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The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

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

#251

Post by threeseed »

mrweasel wrote: post #188
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 soft…

> there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones

That will not happen.

You can't just allow banking and financial software to be run on a compromised OS. It is great for you but terrible for older people who would be exposed to rampant criminal fraud.

The better approach is to force OEMs to support their phones for longer. 10 years is realistic.

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

#252

Post by linooma_ »

crote wrote: post #150
scarface_74 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

> Unless you care about your phone working as a phone Most of that is a chicken-and-egg problem. 3G was dropped because very few phones were still using it, and you could not run 3G on the same frequency as 4G/5G. If phones lasted longer, more people would've remained on 3G, so they would not have dropped it. Furthermore, 4G and 5G can share the same equipment and frequency due to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, so there i…

Not here in the US. The carriers wanted to discontinue 3G for years. They really only started it in earnest in 2018. It took them about 3 years longer from the first dates given to finally kill 3G. It sound to me as if 3G phones didn't bite the dust as fast as carriers assumed or customers refused to upgrade at the rate they expected.

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

#253

Post by sroussey »

tcfhgj wrote: post #246
sroussey wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend money where I spend time: phone, chair, monitor, mattress. I rarely drive so my car is 19 years old. I use my phone daily (right now!) so I have the newest one.

Why explicitly the newest one?

I’m on the apple upgrade program. So I just pay monthly. I could skip a year and own the phone, but don’t really care. I want the best cameras. Life is too short.

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

#254

Post by kevinmchugh »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #241
superkuh wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there are options. And instead of having people chose themselves to pick these options and refuse to buy terrible phones the EU is instead saying it will use the force of government violence against other people so that only phones of their desired non-shittiness are sold there. I really don't thinking bringing violence into this situation is called for. The EU is showing is an implicit assumption that people can…

Was this comment written by an LLM? You know those of us in the EU elect these people who write these laws, right? And there’s public consultations and shit?

What percent of phones sold in the EU last year had user replace batteries?

It seems like revealed preference is for devices without replaceable batteries.

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

#255

Post by jq-r »

Kirby64 wrote: post #214
jacquesm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is google down or something? https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

That has nothing to do with "wrecking battery life" though. They added a fix to prevent the device from turning off early due to battery brownouts at lower states of charge. It did result in reduced performance (and they got a lawsuit cause they weren't open about why/how they did it) but this wasn't causing excessive battery drain.

Lets not use this case as a scapegoat and pretend that slowdowns don't exist in iOS.

Pretty much from the first iPhone model it's well known that newer iOS releases will slow down your phone and/or make your battery drain faster. I even remember when they actually broke wifi on a lot of phones with an update and pretended that the hardware was defective all the time (which it wasn't). Hell I'm looking right now my old iPhone 8 which got a new genuine battery, and it's a lagging, hot mess so I only use it when I don't want to burn the battery of my new phone.

My good colleague resisted updating her iPhone 11 to any newer version of iOS from the one she got, but couple of months ago she couldn't install her banking app anymore so she broke down and updated the OS. Instant laggines, and battery lost close to 40%. Just like that. She got mad, and when the madness subsided, she bought a new iPhone. Mission accomplished for Apple.

All of this could be much avoided if they would allow you to install previous versions of iOS, but they don't for obvious reasons. And before anyone mentions security, that is a load of BS because even previous iOS versions get patched up. So planned or premature obsolesence, the user just gets frustrated with an old phone which hardware-wise might be perfectly fine, but software-wise an unusable mess and buys a new phone. I hope the forced user battery replacement works, and I'm sure they could look into these forced software updates which are also largerly contributing to larger problem at hand.

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

#256

Post by jacquesm »

hyperdimension wrote: post #235
jacquesm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one and it is a pretty good and solid phone. Not quite a smartphone (it runs Linux) and I very much like it. Absolutely indestructible, cheap and unbelievable battery life (so long I sometimes forget I have to charge it at all).

What model are you talking about? I'd like a portable Linux device. I was born too early for the N900, and it wouldn't get cellular coverage in this day and age even if I were to buy one...

N800 tough. They are pretty serious about the 'tough' bit, I'm fairly sure you could use it in hand-to-hand combat and at least the phone would survive.

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

#257

Post by jacquesm »

cududa wrote: post #207
jacquesm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And he's wrong about that too.

Do any phones designed by EU companies move more than a million units per year?

Are you going for the record of all moving the goalposts comments?

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

#258

Post by jq-r »

forty wrote: post #162
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.

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

Oh yeah, EU regulators huffed and puffed when it was discovered that they are not doing their jobs and actually are in cahoots with the industry. Great example there.

If EU, or maybe just Germany was even concerned about ecology they would heavily tax those heavy monsters of "crossover" cars and similar garbage and transfer that money to EVs, but they don't. Nobody touches EU car industry where it actually hurts.

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

#259

Post by john61 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #90
john61 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation is not made for the benefit of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole. In this case, for the environment or the planet. I doubt that people don't want a planet to live.

Society as a whole is just a bunch of individuals. If its bad for individuals its bad for society.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

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

#260

Post by hyperdimension »

jacquesm wrote: post #256
hyperdimension wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What model are you talking about? I'd like a portable Linux device. I was born too early for the N900, and it wouldn't get cellular coverage in this day and age even if I were to buy one...

N800 tough. They are pretty serious about the 'tough' bit, I'm fairly sure you could use it in hand-to-hand combat and at least the phone would survive.

Thanks, that looks like a pretty nice phone. Even has a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm jack. Also, I didn't know KaiOS was based on Linux. Is it exposed anywhere? Can you get a terminal on it or ssh into it?
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