I hope this happens. Making a phone more of an appliance like a washing machine etc. I hope this happens for TVs too since smart TVs are a load of shit just now.
The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
151–160 of 334 posts
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#152It 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.
> It would be admirable if they held the same standard for vehicles, including brands from the EU This regulation does cover vehicles. It also covers a wide range of devices, including ones that are indeed made by the EU. Beyond that, I think "only regulate things you make" is a silly standard. The point of regulations are (or should be) to protect consumers, not to disadvantage companies. The EU has lots of consumer…
One EV is like thousands or hundreds of thousands of headsets.
So redesigning Tesla cars will get a bigger result than apple AirPods.
And there is a Gigafactory in Germany that will be first up to make clunky Teslas. So they are definitely regulating themselves.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#153The 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"…
Is ROM really used anymore? It seems like these days, everything is OTA update compatible. Customers aren’t forced to buy new devices, they just no longer get software updates after N (5?) years. You would need an alternative OS, like a version of Android that lacks google apps or something.
"ROM" is just used as a term for the system image. It is no longer truly "read only". And replacing that is often intentionally made difficult by cryptographically signing the image, making it impossible to boot a custom one.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the hardware was more open it wouldn’t even be a problem. People could pick and choose ROMs best suited for their phones and use cases, just like Linux. Newer phones could use bleeding edge features for their HW, and older phones could use more stripped down versions to preserve battery life.
What percentage of consumers want to pick the ROM their phone runs?
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> used a phone there are almost no smartphones where you can easily replace the battery these days.
I recently replaced the battery in a Pixel 4. Definitely not latest-and-greatest, but also still just about getting feature updates. I think the biggest challenge for most people would be confidence, rather than it being intrinsically difficult. iFixit sold me a kit with all the necessary (OEM) parts and (iFixit) tools, and they have a web page with sufficiently-detailed instructions.
Last time I changed a battery in a phone I paid apple $69 and walked the mall for an hour. Pretty painless.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#156I 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…
I finally made the switch last year, but I used a moto G (rather popular model, at least in Europe: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ ) for some 6 years.
It did slow down at one point, but it came back to life after installing lineageos, so now I blame bloat for the slow down phones suffer from.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the low end, surely you'd get more standardisation. Same processor, screen, Bluetooth and mobile chips. So that from an update pov it's easy. They can always differentiate with cameras, batteries, cases etc.
So a communist phone for the lower class? That’s the not-nice way of saying the same thing. I’m not sure if I am for or against that without more thought.
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.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#158It 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.
The EU doesn't make smartphones anymore in the same way that the USA doesn't make smartphones anymore. There's still plenty of design going on, but the manufacturing is outsourced to Asia.
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#159I don’t know. I already have to click cookie buttons on every goddamn web site I visit, it’s annoying as hell. These EU initiatives can be a bit pointless. Battery needs to be replaced like once every 2-3 years. Why change the device design to make battery user-replaceable when I can bring it to the repair shop?
I want to be able to change the battery far more often - possibly every 8 hours if I'm using the phone a lot during an off-road adventure or other adventure where having a charging device isn't a great solution. When I used to travel a lot I had a smartphone with a replaceable battery and I carried several replacement batteries. Going from 5% battery life to 100% battery life in the few seconds it takes to change the…
You will be able to change your Tesla batteries after this as well!
Re: The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It is interesting that the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in. The EU only regulates markets they are participating in. The only country that regulates markets that they do not participate in is the United States, and for the most part they seem to be doing so for fairly good reasons (such as with the anti money laundering and anti terrorism financing laws). Though of course you ar…
Why are you ignoring what he means for an alternate interpretation of that particular sentence? He explicitly clarified that he’s talking about the EU not making smartphones. Your reply is more like hijacking his comment than actually conversing.
And he's wrong about that too.