Stop micromanaging everything what the hell
Good at making laws. Not good at making tech.
European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
131–140 of 622 posts
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Battery in my last device became too weak long before device was useless. Device was perfectly fine, just that battery did not hold long anymore.
Yeah battery will virtually always be the first to go. Unless you crack the screen.
in my experience, it's the charge port that goes. My last two devices, each of which I had for 3 years, the charge port failed before the battery did. I just finished fixing my current one. Although I did decide to do a battery replacement anyways while I had the device open. But that was just because of how hard it is to open them at all. My battery health monitoring app said it was at ~80% health still. And while the charge port hasn't always failed on me in the past, I'm not sure the battery has ever been the reason for me personally, although I'm probably just lucky in that regard.
Basically, I'm not sure that any one "thing" is the thing that always fails. There are multiple common points of failure and generally speaking, phones are hard to service in any manner these days. I personally would gladly give up water and dust protection, as well as thinness in exchange for ease of serviceability. Unfortunately, that seems to be a relatively uncommon set of preferences (although obviously it's probably much more common in places like Hacker News).
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#133The problem is not really the battery anymore, it's the software mainly. It's all closed source and is often deprecated before the hardware is dead. Then the manufacturer makes it hard to unlock bootloaders; keeps drivers closed source and effectively bricks the device. For recurring sales are the backbone of modern economy so we must force obsolescence. Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device? Pl…
Actually the EU RF, product liability and cyber security regulations rather point into a direction that disallows use of aftermarket firmware that can delay onsolecense and encourages lockdown. Instead of overregulation we need create an economic system that encourages sustainable use of resources. The EU just does what they can do best: regulate
It seems that they are too good at it, to the point of outlawing new competitors and even hobbyists who simply can’t afford to deal with the paperwork; eg see the shit-show that security regulation around OSS.
https://hackaday.com/2023/04/21/the-cyber-resilience-act-thr...
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device. I wish I could upvote this more. It's a crime how I had to throw away in the past perfectly usable devices because they were forced into obsolescence.
I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.
If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#135The problem is not really the battery anymore, it's the software mainly. It's all closed source and is often deprecated before the hardware is dead. Then the manufacturer makes it hard to unlock bootloaders; keeps drivers closed source and effectively bricks the device. For recurring sales are the backbone of modern economy so we must force obsolescence. Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device? Pl…
No, it's batteries too. And water/dust/fluid ingress protection. Modern phones are sealed up pretty tight because users want them to be waterproof. This makes it very difficult to build in replaceable batteries!
solved see galaxy s5
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version. It seems clear that there will be some downside to the replaceable battery version, whether it's size, cost, weight, ergonomics, water resistance, etc. Will the convenience of having replaceable batteries and not i…
> Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version. Assuming everything else is close enough. I know there's an ocean between me and the EU, but importing a phone becomes significantly more difficult than it needs to be based on which cellular frequencies are supp…
Sure, but I'm thinking about stuff like just going to Nordic countries or even the UK. A lot of Europe isn't that far away from a country that doesn't follow EU rules. I was under the impression that you could, for the most part, buy a phone in the US and use it in the EU anyway these days?
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#137Is this rule enacted now or was this just a vote? That's the important detail for whether this counts as SNI or not ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... ).
No, the rule can not be enacted since it has not been fully adopted - the final (multilingual) text has to be added to the European Council Rules via the plenary voting procedure. This rule will come into effect following that vote.
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#138Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is significantly more complicated than that. Water isn't just dangerous because it short circuits, but because it also attacks the materials. You do not want water in your phone, seperating the battery compartment also increases thickness and complexity.
Super thin phones are impossible to hold without the hefty case.
But most phones arent super thin. Imagine adding a replaceable battery and thickness to those.
Re: European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device. I wish I could upvote this more. It's a crime how I had to throw away in the past perfectly usable devices because they were forced into obsolescence.
I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.
It would require doing things slightly differently, such as hardware vendors having to buy the rights to redistribute firmware blobs / source code... just because it's hard it doesn't matter it can't happen. After all, if physical components can be brought together to make a product, why can't software licenses move with them?
One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.