Comment by rythie

Agree - I read this as it will be easy to replace the battery when it reaches its end of life and no longer can hold my charge. It will still take time to replace it, but that's okay since it'll only be done once every few years. It's not meant to re-introduce swappable battery packs, so you won't be able to carry spares on long trips etc.

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?

We don't need fast charging. Phones will be left on wireless charging surfaces, which will eventually be ubiquitous. Everyone hates usb-c plug in. Just leave it on a surface, pick it whenever you want.

We don't need to fast charge anything, phones or EVs. Slow charging preserves battery life and smart charging will charge whenever it is cheapest.

Slop

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.

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.

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.

The trade-off is basically having a thicker phone. Nobody except apple thus all manufacturers 6 month later want paper-thin phones. Never the actual consumers.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

> Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.

Fairphone 6, recent with replaceable battery: 9.6 mm

Galaxy S5, has a replaceable battery, released _12 years ago_ - battery tech has improved a lot since then: 8.1 mm

iPhone 17 Pro Max: 8.8 mm

iPhone 12 Pro Max: 7.4 mm

We want to make phones as thin as possible so the latest flagship iPhone is 1.4 mm thicker than the one from 5 years ago? A whole 0.8 mm thinner than a recent one with a replaceable battery with maybe 0.1% of the iPhone's R&D budget, and 0.8 mm thicker than one with a replaceable battery made 12 years ago?

Bullshit. This was the reason the industry gave for why they were removing battery replaceability support. Everybody hated it when it was first introduced, and to this day I only buy phones which have easily accessible ways to put a new battery on when the day comes. Fuck this BS of "people wanted thinner phones".

It’s also very hard to make them resistant to water and dust, I really like that I can wash my iPhone in the sink and don’t have to worry about it getting wet in general. This is a lot harder to achieve with battery doors, especially if they need to be as big as a phone back.

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.

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.

Too scary to sit on a battery and possibly breach it. Keep em on your belt like batman.

I carry USB-battery pack or my MagSafe battery. At night I use pass through charging.

Works just as well.

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.

Nah, they'll just make the battery an external MagSafe accessory like the Air.

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.

user replaceable batteries and blue bubbles are the 2 greatest threats to Apple

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

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.

> 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?

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