowing mass production of plastic, or phones, or whatever, so these antipatches are going by the "feels" as well, with no individual taking responsibility for failures.
A bit off topic, but I recently had a drink that didn't have the attached bottle cap while travelling abroad, and my god, was it a minor annoyance to have to hold the bottle cap in my hand while drinking. I also almost dropped it because I expected it to stay attached. Funny how fast we adapt.
There is monitoring of beach pollution but data publication is typically delayed, like, we know it went down by 30% from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021, we will have data on a regulation that went into force in late 2024 only in a few years.
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https://joint-research-centre.ec.europa.eu/jrc-news-and-upda...
I envision somone keeping a phone long time, not updating it and evtualluy the spying hooks get obsolete and so phone gets more secure, as tech companies move on with new apis and drop support for the old ones. This might be the biggest win. Ms still has customers using win95
> I suppose someone will say that this law is necessary for environmental reasons, regardless of people's preferences.
Welcome to democracy and lawmaking in 2026. We know better than you!
It would take a great deal of lawmaking to make phones more worse, for most people, than phone manufacturers and mobile app developers already do. You want to talk about idiosyncratic preferences, really? Here?
Imagine getting a car without a replaceable battery.
Buddy. You are on the Hacker News. It's like you wanted to get skewered on purpose. Of course we want replaceable batteries! Anyone over the age of 30 will remember the convenience of throwing another charged battery in your car/backpack/briefcase and heading out for the day. Carefree. Also, what a treat to be able to properly restart or power off my phone (no, I mean REALLY power it off) by ripping out the battery!
What's next, having TV remote controls with non-removable rechargeable batteries, for the "convenience"?! Gimme a break. I love tech progress, but leave your hands off my removable batteries! And my 3.5mm audio jack, now that I think about it! :-)
> One of the most frustrating things about HN is that people seem so unaware of how idiosyncratic their preferences are.
Least self-aware HN user out there.
Do you really think the European commission got lobbied hard by HN folks?
This law will make phones better for most people, who would rather keep their phone for a decade rather than having to every three years buy a new phone optimized for some vanity metric that looks good on Engadget reviews.
LOL, please do the experiment for real and be amazed! :D
> If you stood on the street corner and asked every passerby what they would change about their phone, I think you would be there all day before someone said "I wish I could replace the battery".
Not my experience at all. The (few) non-tech people I've talked to about phones soon getting batteries again like it. People believe the idea that non-removable batteries are a conspiracy by the phone companies to sell you more phones the same way cartels manipulated the lightbulb market (Phoebus cartel).
My own hesitation with HM echo chamberification is federation. Nobody cares. And until you can point to a concrete benefit to end users, you should stop and think about why you’re pushing it this hard.
But I don’t think this is the case with phone batteries. I’ve had many conversations with friends and family that came down to replace the battery or upgrade the phone.
I feel the same way about soldered on CPUs, RAM and SSDs in laptops and other computers. The benefits of doing this are marginal at best. We all know the real reason is forced obsolescence.
We all know this is why battery replacement is hard too.
what are you on about? most people i know have 4 year old phones which are just fine and want only the battery changed. my phone was 6 years old this year and it hurt me that I had to change it because of the battery. otherwise it was a perfectly fine phone.
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I certainly understand the value of replaceable batteries. OTOH, I'm concerned about what this will mean for how many common upper end phones are IP67 submersion rated. I don't want that to go back to being a feature only of clunky super expensive phones, and I would rather have IP67 over a replaceable battery.
Now, if I'm lucky, they will mandate both a replaceable battery and that the phones be ip55 or better, after battery replacement.
Yeah great
“let’s just pass a law that says ‘no trade offs’, problem solved”
You will need to have a factory to replace the battery and also run tests to prove that the phone still works with water then
"I would rather have IP67 over a replaceable battery"
Not me, and not most people.
[delayed]
Have you done a survey?
What good is a replaceable battery if the device becomes obsoleted by changing communication standards first? How long before 4G and 5G are phased out? What if we could have forward compatibility in our mobile network protocols?
one step at a time
This is excellent news. Now make them have user-unlockable and user-relockable bootloaders...
You wish.
Recently replaced the battery and charging port of my Fairphone. 5 screws, two plucked components, done. Hopefully this means that soon you won't have to buy a specific company's phone for this marvelous experience.
The Fairphone 5 is only IP55 rated (dust protected, and water droplet resistant). Most flagship phones are IP68 rated (fully dust sealed, and water submersible). IP68 phones are sealed with a single-use adhesive gasket, and replacing battery requires breaking (and replacing) this seal. If the seal is improperly applied, the phone is no longer protected from dust or water.
There is also a middle ground of IP67 from the Samsung Galaxy S5. I'm personally fine with the Fairphone level (they clearly prioritise easy and frequent disassembly; that's their entire brand) but for someone who wants to be able to submerge it just below the surface and walk through pouring rain for hours, that would be enough
While this is a good step forward, it feels like complaining about the 0.025% of plastic from straws in the ocean while ignoring the 75% of plastic from fishing nets.
I own a 2020 Kona EV. The battery cannot be upgraded. Eventually, I'll have to replace the entire car to get a longer range. BEVs should be mandated to have upgradable batteries and modular interfaces so that the shell can continue to be reused, the batteries (and BMS) upgraded, and old batteries easily recycled.
Useful life of most of the cars is on par with their battery longevity, as long as you have proper thermal management and your usage patterns are not outliers.
Focusing on being able to upgrade battery (and to be clear - upgrade, not replaced/repair) is solving 1% problem.
Cars have basically unlimited useful life because every component (arguably with the exception of the frame) can be repaired. It's surprisingly affordable to rebuild an engine and make it as good as new. I can buy a car made in the 50s today, that's a 70 year old car. And I can keep servicing it and keep it going for another 70 years.
The main enemy of cars is rust, but for that there are cost effective mitigations now. The real reason people ditch cars is always they get tired of the old car and want something more modern, not because the car is at the end of its "useful life".
Batteries are not like that. They actually have a useful life that degrades over time, which makes them non-servicable.
What I would like to see is serviceable batteries, where you can replace individual damaged cells and keep the battery going. Everyone would benefit from that, especially the used EV market, which would help stem the massive depreciation hits EV buyers are facing now.
I still drive the car I bought 20 years ago. How long should the useful life of a car be?
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You bought a car with some range, you are fine with it. Why you have to replace it with longer range?
Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
> you are fine with it.
Why not ask me my motivations instead of assuming them?
I'm not fine with the range; I bought an EV to stop burning fossil fuels, my 24-year-old RAV4 was on its last leg, and there was a $6K bonus for trade-ins (my RAV4 would have been about $5k in parts).
Plus, the long-term cost savings kick in after about 8 years, which I blogged about at: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/08/06/typesetting-markdow...
> Why you have to replace it with longer range?
Because I want to explore the interior of BC, drive across Canada on fewer charges, visit family, go on road trips, etc. Just yesterday I spent 30 minutes trying to charge my Kona. It's a long and boring story, but suffice to say our charging infrastructure here sucks, and is not as simple, quick, or convenient as "tap-to-pay" (with a credit card) at petrol stations.
> Should I be able to eventually replace gas tank with the larger one in my ICE vehicle?
FWIW, that is actually a thing you can do. It is mostly done for SUVs and pickups since the primary use case for the extra range is off-pavement driving and the upgrade is simpler.
Yes to both. Why not?
Batteries degrade, you know.
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That will probably come when EV marketshare is higher and innovation plateaus. I definitely appreciate the phone thing as someone typing from an iPhone SE. I also think phone batteries degrade faster than cars, right? I think my phone is from 2022 and I’m definitely starting to feel it.
I don't see how that's even remotely comparable. It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one. You will be able to buy a new battery for your car, that's already guaranteed in the EU - but it will be the same capacity as what you got.
I don't know why is this even an argument really, like.....in a petrol car, do you expect to be able to fit it with a bigger fuel tank after 10 years? or a more powerful engine? Until very recently even software updates to the infotainment weren't really a thing, if you wanted a newer interface you had to change the entire car(I'm not saying this was a good thing, just that generally the expectation is that the product will work the way it was when you bought it).
> It's not like you can replace the battery in your phone with a larger one.
That was totally a thing for phones in the past. Depending on the model you could get a larger pack that had a bulge on the back of the device to have extra battery time. There was a similar thing with a number of laptops.
I do agree its kind of a questionable thing on something like a car. I imagine packaging concerns would really get in the way of adding a bit extra.
it's all virtue signalling. Always has been.
Disagree. I want a replaceable battery in my phone. They can get to extensible memory next. And it's not because you don't care about something that you should remove this freedom from me. And don't tell me that the market will self regulate in the best interests of the consumer or other nonsense like that.
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It's not for me at least. Nobody can prove their inner intent to you but most people will know from themselves that their actions are sometimes misunderstood (especially when something worked/came out badly) but that they genuinely mean well
I worry that this ends up, like other EU consumer-protection regulation, as an own goal.
- The cheapest phones available in the EU (and purchasable online) all have glued-in batteries, not swappable ones. Forcing consumers to use phones with swappable batteries may just mean that the bottom of the market disappears, and consumers will be left paying more for their phones. And would they rather pay less or have swappable batteries?
- This will cause some cascade of engineering changes, which will make phones thicker or less waterproof. Again, it's not clear to me that the tradeoff is being fairly reflected here.
It's replaceable with commercially available tools, it doesn't mean that you should be able to pop off the battery during the day at any point.
This doesn't restrict the design space that much at all.
... other EU consumer-protection regulation ...
like unified charging cable, free EU roaming or intercountry bank payments that are instant and almost free, air travel protections?
- efficient vaccuums - efficient bulbs - no roaming costs if somebody leaves a message on your voicemail - insurance companies and banks can't charge you as they see fit - toxic free food - toxic free meat - farming without killing the rest of the living things - Best of all: China and USA can't dictate the rules everytime
Like the experience of opening any website for the last decade and being greeted with a cookie popup is more the direction the parent comment was intending I'm assuming.
Some regulations are good, some are bad, all have second and third order effects that need to be weighed against benefits.
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Not having cheap plastic junk that ends up as toxic landfill is a pro, not a con.
"Cheap" isn't enough, especially if it's cheap through externalizing cost.
I have never used a phone without easily replaceable battery (where "easily" means no screwdriver necessary, just pop the backcover and pull the battery out). It just happened this way, but I think I'd refuse to buy one anyway, as aside of obvious repairability and maintainability issues having the battery sealed in is also a big factor that makes dropping the phone so dangerous. When I drop my phone, the battery is easily set free to disperse its kinetic energy away from more fragile parts of the device, so it's much harder to break the phone this way. I have made some small dents and scratches from drops over the years, but no serious damage.
This is not what the laws is about, though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835530
It's replaceable without special tools, heating, solvents. It can easily feature a screw or a million other solutions.
EU is late by 19 years. No one cares anymore about user replaceable batteries.
Every single Pixel upgrade I made - every single one - in the last decade has been because of battery life.
This law will be tragic for Google and Apple. What will compel people to upgrade their functional phones?
There was nothing stopping you (and others) getting the battery swapped previously for a fraction of the price of a new device.
Yeah this is what I don’t get. People are actually blowing hundreds of dollars on new phones rather than having Apple (not the cheapest option certainly) replace the battery for $89
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> Every single Pixel upgrade I made - every single one
You make it sound like a large number. I’m keeping iPhones for 4 years now and upgrading because of cameras. Are pixels really that bad?
Awesome!
And next, hopefully, replaceable software.
Which will do much more for phone longevity.
They should have standardized 3 to 5 battery sizes (and their connectors, voltages, etc.), so that the same battery could be used across many different devices, which would bring down the cost even more.
I hope this puts more pressure to extend the software life-span.
How about computers to have replaceable SSDs? There's no point you can exchange the battery when the hard-soldered SSD dies first. (I had more dead SSDs than batteries)
At least there's a choice there. I've never bought a computer with a soldered-on SSD.
And get rid of soldered RAM while we're at it as well.
This should be mandatory, although I never had a computer where the SSD was not replaceable.
Some were a bit of a pain in the ass to replace though.
They (Samsung, Apple, etc.) should never have been allowed to glue it behind the screen. Threaded fasteners and a silicone gasket cover is good enough for 99.999% of the public use-case.
You know this how, exactly?
Via firsthand observation of people in the world. Go ahead and check the number of people on the street that need the edge case of using the phone under IEC standard 60529. Now go ahead and check out how many people on the street want to be able to replace their battery.
This is a bad development. This is likely the end of waterproof phones in the EU market. Customers preferred phones that had non-removable batteries. Previously all phones had replaceable batteries. This is due to market forces.
As long as it does not make the phone bigger or compromise the water resistance, I support the requirement.
But it is not super high on my list. Every 2 or 3 years I pay less than $100 to have a new OE battery installed, takes about an hour. There are other features I would put a higher priority on - like a good small phone option now and again.
I still sometimes miss the Samsung Galaxy I had that had a microSD slot, a removable battery, and a headphone jack.
Phones have lost so much in a decade.
Same but from the other side. The new phone (without SD, removable battery, or headphone jack) is already acquired and laying in my drawer, but I have yet to bite into the lemon and start making the switch. Too damn convenient compared to the abstract threat of software updates... I'm dreading the new situation so much
I have a Samsung Galaxy from 2022 that has exactly that and it's still supported by manufacturer. Unfortunately it's a Samsung Galaxy Tab Active4 Pro.
Neat. That may allow repurposing phones as mini home servers too.
Lithium batteries in things running 24/7 unsupervised always makes me a bit nervous
This must be paired with strong lithium battery import regulation. Even the highest quality OEM batteries can fail in dangerous ways (See many models of Samsung, Surface or Macbook). Cheap, dangerous Chinese imports must be eliminated as an option, because the secondhand owners doing this replacement will likely buy the cheapest replacement battery available on the market.
the largest danger with pouch cells will always be mishandling followed by bad BMS.
it's so routine that they get abused that every llm I asked blamed leaving laptops plugged in for a spicy pillow.
Will this affect the water-resistance of current iPhones? I thought that was why the batteries are not easily replaceable by users, because of the seals/gaskets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dyL6hMZvWQ
Most wristwatches provide much stronger water resistance while still being very user serviceable with a $20 watch tool kit. Whatever the phone makers are peddling are mostly excuses.
Also the latest pixel watch has a new mechanism without glue that has a rubber gasket and screws.
There are multiple watches, cameras, etc., with a lot of physical buttons even, all with replaceable batteries and weather-resistant (or even better, water proof). This is a bad excuse.
water resistance + easily battery exchange for repairs is very viable (AFIK always had been, too.)
like this law isn't about users causally replacing batteries like on very old phones
but about an repair shop easily and without risk of breaking your phone being able to replace it without only holding on your phone for idk. 10 minutes
So that you can just drop by (once they have the replacement parts) wait a moment and have a new battery.
This means in the worst case something like needing to a add a bit of additional seal/wax/glue or similar to improve sealing is very much fully viable (Id the sealing agent is generally buy able.)
It just is something you have to design in from the get to go. And it's easier to not do so at all. And maybe if you obsess if your phone is 1/10mm smaller or not that gets in your way too. And not doing so is more profitable as people will buy successor products more likely, even if just very slightly more likely.
But in general? That really isn't the problem.
Also even if it where the problem. What is better? Having a less waterproof phone, but not needing to buy a new one for another one or two years or having to buy one now?
Galaxy S5 worked quite well. IP67 and a removable battery.
While I'd be perfectly content with an IP67 iPhone with interchangeable battery, the current iPhones are IP68 which is a significant step up in dust/water ingress protection. IP68 devices generally require a sealant, IP67 normally doesn't, making it easier to do a battery hatch etc.
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Please bring back the 3.5mm headphone jack!
Removing it is one of the most annoying things ever in a phone. Yes, Bluetooth is getting better, but the jack always works perfectly. Why can't we have both?
The IP rating will degrade the moment they bring it back. The jacks will either corrode or let water inside the phone and kill it entirely. Nobody wants to deal with that giant hole.
This is about user replaceable batteries, which is subtly different for me. Batteries that can be replaced by a shop, with some specialized tools and knowledge are important to me from a sustainability perspective since that extends the life of the phone.
Batteries that can be popped out and replaced by your average consumer are something beyond that, and have certain consumer benefits like being able to bring along a backup or something, but aren't that important to me.
I hate to say it, but the lack of removable batteries serves a purpose. It wasn't done just because 'screw consumers'.
It was done because:
* It makes phones massively easier to waterproof
* It allows for larger batteries
* It allows for more compact and lighter phones
Consumers, based on what they buy, have shown again and again that they want these features.
It also simplifies manufacture and lowers costs, which everyone likes.
I like removable batteries. If I had the option, I'd get a phone with that feature. But I know that I am certainly in the minority, as is almost everyone in this thread.
It's also worth pointing out that these days, battery and software have advanced to the point where degradation is quite slow in many cases. The phone will often outlive its useful life due to specs rather than battery.
In order to have my iPhone 11's battery replaced by my local apple authorised repair shop, inexplicably I have to leave my phone with them for days. Since the phone is old they have to order the battery from Apple and that could take up to a week, according to them. Of course it's impossible to stay without my phone for a week+ so my only option is to buy a new phone if I want to fix my battery capacity issues.
Find a repair shop that will order the battery in advance?
There aren’t any 3rd party repair shops close to me that are in Apple’s Independent Repair Provider network, so if I were to choose a random repair shop my only real option with them would be a battery from a 3rd party manufacturer, which I’ve had bad experiences with before. I wouldn’t mind as much if I could easily replace it again myself if it started swelling like last time.
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This is good. I recently had to replace a generally working phone because the battery was dying and there was no cost effective & reliable means of replacing.
A proper gasket and screws needs to be the standard solution here.
Ironically the EU also demands phones are water proof.
And they say this will save consumers money, but I will this not also make all new phones way more expensive?
No because phones should be priced as what people pay for them... It's an open market.
It seems like the whole world could massively benefit from this much like the other great innovation out of the EU -- the Common Charger Directive (aka USB-C).
Gigaset makes IP68/MIL-STD-810H smartphones with removable batteries and sold the battery for 30€, don't fall for the "but watterproof".
What good are replaceable batteries if the software becomes obsolete and un-upgradeable by the time you need to replace the battery?
https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu/product-list/...:
- rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
- availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
the secondary market for old phones seems strong?
Because people don't understand the security implications of non-updated software?
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good idea - but not effective enough.
if you gonna go about e-waste then go by repairability and part prices and part supply. then let the market sort itself out.
as someone said - either standardize batteries or ensure that device makers can cap the cost of battery replacement from 3rd parties.
most phones these days - the screen gets damaged before batteries.
what about laptops ? other e-devices ?
Thank you, EU, for having the courage to pass the pro-consumer regulations that my own government lacks. Often, as happened when the iPhone got rid of the proprietary Lightning connector, the benefits extend well beyond your borders.
The right to repair legislation the EU passed is heartening. Now, let's see if they actually enforce it.
There is a shocking amount of apathy on the part of people who think this doesn't affect them because they personally have no desire to use their car out of warranty or to take a car to an independent mechanic. It affects them because it affects resale price, which affects depreciation which hits their pocketbooks directly. Even if they lease the car.
There is a reason that EVs are getting hammered and even ICE vehicles are seeing steeper depreciation curves, and that's because they are becoming more disposable and harder to repair. People are talking about "useful life" of a car as if this was a disposable consumer device, and not a durable good that can be repaired and maintained for decades as long as the ability to replace components is out there. Toyota famously said "Our mission is to build cars that last for 30 years in the third world" and what do you know Toyotas don't depreciate nearly as much as other cars and people still pay 5 figures for 20 year old landrovers.
We also used to build toasters and refrigerators that easily last 50, 60 years or even 100 years if properly maintained. There is no reason cars can't do the same, and for some cars this is possible, but not for modern cars and certainly not for modern EVs. This can change.
[offtopic] Ive always wondered why a conversion has not been offered ( by someone ) for apple phones to make, it so the battery can be replaced by end user? It would be a case modification somehow. Some kind of new "back"
Next: replaceable storage? Since flash-based storage is widely known as a consumable that tends to fail first.
You mean the kind of "first" that comes right after shattered screens, worn batteries, and loose charging ports? :P
I agree in spirit though: storage chips wearing out seems to be common from my limited experience and it would be good if you could solder on, or slide in, a new chip with some standard procedure
So Apple will skip the iPhone 18 replaceable battery? I will wait another year to upgrade my 7-year-old phone, but I wouldn't buy 18 if they don't include this.
Both options have pros and cons but IMHO the cons for replaceable are more.
Since 2020 phone hardware and especially battery has become much better, reliable and long lasting, at least at not dirt cheap ones. It will fail long after the screen brakes or the software updates stop. And a replaceable battery degrades the design.
On the other side a new battery makes an old phone like new. But again it only costs 15-20E to change it in a non-repl phone.
The only real reason to promote battery repl is to reduce e-waste.
I wish them same regulation would be enforced on toothbrushes
So this means no iPhone Air 2 in Europe? I can hardly see Apple wiggle around the special tools requirement when these batteries are glued and sealed shut in the devices.
[edit] didn’t see the fine print with the cycles requirement etc. so it seems Apple etc is still safe.
Was there ever a plan for an iPhone Air 2? They're struggling to sell the stock they have.
Aside from an easily swap-able battery I would love for an iPhone with a double thickness screen that was less susceptible to cracking and built-in rubber bumpers so I wouldn't need a case.
I'll take what is a screen protector for 500, Alex.
And next we could have mandatory security patching for 5 years to make it worth replacing the battery on an old phone. I would say right to repair should apply to the firmware/OS as well.
Already exists in the EU: https://www.reddit.com/r/Smartphones/comments/1lad1a4/eus_ne...
Ah, I must be living under a rock, thanks :)
I made my local store to change the battery of my iPhone 6s for 39€. And here we are again, for the next ten years.
Earlier this year I downgraded my S24 ultra to an iphone 13 mini and then to the first gen iphone SE. I replaced the battery myself on the SE and couldn't be happier. Less screen time and more IRL time. People should just use less of their phones and for battery longevity they should not let their phones go daily below 20%.
No one on this planet should use their phone more than 2 hours per day. Period. More is just plain stupid.
For context to HN readers reading all the naysayer comments: Here's old HN post about EU and USB-C regulation
"EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33358353
It's interesting to see almost all the exact sentiment. I think barring some niches, most people are happy with USB-C transition.
I understand the scepticism but the expectation of "perfection" from regulators (incremental improvement disliked) while fanfare for incremental startup / tech improvement is a weird, cognitive dissonance of HN
I still remember the people arguing that lightning is just fine and we don't need usb-c. It's true, they existed.
Nowadays, good luck to find someone arguing that lightning iphones are better than usb-c.
I guess it would cost them dearly to recognize that they owe that to the eu regulation.
In the us they say vote with your wallet, obviously it didn't work..
> I still remember the people arguing that lightning is just fine and we don't need usb-c. It's true, they existed.
Before that, many of them argued that powerpcs were better than x86. :)
I understood that the move to non-replaceable batteries was at least partially driven by water resistance
*Edit. Not sure why people are downvoting. I didn't make a positive declaration. HN didn't used to be this way for completely milquetoast comments.
It probably makes things easier, but its unlikely that the industry that found a way to make foldables waterproof couldn't figure out a way to put rubber gaskets on battery covers. And in fact, they did, there were several devices introduced in the transition period that had both features.
Rubber gaskets wear out. Best practice is to replace them every time you open the cover. We can put them in, but the replacement battery better come with the gasket because you can't safely replace the battery without a new gasket.
Galaxy S5 was IP67-rated (1 metre depth, 30 minutes) and had a user-replaceable back cover / battery
Also a notification LED, OLED screen, bezels to pick the device up by, headphone jack, unlockable, a continuous light sensor... peak smartphone, save perhaps for the meager 200 Hz accelerometer refresh rate (modern phones have 500 Hz usually, I have no idea what for but I personally love toying with FFT plots)
If the headphone port flap was perfectly sealed….
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Yes and don't forget consumer preferences. This is Hacker News where they are still clamoring for a "small smartphone" because everything else is too big. Shocker, small phones don't sell. Neither do bulky ones when compared to sleek iPhones.
Haven't modern smartphones had non-replaceable batteries long before they had any kind of water resistance ratings?
Not sure if I should be repeating the same answer below each instance of the question but here goes: See the Samsung Galaxy S5 for example as having a good waterproofing rating and user-replaceable battery
Anything except full support of the EU during European hours gets downvoted
Every post about the EU here gets absolutely flooded by negative comments of people who tell me that whatever the EU proposed won't work, governments shouldn't do these things, the proposed legislation is ineffective, it doesn't go far enough, they're just trying to extract money from our successful American companies, and so on and so forth. It's just a neverending diarrhoea of anti-government anti-European underbelly sentiment.
That sounds like seeing a pattern where there is none (apophenia). Do you have examples of posts that wouldn't be downvoted outside of times where Europe/Africa is awake, or that weren't only because it was posted outside of said hours?
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This might be shifting us closer to worse overall design/performance to accommodate swapability. The pouch cells are very fragile, with the phone itself being the physical protection for the cell. If end users begin to handle these, you likely have to add additional packaging to the cell which increases the overall dimensions or reduces total capacity to maintain the same size.
Maybe it's for our own good, maybe we have to suck it up and lose a little capacity to meet sustainability goals. Or maybe this won't do much for the environment.
I am not sure people actually care that much about dimensions.
Most phones today only look thin on promotional material. With the massive camera bump that is sometimes thicker than the phone itself, and the way most people use cases, in the end, you have quite a brick. Also a glass back panel, which to me is one of the worst materials for that purpose, but it looks good on the store stand.
So to me, a removable battery will not affect the phone dimensions as much as it will affect the look, which may piss off the marketing guys, and I take it as a positive!
Seriously, bring back the removable plastic back covers, plastic may look cheap, but to me, it is the best material, and if you put on a case, as most people do, you won't even see it!
Obviously it helps with the design to embed. But it's also obvious so hard to replace batteries are by design to make those phones throw away after the 1000cycle or whatever batties last.
A good middle ground would have been to enforce an easy to replace specification..but then we are up to interpretation.
This won’t do much for the environment.
Even today, phone batteries get replaced until the phone is no longer able to run today’s software.
I recently swapped a broken display + the battery of a smartphone. It's definitely possible with recent devices (although apple might be different).
You need some skill and patience to cut it open etc. without damage, so most people should probably go to a repair shop.
I know a common refrain with my friends is "IDGAF about an extra few centimeters, give me an audio jack". I think consumers are down for thicker phones if they get something for it. In this case, a phone that lasts longer
People say that but then they don’t buy the phones.
There is a difference between revealed and stated preference.
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I'm pretty sure most companies optimize for what the consumers actually want.
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You assume that everyone needs more battery life. That need is highly variable based on different use and access to chargers.
They need a standardized battery. Something with common terminals and width available in a range of thicknesses and lengths would be ideal.
They should extend the principle to laptops, obviously.
I think most (all?) would already comply. What laptop do you see as not having a user replacable battery? Even MacBook can be swapped out pretty easily [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgTon2jqI-A
I won't name brands, but there are lots of low cost "tablet with keyboard" laptops with glued battery. Just a couple of months ago I had to ditch one.
Anyway, if most comply, why not make it mandatory? Or are these kind of directives only aimed at picking fights with manufacturers?
Note that I am not suggesting that all laptops should have USB-C chargers, that's a separate directive. I mean user replaceable batteries available for at least 5 years, without requiring major surgery to replace.
MacBooks are not easy at all. I did it twice and it's an annoying, dangerous mess (danger of tearing the battery open). Apple won't even bother with it. If you want an "official job", they will just replace the whole top shell including the keyboard, because they can't be bothered to remove the glue. And of course it's expensive because of that.
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Hopefully the EU can get the battery situation to mirror the charging cable situation. IE force them all to adopt an industry standard.
Considering that this, and other, regulation is officially aimed at reducing e-waste, the EU should commit to publish independent data on the amount of e-waste and phones replacement rates now and every year afterwards in order to measure the real world impact.
Too often, including in HN comments, those regulations are presented as "obviously" good policies. Well, data are better than assumptions.
I don't know if this is standard, but at least for some previously enacted electronics regulations I know they look into the real-world effects. I think I was looking for information on how they calculate the battery life for the new smartphone energy labels (e.g. is the browsing test over WiFi or the LTE/NR modem) when I found some document about how much energy they're expecting to save with this regulation. It showed a base path of expected energy consumption development, and then how the regulation is expected to modify that
Edit: not the one I saw before, but found a similar document via https://energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu -> policy making -> "EIA reports and related analyses" -> 2025 overview report https://circabc.europa.eu/ui/group/418195ae-4919-45fa-a959-3... -> see e.g. the graphic at the top of page 79
The shaded area is the effect that they think is attributable to regulations, e.g. -2.2TWh electricity per year in the category of phones and tablets when comparing 2010 and 2030
As another example, for "Servers and data storage products" they expect almost no change due to regulation: the consumption is expected to go from 48 to 67 TWh (2010 till 2030) and that it would have been 70 TWh without regulations. If I'm reading it right, this small improvement would be due to the 2019 "information requirement ... including the maximum allowed operating temperature for the equipment ... to stimulate data centres to choose equipment that supports higher operating temperatures, to enable further reduction of the cooling load."
Page 42 shows that they also take into account 'additional acquisition costs' (how much more expensive devices are because of this, I think that means?), but that this added expense is well below the energy costs that would have been incurred otherwise. Of course, that's what I'd say too about my regulations :) but I don't know of another information source for this so this is the best info I have atm
I wonder if this is the reason for Google not majorly renewing their Pixel line since Pixel 9 till 11.
As a non-European I want to say: thanks EU
I thought USB-C was already required.
What percent of iphone users would take a sleeker, slimmer phone over a replaceable battery?
I don't think hackers (in the Hacker News sense of the word) are generally iphone users, considering apple's hostility and condescension towards customers, fighting consumer rights forced by regulators, and device lock-down. People who already compromised on that for a status symbol would probably take the shiny new toy over functionality, sure
> The move comes amid EU-wide efforts to cut the continent’s carbon footprint and tackle mounting waste [...]
...
> [...] if specialised tools are required, they must be provided free of charge when the phone or tablet is purchased.
So if a family buys several phones and tablets that all use the same specialized tool to change their batteries they end up with several identical specialized tools?
From a reducing waste perspective wouldn't it be better to just require that the tool be available for free for some reasonable amount of time such as however long the manufacturer is required to support the device?
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I honestly would not have upgraded my iPhone 13 Pro if I could have just swapped the battery. That phone seemed to get better battery life than current models.
my naive opinion is that this will result in more bulky phones, with worse quality batteries.
Well, Nokia phones used to be good phones with replaceable batteries.
If only we had batteries that would last for 20 years...
Well, 9 more months until I’m going to replace my iPhone 12!
Hot swap batteries! Who's going to offer THAT first?
I recently bought a Supernote Manta. It's an e-ink writing tablet. Guess what: it has a back which can be opened, and its innards are easily accessible. I could pop in an SD card, and the battery can be replaced, too. It's thin and light.
We are being gaslighted by Apple. They keep telling us that it's impossible to have a thin and light device with a user-replaceable battery, or even, heaven forbid, an SD card slot. I beg to differ: there are some compromises (it won't be as seamless perhaps and Jony Ive or whoever won't be able to wax poetic about the materials), but it can be done.
I would imagine something similar is true for waterproofing. There are certainly ways to have a separate battery and phone, with a waterproofed connector.
I don't own EVs but I hope this is forced on EVs (cars and bikes)... that's the only reason I don't buy one.
If this happens, all phones worldwide will have replaceable batteries. It makes no financial sense to have EU and non EU models of phones with seperate manufacturing lines...
Finally! Great to have them back.
GOOD.
Finally!
Legally can this be satisfied by shipping a MagSafe battery pack or is that considered insufficient?
I hope someday EU will implement requirements for phones -> You must be able to flash any firmware (OS) on your phone, without any restrictions.
This is much more important, than batteries.
I mean, I paid like $100 to have apple do it on my iphone 13 mini. It took a few hours and my phone works approximately like new. If a $800 phone's battery lasts 4 years, it's very much worth $100 to get even a couple more years out of it...
Next time I will also by previous generation rather than the newest model.
Seems like I will be buying new iPhone in 2028.
Now all we need is that they honor the requirement for at least one physical nano-SIM so that we are not beholden to carriers to do something as simple as switching phones when travelling--or in an emergency.
I dont care about replacing the battery but doing a 'battery pull' is very useful sometimes. Esp when Android locks up.
This is amazing news.
However, doesn't Apple already provides this? You can go to store and switch your battery for like 60 EUR or so.
They’re just going to change the software for thebattery so that it only charges to 80% capacity so that it meets the requirement of 1000 cycles no one is actually getting replaceable batteries. Edit: commercially available tools. All right so you just sell that tool on your shop.
Awesome! hopefully apple will just stop selling their filth here entirely.
Dude I dream of a day where there will batteryless phones with no requirement to charge. That would be pure bliss.
Like, a landline?
Nfc tags don't have battery and they draw power from the em waves of the scanner. Maybe in a few centuries we will power our phones using the cell towers.
But landline requires wire. A portable mobile phone without battery and no requirement to charge.
This is idiotic. What's next, disallowing unified memory or SoC with packaged memory? These people think they know better than world experts on these matters.
Have they researched durability with replaceable batteries and can promise us phones won't break more often?
Don't remember that being necessary to taketh away, and now that they're required to giveth it back we don't want it anymore?!
Replacable charge sockets too please.
that is THE reason i ended up getting a new phone several times.
and now these voices from right wing, that EU is a communistic union resonate more and more. Now they tell you what to do and how to do.not by market forces.
if anyone can replace the phone, it's much harder to track how it was recycle with phone with battery. same with cars btw.
they trying to change the world by just issuing the order. That usually never works fine.
Now do screens.
and software.
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Damn, recently I had a phone with a battery that wasn’t properly glued and it would turn off when shaken. I hope this doesn’t become the norm from now on.
Never had this issue with several cellphones I had in ye olden times when all cellphones had removable batteries. All it takes is a properly designed connector.
Yeah, none of my Nokias with a removable back cover and battery had that issue. What you realistically might've had was instead that you dropped your phone on the floor and the battery came flying out.
Behold: the widget of the future.
A spring.
I am simply not a fan of this type of legislation. It reminds me of CA bullet button. I also don’t quite understand the purpose. Official retail cost from Apple in the US ~$120. Third-party you can usually get it around $60. Sure the battery does not have quick accessibility but I can replace it pretty cheaply.
Agreed. This rule will likely be irrelevant in 5-10 years when battery technology improves, and it has such a huge carve out (batteries that maintain 80% capacity after 1000 cycles are exempt) every phone manufacture can get around it. Phone makers can meet this regulation by artificially limiting battery capacity through software to protect battery health. Or they could put in a 10,000 mAh battery and only allow the user to use 8,000 of it, and use the rest as buffer.
A better example is the EU cookie consent law. The intent was to make websites stop using cookies, but what resulted was websites didn't change anything except put up annoying consent banners, and made the internet experience worse.
If the battery lasts 10 years basically then that's fair, but ease of repair is very useful.
$60 has different value in other parts of the world.
Sure but how does this legislation help that? Not to mention that would mean labor is going to be a lot cheaper so the largest cost may be the battery itself. That $60 would come down.
Europeans are very good at making companies do unnecessary things.
Phone manufacturers should be able to seal their phones to prevent unwanted substance egress and to compete on aesthetics. They should also make the seal breachable with consumer-grade hand tools like a hairdryer, suction cup, and plastic wedges.
The inside of the phone should use standard screws and securing mechanisms, and batteries should not be glued to the phone.
I actually really like what Apple's been doing with its new batteries by sealing them in metal. That way if a user is being careless and accidentally slips a screwdriver under the back of their phone, the risk that they puncture their battery and start a fire is greatly reduced.
It secures the most dangerous component of your device in a way that makes it easy for anyone to remove and replace safely. I'm sure Apple has a robot to rip the battery out of its case at its recycling plant, and if the phone gets dropped in a lake or something, if that battery eventually catastrophically fails, at least it's wrapped in a suit of armor.
Yikes, I don't live in the EU, but I absolutely don't want this. Maybe I'm mistaken and they could have achieved the same with removable batteries, but my phone is completely waterproof, dustproof, and has survived more than a few hard drops with no case. I would definitely take that over a replaceable battery. Again, I acknowledge they might not be mutually exclusive.
As the law is written, the latest iPhones, for example, would be compliant (battery is replaceable with commercially available tools under the self-repair program), and they are completely waterproof and dustproof. Some manufacturers now use glued seals for their phones and would probably need to change their approach in design, but I think the majority would be okay with minimal changes.
Like others have pointed out, if phones can certify using batteries with 1000 cycles of charge above 80%, they'll also be exempt, so this will likely only affect very cheap models.
I don't have the same experience at all. For me, battery life is the #1 reason of obsolescence of my smartphones.
With respect, maybe read the article? You're against it, because you didn't read what is being mandated and instead just invented worst-case scenarios instead. You're against your own Strawman.
The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools, if the manufacturer requires specialist tools then they must provide them for free.
Essentially they're banning specialized tools, and mandating that repair shops and consumers must be able to purchase replacement batteries for "at least five years."
For context the iPhone was already altered to be compliant with this law and none of the issues you raised were notably worse in the iPhone Air, or 17.
This likely will eliminate specialist software to "sync" batteries, and non-standard screws/attachment mechanisms.
> You're against your own Strawman.
> The proposal is: batteries must be removable using commercially available tools
That's exactly what he's against, plus the premise "Making batteries removable prevents them from being waterproof, dustproof, and collision resistant". Which may be true or false, but not a straw man.
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