Comment by bko
11 hours ago
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.
Battery tech has gotten a lot better every year over the last hundred years.
I think OP meant the phone was going to be replaced in three years tops, so no one cared much about battery longevity. Nowadays, the battery can be the constraint for practical phone life, since few consumers can replace one themselves and by the time they pay someone else to do it, may as well trade it in and let Verizon subsidize a new one.
Having an easily swappable battery returns some power to the user.
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You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
> You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy. Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.
I do it.
> a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway
You don't, this is nothing but an excuse for
> b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
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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...
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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.
Also Products aren't being designed for individuals anymore. There being designed to maximize for ad revenue, we're the product.
If there is any incentive to make a product better is to make it more accessible to their first party customers.
Slow down innovation is certainly one way to have people keep their phones longer and cut e-waste. Imagine if they allowed air conditioners...
Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc.
There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.
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...You think air conditioners are forbidden in Europe...?
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I think it’s far more likely to introduce additional dead batteries into existing waste. Probably drop in an ocean given how much batteries are already dumped.
> 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.
>Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C
Short term thinking, if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape, it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.
(1) The EU fundamentally didn't care which standard so long as there was one; they only forced this because Apple dragged their feet with their own proprietary thing that wasn't a significant advantage. The other end of Apple's Lightning port being a USB port does not suggest it added anything except deliberate incompatibility.
(2) what would "significantly better" even look like? USB-C can do 120 watts, enough to fill a 20 Wh battery in 10 minutes, except the batteries themselves aren't ready to charge that fast.
(3) if someone somehow manages to make a significant advance, nothing prevents them from having two ports. Or indeed lobbying for a law change on the basis of a tangible thing they can demonstrate rather than a hypothetical that still hasn't happened in all the time since these discussions began.
The same Europeans that were miles ahead with their GSM standard?
We can compare that to the US. Here, we stayed stuck with power-thirsty analog phones for many years before bouncing through a litany of mutually-incompatible digital non-standards...and finally landed on the ~same actual-standards that Europe adopted.
I think they'll be OK. (I think the rest of us will be OK, too.)
With that attitude, we’d still be using D-sub connectors.
I assume OP thinks more like me: the EU will move to the next standard in a reasonable amount of time after it's available.
I'll be the first to complain if the new standard isn't adopted in due time, but as a strong example I'm still very content with how the GSM legislation standard has played out.
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This is fully on Apple themselves. USB consortium asked apple to use lightning for what became USB-C, but Apple didn't want to give up the ecosystem control.
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You're aware the maker of the lightning connector helped produce the USB-C standard in the same year they created lightning?
> The design for the USB‑C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc., with the help of Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
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What does any deity have to do with it? Btw, has anyone done a post mortem analysis of that mandate? I wonder if it delivered what it promised. I doubt it:
All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable.
The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet.
The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.
Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.
How much cool aid do you have to drink to genuinely believe the corporate argument that using proprietary connectors is "innovative"?
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Not even that.
Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.
And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
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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.
That doesn't change anything the parent said. If not copying Apple created a better product that people want to buy, someone would be doing it.
1. It's easier to design and build Ingress Protection without user-accessible compartments.
2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery.
3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone.
4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack.
5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.
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 Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.
It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.
> but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it
The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.
> And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.
Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.
> why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.
> 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.
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