European Union is doing the work the U.S. government should be.
U.S. government is too busy worrying about what people are doing in their bedrooms, libraries and doctor's offices.
Meanwhile, one of the US parties is trying to ban universal free school meals. Sad.
Beyond being good for right-to-repair, this used to be the one way to be sure that your phone is off and is not listening to you. It's a stride on the privacy side as well.
Yes! mandatory usb C and replaceable battery, and i'd like the 3mm headphonr jack to also be a standard 😁
Me too, but that one might be dead for good.
Out of the phone vendor fuckery with the connector, battery, micro SD, and headphone 3.5mm, the headphones were always the biggest thing.
Bring it back please EU hear my prayers. Right now I’m listening to music on my iPhone with a half broken dongle that pauses if I jiggle it wrong.
I don't mind that my phone battery is sealed up. I do mind that I have to bring it to a specialist that might screw it up and make me pay for the privilege.
Actually, this bothers me way more with laptops than with phones. With laptops, there's no water resistance or any other reason besides thinness to seal the battery up. Particularly with business machines, the computing power will be more-than-sufficient for many years to come, yet many will end up in the trash because the battery's no longer doing its job. It's ridiculously wasteful.
Great news! No point in 5 or 6 years of software updates when the battery gives out after 3 years.
I've replaced some "non replaceable" batteries in phones before... Only to find that after about 5 years of medium use the flash storage goes to shit (which causes massive slow downs), the chips begin to desolder themselves, the USB port gets janky and stops charging, etc.
Batteries are a great first step, but damn these $1000+ devices just are not built to last more than 3 years
Honestly, they are pretty damn stressed devices though.
If you think about it, they are on 24/7, with active usage at least 4-6 hours a day, exposed to god knows what humidity, unknown low and high temps, dropped every x days. It’s a modern technological miracle that they last as long as they do. Lots of read and writes with photo and video backups.
My 5 year old X died a month back (flash memory failed), I was actually impressed that it lasted that long.
I don't even want to replace my battery. I want it to last. At least 5 years.
Bring legislation that enforces a 5 year warranty on batteries that are built-in. That would help the environment much more than being able to replace a battery every year that shouldn't fail in the first place. And yes, it's possible to build batteries that last longer. It's more effort, true. But so is building exchangeable batteries or doing an exchange. I rather shell off 50 € more for my phone when I know that the battery will make it 5 years.
I want it to last. At least 5 years.
That is something that would be very hard to legislate. Especially since battery lifetime is dependent on a variety of external factors (charging-style, temperature of the device, luck). Build quality certainly also factors in, but even the best battery won't survive a 10 year old regularly overheating their phones with games and charges it for the entire night. I would love to see OEMs implement nice things like "capacity settings", where you can set your device to stop charging at 80% and show it as 100%.
The EU has been good at holding phone manufacturers to account on this kind of thing, glad it's gone through. I've had at least two phones die on me through the battery breaking, it shouldn't be cheaper to just buy a new phone than get the battery replaced. So much waste.
Hoping us UK folk will see the benefit of this as I imagine it's less effort to just bring the change about across the board than to be specific about geography.
Good, now add SD card please.
And headphone jacks
These days I don't buy a phone if they don't have a micro SD slot. Need that extra space without paying a bullshit upcharge for the larger model phone
tbh SD cards are out and mostly for power users, make them compatible with M2 drives :))
Back in the day I used to just keep 2-3 fully charged spare batteries if I went out. No need for a battery pack to recharge if I can just quickly swap battery and get a days worth of charge instantly.
Any battery is replaceable if you pry it hard enough
Every component is replaceable ~by buying a new iPhone~
-Apple
This is why I got a Fairphone. I was done complaining about the direction of the mobile market and decided to buy a phone which lets me do all of this and has longer support for software and hardware. It's the best phone I've had since the S3.
It only works for me because I like Android, live in Europe and have big enough pockets, though... the thing is a brick.
Laughing in Fairphone
Same! But the beauty of it is that this effectively creates a competitive advantage for Fairphone. Fairphone is already compliant, while all other smartphone companies will have to develop this from ~scratch.
I used to have a phone with a replaceable battery and it was awesome. I would charge the other battery while using the phone all day, carefree. When it was about to die, I'd swap out the battery. It was basically like I had an instant charge of 100% on my phone. Those were good days.
I'm fine with internal batteries, but please use some form of standard cell size and connector.
The language in the article does seem to forget that plenty of early smartphones had replaceable batteries... Yeah, it might add some bulk, but it's not exactly going to be a major hardship.
... but it seems like a good reverse step to me. Any consumer replaceable part is a good thing as far as I'm concerned.
I don't really see the benefit anymore. My current device lasts ~40 hours on a charge, so I seldom find the need to swap anything out. Even if I did, those little USB battery packs that charge multiple devices are more practical. On a long flight, my wife and I just share one and it works on the Switch and tablet too.
Sealed devices have way better water resistance, less plastic makes the batteries themselves bigger, and wireless charging (especially with magnets) will be challenging to add to a battery that's also the back cover.
I'm sure I'll be in the minority on this, but, I don't really have any interest in a removable battery, especially if it involves other compromises on size, capacity, and features.
I see it as a longevity thing.
Sure you can bring another battery pack with you and charge your device from it, but at some point your internal battery will be degraded enough that it essentially needs to be plugged in to function, which is not feasible.
Being able to easily replace the thing in the device that wears out fastest is a good thing.
Granted I expect if this does go through, that mfg will make the battery hard to replace by other means (ie drm locks) making sure they can nickel and dime the consumer all the way.
Being able to easily replace the thing in the device that wears out fastest is a good thing.
Yeah, it's like buying a car without being able to change the tyres.
Now require manufacturers to provide like 5 years of OS updates so devices aren't insecure bricks once you get updates.
OR disallow banking apps from blocking custom ROMs/root, so you can just install your own updates ROM without losing updates.
I wouldn't even care about it being super easily replaceable. It would just be nice if the phone wasn't basically filled with glue...
Holy Shit if that holds up it will have massive consequences
Anyone remember the LG V10? Mine came with an extra battery and a charging dock for the external batteries. Never plugged that phone up once in 2.5 years, just took 10 seconds to swap in a full battery.
At long last. I really miss being able to swap phone batteries. Phone batteries are light, compared to external batteries.
All for this. The amount of times I've needed to do a full reset that would've been so much easier with a removable battery is wild. Waiting 10 hours for it to discharge is nuts
This is a much bigger demand than the usbc charging. I wonder if they can actually pull it off. I’d be happy with simply the right to be able to use a fully independent 3rd party to replace a battery.
The motherboard is so freakin' tiny compared to the actual battery, there really is no reason for it not to be swappable.
Hell yes! This has been a big sticking point for me since they started being removed around 2016. I hung on to my Note 4 until it was tired around 2019/2020, bought an LG V20 as it was the most recent 'flagship' still using a removable battery, then I finally crossed over to the darkside with the S21 Ultra.
Hopefully options will open up over the next few years as even if you don't want a removable battery, your preference shouldn't dictate the entire market. The smart phone market is way too homogeneous where every phone is essentially the same in a mildly different brick shape with a different logo.
Good. With this, my next phone might also last 6 years, as my last one did. I'm not so confident with my current phone, as it's exactly one of these glued shut types where replacing the battery is extremely difficult.
I had the battery for my OnePlus 6T replaced, extending the phone lifetime for probably 2 years. It cost me about $100.
Forcing manufacturers to make batteries easily replaceable by the user without special tools and skills seems like it could make phones less lightweight and less waterproof. I would be fine if they just require manufactures to make it available as a reasonably priced service.
I like replaceable batteries but there is no doubt that the simplified unibody designs have other benefits besides the planned obsolescence companies seek. Battery life or thickeness will certainly take a hit. I feel like having some form of incentives for more repairable phones would work better to bring better, more renuable options without blockingotherr designs
Battery life or thickeness will certainly take a hit.
Modern phones tend to have a big bulge for the camera, so the rest of the phone can be thickened easily without impacting the maximum thickness.
We heard the same things from the laptop industry. But framework proved you can make laptop that's modular and still thin. And battery density keeps improving so even if it adds 2mm it'll catch up in a generation or two.
I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands to just have a single model for all countries, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we'll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks "sideloading" when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you're outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.
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