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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

#261

Post by ascorbic »

theshrike79 wrote: post #135
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most people won't: - it's expensive - it takes their phone away If changing the battery is a one hour cheap deal, a lot more people may do it. And I am very happy about those EU initiatives: this way I know what sites are tracking me and how much. This tells me which sites values annoying me with their banner so they can sell my data. Have you noticed there is no banner on Hacker news despite the fact that: -…

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.

There you go. Half the price https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-8-replacement-battery...

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

#262

Post by phh »

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'…

> 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?

First 4g devices were released in 2012, in 2014 you could find sub 150€ 4G devices. If you bought the last 3G phone in 2015~ (there were still 3G phones after that, but nothing reasonable), 10 years of network support is still reasonably within reach.

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

#263

Post by Toutouxc »

pizza234 wrote: post #37
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…

In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time d…

> CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating

I might be wrong, but AFAIK this is not a thing within the usual timescales.

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

#264

Post by phh »

threeseed wrote: post #251
mrweasel wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm pretty confident that by most metrics custom ROMs are less compromised than OEM ROMs. It will have less malwares, I better sandboxing, less 3P backdoors , more up-to-date security updates.

1P here being the user/owner of the device

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

#265

Post by summerlight »

pizza234 wrote: post #37
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…

In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time d…

It's probably due to old battery causing imperfect thermal control then extreme throttling. Phones are not really well tested on aged batteries since it's hard to artificially make such one that fits well to real world scenario, and manufacturers also don't have good incentives to do so.

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

#266

Post by phh »

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…

> To Google's credit they have already done a _lot_ of positive work in that area as I understand it

They haven't. I've extensively worked on their Project Treble, and they did a beautiful work to perfectly versionize every behavior OEM might depend on, or version driver APIs. They could use that to provide long term support (which is what I do in my own project, the foundation is very sound), but in practice they use it as a way to obsolete code faster:

Before Project Treble, Android kept whatever code was in use. So if some OEM was still using a 5 year old code path, and it was still working fine it would remain.

After Project Treble, every driver API has a new version every year, and the older ones will be deprecated (read: purposely broken or completely removed) within 3 years.

Before project treble, OEMs could maintain the Android for their platform quite effortlessly for 5 years, nowadays they have to rewrite whole parts of drivers after 3 years.

someone will come and say that since Project Treble OEMs have been upgrading for longer. But I consider it's completely a matter of timing, the smartphone market stagnating. Look at nVidia Shield and fairphones for reference.

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

#267

Post by shortcake27 »

palata wrote: post #72
jacquesm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.

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…

I have an iPhone XS. For what I do, the hardware is still perfectly capable. I use basically the same apps I used 5 years ago. Except now, I often can’t run more than 1 app at a time. I’ll have an app open, switch to another app and it’ll reload from scratch. Then when I switch back to the first app, it too will reload from scratch. Multitasking can be very painful.

My understanding is that apps use more RAM now because newer phones have more RAM. The result is that older phones with less RAM will aggressively kill apps because there just isn’t enough memory to go around.

As a developer I can see both sides of the coin. On one hand, I know it would be possible to reduce the memory consumption. On the other hand, I realise this would also cost more money. But it isn’t malice. Just a choice.

Apple as a manufacturer have gotten a lot better over the years. I remember when iOS updates made the iPhone 3G literally unusable, but that isn’t the case any more. I’m running iOS 16 on my iPhone XS with no performance issues at all. I expect iOS 17 to be just as fast. They also implement features to increase the longevity of their phones, like reducing performance and maximum power delivery when the battery is degraded. They were lamented for this feature but it genuinely saved my iPhone 6S which kept on shutting off.

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

#268

Post by makeitdouble »

giantrobot wrote: post #225
makeitdouble wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A replaceable battery needing its own impact shell Why ? Current battery replacements are sold without an impact shell, and the main issue is to have to remove all the parts to reach the battery at the very bottom of the stack and then deal with the dirty gluing. A design where you remove the bottom first, unglue the battery through pull tabs and stick the new battery would have exactly the same properties, the bod…

Current LiPoly replacement batteries are not sold as consumer items. You can't buy them off a peg at a normal retail store. Take a look at phone batteries sometime and make note of the logos everyone ignores. A UR mark (its a backwards printed UR) is a UL certification for components meant to go in a UL listed product but themselves aren't individually certified as UL products. Not that UL or any other testing labs a…

Thanks for the details.

If I correctly get your point, the whole UL/UR system will need to be revised to adapt to more consumers directly buying replacement parts, as they'll expand beyond the nerds following iFixit tutorials.

On the glue part, sretch release strips are simple enough to deal with.

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

#269

Post by mk_stjames »

In the last decade and a half I have owned 4 phones total and I have yet to have one that has such a poor battery that it has needed the battery replaced before the phone itself was essentially obsolete. I don't know if maybe other people just use their phone so much more than me... Mine sits here on my desks and I look at it for notifications every now and then, maybe send a text... Thats it. Take a phone call once every few days.

My phone is a Pixel 2 from 2018. The battery lasts nearly 2 days without charging, easily. If I am about to go out and use it heavily on maps or GPS... I charge it, and I get an evening's use out of it still easily.

Maybe I'm just not the normal user. But for these people running batteries dead more than once a day and needed to replace a battery once every 2 years... I don't get it.

And this is a level of regulation that I don't think will actually do much to save batteries from landfills.

Meanwhile in Spain there single-use vape pens for sale in every Tabac shop that have small lithium ion cells in them, and people everywhere are literally buying and tossing those cells in the trash every goddamn day. I find them laying on sidewalks all the time. This is still allowed, but a battery tightly sealed in a phone that should last a normal person years is a problem?

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

#270

Post by jacquesm »

hyperdimension wrote: post #260
jacquesm wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, you can, but I haven't actually used that. The camera is pretty crappy and there are some (minor) UI/UX issues, but overall it is very solid, it's essentially a repackaged 8110 with a focus on battery life and robustness.

It has dual SIM capability but if you use that you lose the SD slot.

There is also GerdaOS (instead of KaiOS) and you can run Debian on it. When I get my next phone (which could well be years, this one is now 4 years old and still going strong) I plan on running stock linux on it to see what else you can do with it. I paid about 80 euros for it.

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