The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

Post by GuB-42 » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 2:41 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #164

kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android seems to suffer from a phenomenon similar to "Windows creep" where performance decays over time for no reason in particular, even for users who are good stewards of their devices. It's more of an issue for some devices than it is for others for reasons that are unclear.

I used to think this at well, but then I removed all of the useless apps I'd gathered over the years. The improvements were almost instant. Installing apps doesn't have a noticeable impact on general system performance, but install enough of them and you'll find everything mote sluggish than you remember. My phone feels as fast as the day I bought it, which so far must've been about four years ago now. It came out wi…

Post by scarface_74 » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 3:12 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #320

scarface_74 wrote: post #317

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That’s just the thing, there are valid technical reasons. Apple alone sells 200 million phones a year. If even five percent of people don’t secure the battery properly or the battery cover isn’t reliable after repeated removal - which happen to older phones back in the day - it affects a lot of people. There weren’t that many reports in the west for instance about the physical home button being unreliable. But that d…

> Can you imagine how much less reliable at scale a physical removable battery door will be over the five or six year possible lifetime of an iPhone? Apple claims to have over 1 billion iPhones in use. I can't, since my GS5 lived 5 years with me before I lost it, and never had any issue with water. It's not obvious to me that this is automatically an ureliable setup. You're also talking about the refurbished marked.…

Post by oefnak » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #297

kaba0 wrote: post #100

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Come on, what a stupid take.. what violence? Let’s also call out the EU next for “using violence” and disallows selling grinded shit as food.. capitalism doesn’t work without rules , period! It’s as per the very Adam Smith! Libertarianism is absolutely divorced from reality.

Bad food causes actual physical harm to people. This is violence. Bringing in state violence to prevent this actual physical harm makes all the sense in the world. Making a choice to buy a shitty phone with a glued in battery is not being harmed . There's no violence being done in this context. And there's no coercion involved. As for, "What violence?", how do you think laws are enforced? I hope this helps you better…

Post by kevincox » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 4:16 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #24

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…

The second proposed legislation from the article seems to require that at least 5 years of updates must be provided after the device was last sold. This is far more than many low-end and mid-range Android phones, moreover many Android phone manufacturers start counting after the device was released, not last sold. Interestingly, they also seem to put upper bounds on how quickly these updates should be rolled out. Eg.…

Post by schmorptron » Mon, Jun 26, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

tomjen3 wrote: post #58

microtonal wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second proposed legislation from the article seems to require that at least 5 years of updates must be provided after the device was last sold. This is far more than many low-end and mid-range Android phones, moreover many Android phone manufacturers start counting after the device was released, not last sold. Interestingly, they also seem to put upper bounds on how quickly these updates should be rolled out. Eg.…

Is it? It is going to meant that Android can't take advantage of the high end features of the new phones that are being released, and that old and slow phones are going to get updates that makes them run even slower. To top it of, it is not like manufacturers are into throwing away money, so this will likely mean that prices on the cheapest phones will increase more.