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Comment by taf2 | Hacker News Reader

This seems good on the surface… but imagine you are designing a new piece of hardware… add this to the list of many “good things” that maybe won’t be great in 20 years from now when a new technology doesn’t fit the mold… I’m all for being able to repair. I enjoy finding a short and fixing by replacing a blown capacitor… I’m just not a fan being forced to build things in a specific way that prevents innovation. Maybe in 20 years we have amazing new batteries that last 100 years… maybe a device doesn’t need a battery just a capacitor and exposed to the sun is this now not a possibility? Because the capacitor need to be replaceable or is this a loop hole in the regulation… time will tell but IMO more rules about what and how I can design new hardware is bad

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This is a law for today. When batteries will last 100 years, the law will change.

I find this law quite good.

How often are laws like this really changed in a time window that benefits innovation? A flexible phone that wraps around your wrist - how will that battery be feasibly replaced? Again I’m all for repairing hardware and replacing batteries … I just don’t think it’s right to use laws to force a design … for health , for safety sure… but let me sell a cheap phone/device and let me sell a longer lasting device with replacement parts like frame.work… a market of choice is better IMO … I guess the EU just doesn’t think this way…

Looking from the other side, it's been decades now and we haven't seem much innovation on electric toothbrushes or beard trimmers. Except we're still stuck with a non replaceable design.

You'll see your flexible phone as the peak device for 5 years, then again will come the right to repair and battery issues.

Perhaps your point could be that there needs to be a process to get an exception from this law for a year or two if the committee wants to help some technically chalenging devices. But expecting all makers to do the right thing by themselves is unrealistic (and no, "voting with your wallet" doesn't help when a set of brand dominate a market and collude on the issue)

They use considerably less in terms of raw materials than they did 20 years ago. The same is also true even for apparently very simple things like soft drink cans!

Changes were driven by market forces.

Wouldn't the amount of raw material be sheer process optimization, driven by production costs ?

If they came up with easier to recycle designs I'd hear you, but the only industry I see having done real efforts is the plastic bottling industry, and it is still hands down one of the worse plastic producer, even considering recycling.

The reduction in raw material is from finding structurally sound ways of using less, both in the product itself and in the packaging. Yes, that's driven by production costs.

Eh, if battery tech ever gets there, they can just update the law. Big deal?

In the meantime it'd prevent needlessly thin phones and laptops designed around planned obsolescence.

What incentive is there for battery tech to "get there" when progress is essentially banned in the name of standard parts?

It's hard not to see this sort of regulation at the very least slowing down innovation and causing worse environmental outcomes as a side effect over a decades long scale. It won't be apparent to most people though, since they won't be able to see the counterfactual world where technology improved slightly faster.

I'm not sure what you're talking about. Why would allowing battery replacement hinder development of battery tech? If anything it should spur a battery aftermarket using different charge controllers, chemistries, etc. that are user-swappable for the OEM ones.

It just sounds like a generic antiregulatory complaint ungrounded in reality? It's not like li-ion tech has advanced dramatically absent such regulations. The bottleneck seems to be chemical, a matter of energy density, not a regulatory chokehold on innovation.

It's just part of a bigger right-to-repair war, whether it's batteries or cars or operating systems. Manufacturers are increasingly moving to rent-seeking behaviors and X as a subscription, which is great for their profits but not so good for consumers or societies.

Big tech is already on the verge of supplanting governments across the world, the last thing they need is more freedom to "innovate". They don't do it for the social good, just for their profits, and regulation is always playing catch-up to try to limit the social and environmental damage from their actions. At least the regulations have some measure of democratic buy-in, vs the what, 2-4 big tech companies that alone determine the future of tech? They don't have your interests at heart, at all.

Specifically on development of battery tech development portion of your question, requiring any given characteristic in an appliance tends to halt innovation on the axis of that characteristic. For example, if an exact size of a part is specified, there's dramatically less incentive to innovate smaller versions of the same part.

One place this is seen is building regulations. It's not uncommon for an exact door or frame thickness to be legislated, and the required thickness is based on fire risks. This was a very good thing in the short term, but in the longer term, it removed any economic incentive for innovating new materials that require less thickness to provide the same level of protection.

Since it's been many decades since regulations were created in most places, there's often quite a bit of low hanging fruit, from a materials technology standpoint. There would be even more if the rules had targeted objectives (e.g. fire resistance), as opposed to methods (e.g., a set material thickness).

In the big scheme of things, technological progress has been strongly correlated with social good. We live longer, healthier lives and have more amenities than any time in history. It's much nicer to be living in the 2020s than I would be in the 1970s, 1920s or the 1820s. People living in each of those earlier eras saw the benefits they had from electricity, antibiotics, rail transportation, etc that those before them lacked and it's not hard to imagine people in the 2070s will be happy not to be saddled with our current level of technology.

It's easy to devalue what we don't yet have, but it's a fallacy.

So going off that logic, wouldn't mandating end user/consumer serviceability be an objective (repairability) and not a method? People are still free to innovate battery materials how they want, they just can't be locked into the device with no easy way to replace them when they're dead. I still don't see how that hinders innovation.

Sure, a lot of technology has proven socially useful, but usually with regulation (of natural monopolies, for example) and subsidies and such. It's not an either or situation. Companies can and do profit alongside mandatory social contributions that they otherwise would not have done if it meant more profit.

In the electronics space, things like safety regulations, charging standards, warranty protections, etc. have hurt profits but been good for the consumer. There's a balance.

That's fair. I definitely see a lot more harm in specifying "everything has to use USB-C" than in requiring that something is relatively easy to service.

Still, there are valid reasons to make more integrated devices and it's not reasonable to expect everything to be as easy to service as it becomes more advanced. My father could take apart and rebuild all kinds of car engines in the 80s and 90s, but would never be able to do that with a Tesla. It was still a great thing for Tesla to drag the auto market kicking and screaming into an age of electronic vehicles, though.

I couldn't read the original source (foreign language) but I thought the OP was just about mandating replaceable batteries. If it's mandating a particular connector instead, yeah, I get how that would be bad. USB C is a total shitshow that not even the manufacturers and standards bodies can get right. I wouldn't trust any government with that sort of fine grained oversight. Even the cookie law was a disaster.

About electric cars though, case in point, they are a market that people have been clamoring for right to repair on. Not necessarily so they can hack the firmware themselves, but so that they can take it to their local mechanic for repairs instead of the dealership. I understand there is something of a cottage industry of places that can service some Priuses and Leafs etc but some newer cars are too locked down for third parties. That's essentially a DRM thing and hampers innovation in the post sale services sector, anticompetitive OEMs who want to prevent cheaper third party components.

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