By then who knows maybe China's nuclear battery will be available to the public.
Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
521–530 of 560 posts
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
JFTR: achieving that capacity retention is a question of charge settings. Pretty much any Lithium ion battery can achieve it if you don't charge it to the absolute maximum possible each time. It's quite simple. While you can charge a "good old" Lithium ion battery to 4.2V, you already start getting slow degradation at that point. Charging it to 4.1V or 4.05V massively reduces that. But at the same time, those 100 or…
I suppose they can advertise a 0.9x Wh battery and include a 1x Wh battery instead, which is fine for me. If the battery is going to degrade hard just give me one that only reaches 90% max.
This is probably what Apple is going to do, soft limit the battery to not charge to 100% yet still report 100% in the UI. Many android devices and laptops have such a setting these days already. For some it might not be nice to see 80% after a night's charge, hence the UI fakery I'm suggesting.
My old 2018 Hyundai Kona EV did the same thing: officially it was a 64kWh battery, yet when you count the cells they come out at 71kWh or something. They built in some margin to extend battery life as capacity declines. Coïncidentally this also meant that regen braking worked even when the battery was 100%. The car is at 110,000km and the BMS still reports 100% SoH.
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does any of that prevent the phone from having the latest chip and copious ram?
Radiation hardening would do that
That's not a radiation hardened chip, it's regular off-the-shelf consumer electronics. The "solar radiation" test they advertise is part of MIL-STD-810H. It tests whether the electronics survive regular sunlight on earth. The only ionizing radiation this phone is rated for is UV light.
At least if it had registered memory there might be an argument that it has some radiation resistance, but no it's plain old LPDDR4x.
Ulefone Armor 29 Ultra has the same MIL-STD-810H conformance with "radiation hardening", 16GB of RAM and a flagship Dimensity 9300+. Just not a removable battery.
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The point is that people have different preferences, so the EU should not force people to buy phones with removable batteries. There are many food additives with very useful properties, but health effects. There are many perfumes too where the original formulation had a particular compound layer found to be carcinogenic. Regardless of whether an individual prefers to use such compounds at their own risk or not, lar…
> (And if you think you truly have choice as a consumer, I challenge you to use a phone that isn't running either Apple or Google's code.) Why doesn't this count as a choice? Was it more of a choice when Windows Phone was still around?
My point or argument isn't that customers have absolutely zero choice, but that there are very few options out there.
If (phone) OSes were truly healthy free markets, there would be a lot of healthy competition. Even cars and automobiles (which still are almost oligopolies, as it's extremely hard to compete) have more options.
I said that sentence primarily as counter to anyone who thinks the mythical "free market" is a panacea to all ills, as many anti-EU folks often have such a view. I was trying to demonstrate that an unregulated market is (very) often unhealthy, and can paradoxically can result in viewer choices.
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it can technically be done At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs. I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market. I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero…
I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions, maximizing profit and not giving a fuck about any other criteria.
> I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions
Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.
> not giving a fuck about any other criteria
That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.
> profit
I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it can technically be done At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs. I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market. I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero…
> At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs. My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.) The engineering of making things waterproof is in the realm of "A bit more annoying but easily doable if anyone's interested in doing it", not "Doable at the cost of every…
> My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.
Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#527Unless you have giant hands, with modern screen sizes, thinner devices are not merely a luxury. For people that have active outdoor lives, water resistance is also non-negotiable. The only thing that you should care about if you are being pratical and not just an annoying nagging geek, is that you are not forced to use an authorized reseller to buy a replacement battery, and that batteries can be bought from third pa…
I do rowing and sailing as a sport as well as wind surfing. I want to be able to simply replace the battery of my devices as well as connect them with a cable. There are of course trade-offs here, but also very viable benefits.
And no, I never lost a phone to water damage but I can assure you that my devices are far from water-proof. They have quite a bit of wear. Mostly from an active outdoor life...
I don't care about some inferiority complex against geeks to accept shitty degradable devices.
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
Last time this was discussed, it was stated that the text exempting based on cycle counts was removed from the final, adopted version. Is that incorrect?
The batteries regulation[1] doesn't contain such an exemption. The legal argument that iPhones may be exempt goes like this: - The batteries regulation is a general regulation and article 11 specifically says the following: > This paragraph shall be without prejudice to any specific provisions ensuring a higher level of protection of the environment and human health relating to the removability and replaceability of…
Just to be clear: There is an official notice of the EU commission making this legal argument:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:52...
> Consequently, in the case of portable batteries included in products covered by Regulation (EU) 2023/1670, the removability and replaceability obligations set out in Annex II of that Regulation prevail over those set out in Regulation (EU) 2023/1542.
The ecodesign law (spare part but 1000 cycle exemption) pevails over the batteries law.
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#529There's an exception for batteries that "retain at least 80% of its original capacity after 1,000 charge cycles." Coincidentally, iPhones and probably other flagships already qualify for this exception.
JFTR: achieving that capacity retention is a question of charge settings. Pretty much any Lithium ion battery can achieve it if you don't charge it to the absolute maximum possible each time. It's quite simple. While you can charge a "good old" Lithium ion battery to 4.2V, you already start getting slow degradation at that point. Charging it to 4.1V or 4.05V massively reduces that. But at the same time, those 100 or…
> JFTR: achieving that capacity retention is a question of charge settings. Pretty much any Lithium ion battery can achieve it if you don't charge it to the absolute maximum possible each time.
Thats great news - manufacturers who want to ship sealed phones have to charge intelligently.
In fact, I'd take this constraint:
> There's an exception for batteries that "retain at least 80% of its original capacity after 1,000 charge cycles."
even further: retain at least 80% of capacity of 5k charges and commit with escrow money to maintain the software for 10 years. If the manufacturer is unable to commit, with money, to a 10 year support cycle, then the must provide at least ability to root the phone without needing manufacturer consent.
It would be nice if manufacturers stopped shipping disposable phones...
Re: Removable batteries in smartphones will be mandatory in the EU starting in 2027
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without sufficient technical information on how the computer works and without root access, we can't be certain a "wipe" will actually wipe everything. For malware that could be inserted in a targeted manner, even with desktop computers we don't have access the every firmware of every part. When we're talking about mobile "phones", we usually have an interface that tells us "sure, it's wiped", but is it? Without full…
Fair points. I've never owned anything but (rooted) Androids, or (now) GrapheneOS. I don't know if that makes me more paranoid than you are or not; I am, however, much less afraid of a wipe that's not a wipe! Not everyone has someone with technical skills in their family, so making policy that fits only that minority doesn't make sense to me. The majority will, as you say, "hand over their devices willy-nilly". I'd r…
> I am, however, much less afraid of a wipe that's not a wipe!
I don't remember, but there was a story about deleted photos on iPhones resurfacing by mistake. Or deleting a file on Windows or Linux most likely removes the entry for that file, not the contents of the file itself. Or the "quick" format or whatever it was called in Linux. Or not being able to delete everything from an SSD because it moves things around and deallocates some regions. But even if a wipe is a wipe, a random employee is more likely to insert a hardware or firmware malware targeted to someone than the company is likely to insert just malware to every computer sold. Using "paranoid" in this case implies that there aren't many people with actual secrets to keep who could be targeted.
> Not everyone has someone with technical skills in their family, so making policy that fits only that minority doesn't make sense to me. The majority will, as you say, "hand over their devices willy-nilly".
Sure, offer both options then. Also, notwithstanding the fact that I agree with offering both options, not having technical skills should be frowned upon. Everything is computers. Not knowing (someone who knows) how to use a screwdriver or a heat gun is inexcusable.
> I'd rather pursue this as a two-part problem: get the best accommodation we can for hardware, and also impose (very, very) strict data-privacy rules.
Data privacy rules don't accomplish much when the adversary doesn't care about rules. Reminds me of the "We don't have any criminals in Sweden because it's a crime to break the law" meme.
> Trying to do too much at once risks accomplishing too little.
That's another sad part of our reality, I agree.