Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 334 posts

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#181

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

EU: Smartphones Must Have User-Replaceable Batteries by 2027 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36394922 - June 2023 (13 comments)

European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361510 - June 2023 (605 comments)

EU parliament passes law on user replaceable batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336190 - June 2023 (15 comments)

Non-replaceable battery? Not if this proposed EU law passes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129250 - Dec 2022 (234 comments)

EU legislation could bring back user replaceable batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34085963 - Dec 2022 (23 comments)

Replaceable batteries are coming back to phones if the EU gets its way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30867892 - March 2022 (14 comments)

EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660953 - March 2022 (637 comments)

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#182

Post by algas »

vletal wrote: post #42
nuker wrote: post #33

I’d hate to lose waterproof feature on iPhone. For it’ll be dealbreaker.

Submarines are not glued tight, yet they are waterproof. Much bigger deal for Apple is design. Exposed screws sealing the back cover would give Jony Ive OCD ticks, I'm sure

Every part of your first sentence is inaccurate.

Submarines are glued tight; all the body panels are welded together. They do this because making waterproof riveted joints is hard [0]. Riveted joints would flex and open up, requiring constant maintenance and caulking, and early riveted subs would leak trails of fuel behind them (and significantly into the sub itself!)

Second, submarines aren't even waterproof. There's lots of things that are hard to seal, like the spinning propeller shaft. Submarines have a natural advantage over your phone in this regard: all the water that leaks in can be pumped out.

Under the new regulations, phones can't be glued or welded shut, and there's not much room for a bilge pump in the average modern smartphone.

[0]: https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?p=1518898

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#183

Post by pdw »

scarface_74 wrote: post #105
bjackman wrote: post #4

I think this is fantastic news. It will be interesting to see how it affects the amount of phones that get discarded. I think the next bottleneck is likely to be software longevity. This has improved a lot lately! But basically I think phones have now reached a place like laptops and desktops where HW capabilities are stable, and there's no good reason for devices to be obsolete in 5 years any more. I wonder if regul…

> But basically I think phones have now reached a place like laptops and desktops where HW capabilities are stable, and there's no good reason for devices to be obsolete in 5 years any more. Unless you care about your phone working as a phone. 2G was discontinued years ago, 3G is rapidly being dropped by the carriers and how much longer before 4G is discontinued? > streamlining the Android update process? (To Google'…

That's the situation in the US. In most of the EU, you can expect either 2G or 3G to be available for at least five more years.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#184

Post by CamperBob2 »

sroussey wrote: post #148
rlupi wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0237... > (11) This Regulation should apply to all categories of batteries placed on the market or put into service within the Union, regardless of whether they were produced in the Union or imported. It should apply regardless of whether a battery is incorporated into appliances, light means of transport or other vehicles or otherwise added to products or wheth…

So do EVs need replaceable batteries? Telos can longer integrate them into the structure of the car?

So do EVs need replaceable batteries?

If swappable EV battery form factors had been standardized and enforced from the outset, free of DRM and lock-in, we'd be enjoying incredible advantages by now. History will see this as a missed opportunity without a doubt.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#185

Post by theshrike79 »

leptons wrote: post #140
theshrike79 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expensive? It’s like 50-70€ to swap an iPhone battery and you get a warranty for the battery. There’s no way a user-swappable battery will be cheaper than that.

Back when phones had replaceable batteries they were nowhere near 50-70€. Half that, if that much.

They were also really tiny capacity-wise.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#186

Post by jacquesm »

klipt wrote: post #172
jacquesm wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still on a dumb phone and that's because I think spending $800 on a phone is ridiculous. And it's not like I can't afford it.

An iPhone SE is half that. A budget Android half again. Both completely usable, just won't replace your mirrorless camera just yet.

There are other reasons.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#187

Post by refurb »

systemtest wrote: post #12

It is interesting that the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in. They don't make smartphone anymore so any regulations isn't hurting them. It would be admirable if they held the same standard for vehicles, including brands from the EU.

This is a good observation.

It's easy to pass onerous regulations when you won't take an economic hit for it.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#188

Post by mrweasel »

thesnide wrote: post #94

The battery is indeed the HW part that has the most decay. But in that 5y time-frame the SW part is the one that is the most problematic. It would be nice to be able to replace the ROM easily after the EOL of the device. Will self-regulate itself immediately, as then incentives to have longer life is real and you cannot force customers to just buy another device because you decided it's time. By "replace ROM easily"…

The sad part is that you can't even do "ROM" replacements, it won't work for most people. Many countries have multiple apps that you more or less need to function in society, there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones, not just via the official app store, if custom firmware is to make sense. Otherwise that old phone isn't going to provide much value anyway.

10 years of software update isn't actually unreasonable, if you can replace the battery on your phone easily. An iPhone 7 for instance is still a pretty useful phone for many, and I don't see any use cases that would chance that in the next couple of years.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#189

Post by forty »

jeroenhd wrote: post #178
forty wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd consider the being the buying side of a market as "participating" in that market. Vehicles are definitely regulated in Europe (see that story with Volkswagen, an EU brand, cheating the regulation as an example [1]) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal EDIT: I realize this started in the US but EU countries also went after VW and other EU brands after that

While car companies obviously need to follow regulations, those regulations are quite lax compared to the USA. We didn't have as big an emissions scandal in Europe because the European Commission knew about the manipulation as early as in 2010 but didn't act on it. When it comes to regulation in the car industry, I can't help but feel like the car manufacturers are the ones writing the law. They'll gladly make the sa…

I think it can go both ways: heavily regulate stuff built abroad to reduce their profit, heavily regulate stuff made locally so that standard is too high for foreign competition to join the market.

Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

#190

Post by Tagbert »

noirscape wrote: post #131
palata wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to call it "premature obsolescence". I don't believe that the manufacturers actively try to make your old phone get slower. Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower. Maybe I am being pedantic…

There's some degree of active involvement with this. I've long suspected Apple to do this for example. The best version of iOS for any iDevice is usually the one just before the one that they use as the hard cutoff point. Granted, my big example of this is quite old (the iPhone 4 would run iOS 6 really well, while on iOS 7 it was a glitchy, slow, battery-draining mess) but it does seem to be a common trend (my last A…

“ They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.”

Are you going to just drop an inflammatory statement like that and not even try to provide any information to back it up?

Post reply on HN