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Comment by tosc | Hacker News Reader

This is just wrong. Replaceable batteries add cost and fragility to the device, make battery life worse, and most phones die because they stop getting software updates anyway.

Replaceable batteries will increase e-waste because there will be a lot more broken phones.

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Saying "we shouldn't legislate repairablity because <other bad practice that needs to be legislated away>" is not terribly convincing. There should 100% be legislation aimed at keeping old phones able to run newer software.

We shouldn’t legislate repairability at the expense of reliability. The only people that benefits are repair shops.

That should be up to the user to choose, as it is now.

Yea like those famously unreliable Nokia phones with their replaceable batteries

Thankfully EU is also working on legislation that mandates more years of software support. Hopefully days of only 2-3 years of support will be soon gone for good, it's just plain wrong.

Phones don't "die" because they no longer get software updates. They just become obsolete - as planned by the manufacturer. Sounds like the next step is to fix the software update issue!

They practically die. A lot of software, such as work profile, banking apps, etc will stop working (depending on the work settings, bank rules, etc) if you don't update your phone. Also, your apps will no longer update as the app vendor doesn't release their apps for older API versions and will effectively make your app useless if their server side protocol changes.

> if you don't update your phone

Indeed, but the issue is that the phone manufacturer no longer supports the phone and release OS updates. And on Android, you could install unofficial mods to upgrade to a more recent version of the OS, but then some apps (banking apps for example) refuse to work because of... reasons, again making the phone unusable. And in a majority of cases, this has nothing to do with the hardware no longer being capable.

> most phones die because they stop getting software updates anyway

Contrary to what most phone manufacturers would like you to think, no, devices do not suddenly stop working if they go a week without an update.

They do become unsafe to use for most purposes, though.

Depends on what phone you get. Mid to high end phones usually have communities to maintain 3 party system patches for them after they are not maintained officially. You can still use it safely for a a few years if you even bother about it.

For example, my old sony xz3 is a 2018/08 phone with software update discontinued since 2020(?). But there are actually 3party roms that can update it android 12.

That covers most of the software, but basically every modern phone has some proprietary drivers that are necessary for it to function and that have security vulnerabilities of their own.

And nobody's going to exploit those device-specific vulnerabilities (that probably require local code execution anyway) unless you're a high-value target.

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