Comment by PaulKeeble
18 hours ago
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.
A phone is not unusable because some banking apps don't work on it. It didn't even ship with said apps installed.
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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?
Only in some edge cases, in others it takes even longer than 5 years and that time is getting longer and longer.
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
https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/news/new-eu-rules...
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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...
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.
Or she spent 7% of the purchase price of a new device to defer requiring to upgrade for another 3 years.
$100 is worth it, but you can get a good discount by going to that one mall kiosk instead of the Apple Store.
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++.
But that's not what the regulation is saying, is it?
It says
* replaceable with 'commercially available tools' (which means: Apple could just sell you a 'iphone battery replacment tool kit for 1000 Euros)
* has excemptions for high-cycle / long-lived batteries
* ... nothing about the price of the battery (which can be 1000 Euros)
* ... or that the battery/the battery's form factor can't be trademarked, essentially locking you into 'Apple batteries' and preventing aftermarket ones.
Also, I'd rather have a less bulky phone with fewer mechanical parts that can break as compared to a more user-maintainable. Because of 'high-security' software (think: banking apps, or - I assume - the soon-to-be-released EUId wallet), the thing is basically worthless after four years anyways and needs replacement.
I'd wager that ... nothing at all will change in 2027.
> 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
Unrelated note but, cheap/midrange phones are a scam, you almost always get better value purchasing a second hand premium one.
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also camera just not being satisfying enough anymore is a big deal
sure on highest end phones you have very good cameras since a long time by now, but even there they find improvements here and there (e.g. zoom, low light pictures, even better image stabilization)
but middle to lower end phones are still have major improvements in every generation of a certain brand/line/price category. And you might be satisfied with a "acceptable" quality camera, until everyone around you has way nicer photos, or you now have a reason to make photes you didn't had in the past, or you get older and your hands a bit unsteady etc.
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Batteries are generally a cheap fix from third party stores. If you wanted to keep the phone why not spend the small dollars and just replace the battery?
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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.
1996, for anyone else wondering
Not sure how comparable that is when considering that the devices are also commonly required as ticket on public transport with no offline fallback (going so far as to include animations on the screen so you can't send a screenshot to a friend or print it out -- no, I have no idea why they think you can't send a video to a friend). Having 10 minutes of use time is simply not on the table, and GP was probably not talking about that class of phones (pre-"smart" phone) in the first place
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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.
Nice! As a heads up, don't be tempted to replace the battery via a third party if the Samsung battery ever stops meeting expectations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47834810
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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