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Comment by unglaublich | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not really the battery anymore, it's the software mainly. It's all closed source and is often deprecated before the hardware is dead. Then the manufacturer makes it hard to unlock bootloaders; keeps drivers closed source and effectively bricks the device. For recurring sales are the backbone of modern economy so we must force obsolescence.

Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device?

Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.

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> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.

I wish I could upvote this more.

It's a crime how I had to throw away in the past perfectly usable devices because they were forced into obsolescence.

I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.

IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection. And protection granted by government decree can also be taken away by government decree.

So no "permission" to release would be necessary if government's modified ther copyright laws to withdraw their granted protections after some "event" occurred.

The bigger problem is not the permission, it is actually finding the code so it could be 'released' once the event triggered. To make this work would require some form of required escrow in order to gain copyright protection in the first place where the code would be held until such time as the removal of copyright protection from it triggered, and then it could be released.

> To make this work would require some form of required escrow in order to gain copyright protection in the first place where the code would be held until such time as the removal of copyright protection from it triggered, and then it could be released.

Trying to mandate that for all software might be too ambitious to politically succeed in practice - but mandating source code escrow for software used in certain regulated devices - smartphones, cars, planes, medical devices, etc - might be more achievable. You wouldn’t even need to touch copyright law, it would just need to be a product regulation. Of course, copyright law would have to be touched for a compulsory license, but consider that phase 2 and source code escrow as phase 1 - phase 1 could be enacted now, phase 2 saved for later

Throw in a code review.

The easy option would be to have a default law like "you open source your code 5 years after it was created for phones/tablets/cars/etc and it automatically applies to your suppliers as well and the necessary software tooling to get it working. If this requires hardware to program the devices, provide the blueprints of the devices as well".

Then it would be understood and agreed that anyone making software they have to release as open source what was closed source 5 years back. This way I would say that you can't bring the "but the competitors will use this to steal my business" argument.

What you would get in essence is a snapshot of what technology looked like 5 years ago (or a decent number of years people can agree on) and you can fork from there if there's a will to give a second life to various devices.

But really, I don't want an ugly phone because someone decided batteries should be user replaceable like in the old days. And yes, I like my iPhone to be sleek.

> But really, I don't want an ugly phone because someone decided batteries should be user replaceable like in the old days. And yes, I like my iPhone to be sleek.

I don't know about ugly, but my galaxy s5 with a replaceable battery was barely thicker than an iphone 14 without one: 8.1 mm vs 7.8 mm, according to wikipedia. The difference is actually bigger between the 14 and the 7, so even without removable batteries, iphones are getting thicker.

The GS5 was also IP67 certified, and, indeed, it had no issues under heavy rain attached to my motorcycle handlebars, during multiple long trips.

I strongly doubt that having a removable cover would noticeably alter the phone's looks or thickness.

Never going to happen, unless you think western governments would like guaranteeing that Chinese tech will never be more than 5 years out of date.

They don't have to be ugly and plenty weren't.

Secondly, you put prioritise on asthetics over what's good for the planet?

"IP permissions, i.e., copyrights, are not natural rights, they are instead government "grants" of protection"

There's no such thing as a natural right, period. They're all imaginary creations of humans.

Nobody cares about what pmoriarty1 thinks of a word when the legal and political worlds have well-established meanings for those words; meanings that indicate the parent poster is correct in stating IP rights are not "natural" in genesis.

There is a recent movement trying to redefine them as such, led by moneyed interests that would obviously stand to profit from such arguments; but legal history is very clear: IP was never conceived on the grounds of being "natural" or "innate" in any way, but as a device to sustain certain economic sectors. IP is no more natural than subsidies for carmakers are natural.

Yes natural rights are those the constitution recognizes as coming from a Creator and those shall not be infringed.

Copyright and patent are not among those. The Constitution provides that congress can grant "for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

"Limited times" could be defined by congress to "expire" under whatever circumstances they choose.

I thought we were talking about the European Union

The difference is one of justification: we accord "natural" rights to human beings on the basis of the belief that every person is valuable and deserves certain protections and opportunities (e.g. a right to life, a right to education). Non-natural rights are instead determined on the basis of the belief that they provide an on-net benefit to the general welfare, even if not every person needs them or benefits from them.

You're right, but all EU states are members of WIPO, and their governments can't take away protection of foreign-owned IP without violating their international obligations.

So violate them they should.

Realistically, I'm sure there's a loophole they can leverage to achieve these. The EU is a major party to the WIPO and other members will likely be open to "renegotiating" if the alternative is the EU leaving completely rendering the WIPO pointless. The US pulled this stunt many times with other international orgs and treaties.

> I'm sure there's a loophole

"We would never think about taking your IP but if you want to do business in this region, you must agree to voluntarily open-source all drivers after the product is no longer maintained."

Or:

"Of course you don't have to agree to anything but if you stop supporting the product and don't open source the drivers, consumers can obtain money damages for their devices becoming inoperable. "

The US created WIPO and bullied everyone else to join, there's a big difference in what you can do when you're the one with the world's biggest army by a long shot.

Like what? Having the world’s biggest economy matters much. much more in this case

This is one of the biggest issues with current copyright laws. That what you can do in private while in your own country depends not on what the citizens want but on what other countries want completely undermines the citizen's right of self-determination.

> many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this

So plan ahead. For the 2024 model of each iPhone, get all the permissions to release all of the firmware in year 2032.

The usual concern with regulation is not the big players.

It’s the smaller products and businesses that cease to exist because it’s too expensive to meet regulations. Bad regulation raises the cost of entry into the market and strengthens the big players like Apple.

That argument is often used in bad faith/FUD by the big players themselves to halt any regulation attempts.

Regulations can be adapted to affect only the companies that reach X percentage in sales or in market share. The EU's Digital Markets Act does precisely this, for instance.

The regulators can let smaller players grow and thrive, and regulate them once they've exceeded a certain threshold.

Thankfully people here are asking for good regulation, once which states that at some point in the future every phone ever sold in market X needs to have its core software open sourced, so companies can plan ahead.

Who is asking for bad regulation?

I don't know, you brought up the strawman.

The EU isn't making good regulation, they don't have any tech companies and are just attempting to make it illegal to make anything in a fit of pique. The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore.

Europe has an unhealthy culture of naturalistic hippiedom, so this is just the same thing that causes Germany to shut down nuclear power.

(If you think this one's good, try combining it with their six other giant laws you haven't heard of some of which conflict with this.)

I've been trying to find words to describe this take but I fail. It's as if someone thought "what's the most jingoistic thing I can say in support of the US and its anti-regulation free-for-all?".

The US isn't the only country with tech companies. You may have heard of China, Japan, or Korea.

And every country regulates cell phones in particular, since they use shared airwaves, have rare earth metals in them, sometimes have exploding batteries etc.

This is a complete mis-characterization of the EU and it's ability to make laws.

As a legislative body it certainly isn't perfect but you are ascribing motivations and making statements about it that have zero connection with reality.

> The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore

Yes, I firmly believe every every manufacturer would ignore an economic block full of developed countries and 450M people.

This is the sort of bad take that keeps me returning to HN. Some people here are incredibly dense.

On a side note, I wouldn't mind if Apple decided to not sell their toys around here anymore.

This is some weird fantasy comment.

Please do link the other "six giant laws that conflict".

GDPR, DMA, Cyber Resilience Act, Ecodesign Directive, the one in development about proactive CSAM scanning…

To pick one, how does GDPR conflict with this battery regulation?

"Some of which".

The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.

is that a fact? I'm not sure.

could you specify the actual GDPR regulations in question which clearly conflict with these battery regulations (without any creative contrivance required on our part)?

or are you saying there isn't a conflict in that case (in which case, which ones do?) that part wasn't clear

I did not say the GDPR conflicts with battery replacement, no.

which one conflicts with this proposed replaceable battery legislation?

> The people on here saying phone OSes should be open source and unlocked to make them last longer will find the ecodesign and security regulations actually encourage locking them down so you can't break them.

again: could you specify (meaning cite, obviously) the actual regulations in question which conflict with this battery legislation (you know, the topic)?

it seems like a creative but unlikely contrivance that there is an actual legal conflict there as you describe

you quoting yourself when it doesn't answer the question, without adding more context, leads me to believe that you don't think there is any actual legal conflict there, either

I did not say anything conflicted with replaceable battery legislation. I said other legislation conflicts with the things people who like this legislation want out of it. (Though maybe I misworded it.)

in that case, just cite those specific regulations which conflict, because again, the example seems contrived and unlikely (and FUD) without it

The end result may be nobody selling phones there anymore.

Really? Are you claiming that capitalists are so much of a fool that instead of making, say, half the profit they were making before in an unregulated market, they would readily prefer to make 0 profits? The reality is that if American BigTech exit the EU market, then some local or non-American competitor will step in to fill the vacuum. Or have you already forgotten that the European Nokia once dominated the mobile phone industry?

Yes, I'm aware of how economic protectionism works.

The reason Nokia instantly failed when the US entered the market is because their products were bad and nerdy and they couldn't do good software. eg when they got an iPhone and their reaction was to do low level optimizations of their boring UI to make it 60fps instead of having a nice UI instead.

Nokia failed because Microsoft sent a trojan horse to them. Nokia died because of Microsoft.

Not sure how much weight this really has in a market such as mobile phones in which additional external competitors are never going to become a reality.

OnePlus was a nobody when they launched the OnePlus One in 2014. They could have easily gone out of business.

And that's one that got big enough to remember them. Wikipedia lists 188 mobile phone manufacturers [1]. A lot of them very local (e.g. EvertekTunisie making phones for Tunisia and Morocco) or defunct; But even my local (German) retailer offers 35 brands. Big ones like Apple, Samsung and Xiaomi, budget brands like Oppo or ZTE, niche brands like CAT or Beafon. It's a crowded market that doesn't seem particularly hard to enter.

And judging by the spotty compatibility of LineageOS they don't all use the same hardware either.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_manufact...

How would _this_ regulation raise the cost of entry? At worst they'd just have to release the source code for the firmware they wrote (putting source code on github takes maybe 5m).

Source code probably involves libraries from other companies and covers patents owned by other people.

No one is building a product from complete scratch.

Those suppliers would be subject to the same regulations when supplying to the big players. They should have all that stuff already available once it's in force.

releasing the firmware primarily would affect the chip makers, phone manufacturers generally do not write this code themselves.

There are already small businesses that do this: Purism and Pine64.

If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...

> If the owners/companies no longer exist, then I would think the IP should be free by default. Perhaps that's another law to work on...

I think I have even more elegant solution. All IP should be subject to a tax (or maintenance fee or whatever you want to call it). As soon as the IP owner fails to pay the tax, IP falls to public domain irrevocably. The actual structure of the tax can be subject to debate. I would propose a highly progressive tax over time, for example for patents something like $100 for the first year, then doubling every year.

Seriously, why should IP not be taxed? We tax almost everything else that is possible to tax. Especially given it is far from certain that IP is net benefit for society. (I'm willing to give the benefit of doubt though, that's why I am not proposing to abolish IP completely)

Under your model any author would immediately lose protections unless they could afford the fees....

If you can't see the glaring problems there then there's no hope for you....

But hopefully you immediately recognize that it hurts the least advantaged the greatest while also providing a mechanism for anticompetitive behavior under the guise of following your precept (make the fee high enough and only established authors/publishers can hold any copyright).

I really get the feeling you didn't think it through at all....

> I really get the feeling you didn't think it through at all....

I said the structure can be discussed. There is no problem giving first number of years free to see if the IP is commercially viable. The aggressive progression (doubling every year) means that literally all IP is in public domain after a couple of decades.

You saying "it can be discussed" doesn't change that your model is flawed on its face, with no amount of extra layers of ad hoc workarounds able to overcome those blatant flaws....

A simpler solution is to start with a return to something resembling the original IP laws where one lost their rights within their own lifetime.... Theres a reason that was originally proposed, rather than lifetime protections, and why creators originally accepted it with glee... All parties need to remember those reasons, whether rights holder, state or consumer.

Private citizens get different rules than corporations might fit into a discussion. Let an author hold their personal IP. Corporate IP taxed. Might be odd for legal exposure as there wouldn't be a corporate vail.

Again, adding layer after layer of Caveats and Conditionals doesn't change that At The Core your proposition is fundamentally flawed.

Just stop fighting for a broken concept and come up with something better.

Ed:typos

If the IP is commercially viable then it would generate revenue to cover the fees.

If it wasn't viable then it would either never be created or would automatically enter the public domain.

Currently, if IP is not commercially viable then the author has the choice of not creating it, or creating it and releasing it under CC or just public domain. So essentially the same.

A poor writer who works full time min wage to barely scrape by and writes a masterpiece will not have the funds to cover the fees while waiting to get accepted by a publisher

To assert the model isn't blatantly flawed is absurd

It doesn't have to start until it is published or otherwise commercially exploited.

"If you can't see the glaring problems there then there's no hope for you...."

Correct, but easily solved if the tax were to be based on license sales numbers and income. Small/poor license owners would pay almost nothing whereas the big players would pay plenty.

How does that resolve the issue of IP squatting that is in question?

If there's no income the fee is negligible, permitting the rights holder to squat on them for next to nothing and prevent the use of the otherwise abandoned IP by the public....

That's a separate and in some circumstances a serious problem.

For instance, an art gallery takes a photo of an artwork that's out of copyright for reference/insurance and (a) doesn't allow photos in the gallery and (b) the photo which is copyright isn't on sale (as it wasn't intended for that purpose). So the out of copyright artwork is locked up from reproduction.

Variations on this theme are a problem with galleries and museums worldwide.

The money made with the IP is taxable.

I can support your proposal only if the IP taxes are deductible from incoming tax.

and the money i use to pay for goods was already charged income tax, and then it gets charged sales tax, which is bigger than otherwise since it is a percentage, and the workers who produced the product is income taxed, and have to pay salestax for their food...... its hardly as if the regimes around the world have any problems with taxing things to hell

In 2010 you start a company, wholly owned by you.

In 2011 you obtain a patent wholly owned by the company.

In 2012 you fail to pay the franchise tax and filing paperwork for your company so the state dissolves it. You don't care because you aren't making money.

In 2013 another company starts making a product that infringes on your patent.

You are the defacto owner of the patent. This is because you were the owner of the company when it was terminated. All of its assets and liabilities devolved to you. No action was required of you for this to happen, it just happens.

Now imagine this business was actually a joint venture between two wholly owned subsidiaries of two different holding companies, one of which was public but has gone bankrupt and the other was private but subsequently merged with a public conglomerate that spun off a child company, keeping only 40% of its stock after IPO.

The patent is still owned by people, but good luck finding them all.

The purpose of a patent, generally speaking, is to encourage innovation by giving the creator legally protected time in which they can exclusively use that innovation. If they don’t use the innovation but someone else wants to, society is improved by dissolving that patent, even if the owner could theoretically be traced to some person.

The patent renewal system is the attempt to solve this. In the case that the patent isn’t wanted, or the patent owner goes out of business, the patent owner won’t pay the annual renewal (in most countries; the US is once every 4 years) and after the (usually) 6 month grace period, the patent is public.

The invention as disclosed and documented in the patent is free to the world.

Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is? Why do we need to pay taxes to employ those people? We have patent law, which is already a lovely gravy train for the state.

> Society is not improved if a beaurocrat can nullify people's inventions. Who decides what "using" is?

This is reversing the natural order of things. That bureaucrat isn't nullifying fucking ANYTHING. That bureaucrat is artificially limiting who is allowed to create/use a thing.

The natural state of the information is: "Use this - it's free". The whole of humanity might exist because mirror neurons literally go: "Hey - I can do that too!".

It's only when you add a monstrously complex and entirely artificial patent system on top of things that it gets complex.

So we're ALREADY deciding who is allowed to use things, and it's already artificial and bureaucratic.

All this does is fucking stop making it worse. And patent/copywrite is already so god damn egregious as a system. I'm firmly in the camp of "nuke it from orbit". It's time to try something other than this hideous abusive system.

It's hard to know what point you're making, although your aggression is (hopefully) a sign of how extremely you care about this topic.

I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power. You seem to be saying this at the end as well, so, as I say, I'm not sure what point you're making. But your excitement on this topic is appreciated.

> I agree that patents are odd here, but the solution isn't to patch in more power to bureaucrats over the top of the other power.

What is confusing here? The entire structure is already a perversion of the natural world.

If we did not have our government, and the rules that it enforces (those "bureaucrats" you don't seem to like), then there is no "invention" to be nullified.

They already have this power. They enforce it through violence and imprisonment (tools reserved officially to the government). If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.

The question is not: "Will the government nullify my invention?!?!?". It's - "What might my life have been like if the government did not restrict SO many people from competing at all - by artificially stopping them from using the tools and ideas they see around them? (for fairly ridiculous time periods)"

> If the bureaucrats want your idea - they will take it, because they are the only thing stopping them from doing so.

This is possible, but the power to enforce patents is in the courts, and not in the patent bureaucracy. Having a single group that can invalidate parents on a whim is different to that.

And patents can be useful, although I don't have many examples. SawStop is one, though, where even a 20 year patent doesn't seem to have been long enough to establish a successful business before incumbents swoop in. Patents like that are pro-competition in that scenario. Otherwise why bother starting a new business when your R&D effort can just be taken advantage of by someone else as soon as you hit on the answer?

Tough luck. If it's that important, register your ownership interest somewhere and keep that property claim alive by renewing it once every few years for a nominal fee. Property rights are not so important that the world should stop turning if a property owner has retired to a cave without leaving any forwarding address.

So hire a PI. If someone doesn't want to be found, that's one thing, but if they're just out there, living their lives normally, that's not insurmountable.

In reality, it's a bunch of work which costs money, and if you don't have to spend that money, why would you?

In the UK, if a company that owns intellectual property is dissolved, it becomes bona vacantia, and is officially property of the King.

There's an entire government department dedicated to selling this property.

Wait, are you telling me that the UK actually has a halfway-decent solution to the orphan works problem!?

The process is a little arcane, but it's documented here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/buy-intellectual-property-bvc8

They wouldn't be orphan if we knew who holds the corresponding rights. Selling the liquidated estates could help with certain out of commerce works, but I wonder how many such cases exists. Usually other publishers buy the catalogue just to keep it quiet and reduce the competition, even if they have no intention to reprint anything.

Only if you think that the IP remaining restricted rather than entering the public domain is a halfway decent solution.....

Arguably the American model of abandonment is better because abandoned IP doesn't actually result in any lawsuits, while that UK model is built to effectively encourage them.

It would require doing things slightly differently, such as hardware vendors having to buy the rights to redistribute firmware blobs / source code... just because it's hard it doesn't matter it can't happen. After all, if physical components can be brought together to make a product, why can't software licenses move with them?

One could also imagine radically different IP laws concerning firmware or even software.

Software is replicable. It might open up companies' IP to worldwide competition. That's the difference from hardware.

We're talking about firmware which is device-specific, which is why it has to be released separately for each device.

Moreover, there exist devices with fully open source firmware, so if anybody wanted one to copy, they don't need yours. They only need yours to use it with your hardware.

But there is still a difference between software and hardware. This is like saying that for every hardware device I should be able to also spin up my own factory to produce it, and have that bundled into the purchase price.

I feel like you're missing the context.

These devices have a chip in them that needs drivers and firmware. That's software. In particular it's the software that interfaces with the operating system. But the software is specific to a given version of the Linux kernel. When a new kernel comes out, you often have to update the software, for which you need the source code. So when the vendor stops doing this without publishing the code, nobody else can cost effectively do it either, and you can no longer use the hardware with recent versions of the kernel. But older kernel versions have known security vulnerabilities in them, so you can't use those either.

The ask is not that they provide free factories for everyone to make their own hardware, it's that they release the source code for this software in particular. Anybody could then copy the software, but it's only useful in combination with their hardware. A competitor in China can't use the same drivers with some other chip, that chip would need different drivers. That's what drivers are. So the only people who want this code are the people who paid the hardware vendor for their product and want to continue using it.

The hardware vendor, by contrast, doesn't want to give it to them, not because they fear some competitor using it but because then the customer would be able to keep using the hardware they paid for instead of having to buy a new one. Which is unreasonable enough to prohibit.

> Anybody could then copy the software, but it's only useful in combination with their hardware

Well, it would also allow compatible hardware to be manufactured. E.g. "IBM compatible".

"IBM compatible" was a result of reverse engineering, not open source.

And it also has no meaning in this context. What is "compatible" with a WiFi chip or a storage controller? They're all already compatible with each other. The driver is the thing that converts from the device-specific operations to the APIs provided by the kernel. The kernel APIs are already public and anyone can implement them for their own hardware.

That's the beauty of regulation.

Do you want to sell your devices in this large, debeloped, profitable market? The you have to comply.

Manufacturing supply chains are already awfully complicated beast. Complying with reflgulaion of providing firmware for your hardware should hardly be a huge problem.

The modern supply chains behave this way precisely because no such requirements exist.

It’s a typical facade argument you might hear from politicians when they parrot lobbiysts.

> I don't see how this would work given modern supply chains. It can be extremely difficult to track down all of the owners of a particular IP and when you do, many of them may not even exist any longer making it near impossible to get any sort of permission to do something like this.

Exactly the reason to force manufacturers to change their supply chains.

Then you don't get to sell your e-waste in EU. That's enough motivation for them to do.

If we are talking about making new laws, why not just modify the law to exclude firmware from any IP protection. i.e. compel disclosure of the firmware, and also ensure the device manufacturer is protected from any lawsuits arising out of such disclosure.

Easily fixed by assuming that if an IP owner no longer exists or cannot be find, their ownership interest may be reasonably presumed to have expired. It's only hard because people insist on keeping it that way.

It might be difficult to release it with an open source license like GPL or MIT but the company already has rights to copy and distribute it.

It's hard to see it happening with how things work today. If companies had to do this they would make an effort to figure it out.

How? How exactly would they figure it out? As someone who works in hardware development full time, often supporting older hardware, I don't see how this is feasible. Most of the IP we work on requires 3 or more parties to be part of the NDA.

I have no idea. But I know it's not a law of physics so it can definitely be changed.

It's hard to see in the status quo, but it doesn't mean it can't be changed. Whatever system exists today works the way it does because laws defined (or didn't) how they operate. If we change those, the system has to change with it.

Nah, the government can change the law. The obstacle to overcome would be the software quality. Today your driver is a hairball stuck with chewing gum to a point release of everything. In the case of a smallest change of anything it goes up in flames. That’s something harder to overcome by decree. Needs incentives in place.

The normal neoliberal solution is to wait for a new company with a new design to meet the demand for repairable, open devices. This is already happening, and I am convinced will eventually replace ALL proprietary blobs and silicon. This is especially true as the barriers-to-entry keep lowering. The only way this won't happen is if government and the tightly coupled industrial interests prevent it by fiat. This is more likely than you think, since control of these devices is far, far more important than most people realize. Smartphones are crucial for the tracking and control of both large populations and also problematic individuals. In theory they could lead to perfect law-enforcement, which should terrify everyone. Letting the space open up is to give up central authority's invaluable tactical and strategic advantage over distributed authority.

Here is how a small company has done it: https://puri.sm/posts/breaking-ground/.

How about a rule that says you have no intellectual property whatsoever on my phone if you don't maintain it for a year. I would be free to decompile it recompile it and make it opendource

How about as part of FCC approvals you submit everything needed to unlock the device, and it goes into a vault for X years than gets automatically released.

The firmware source needs to be put into escrow for any device with more than N sales; where N is 10k or 50k or 100k.

This could grandfather existing phones. Future phones would need to trace providence of IP and get requisite permissions.

And I would guess by what now are "green" and carbon zero companies

Seems completely trivial to comply with this law while not releasing firmware.

Is there any precedent for forcing firms to release software? And if so, has it resulted in a third party adopting the support after it?

No, it's batteries too. And water/dust/fluid ingress protection. Modern phones are sealed up pretty tight because users want them to be waterproof. This makes it very difficult to build in replaceable batteries!

> This makes it very difficult to build in replaceable batteries!

Except it doesn't. The last two waterproof phones I had had user-replaceable batteries, a USB port, and even a headphone jack.

What it does is add a few dollars onto the BOM.

You must be joking if you think its just a BOM adjustment and a small cost... way to oversimplify the actual implementation

There was a beautiful period where phones had a headphone jack and a USB-C connector and a replaceable battery and IP67 water resistance.

Which phone was that?

Galaxy S5 did it just fine

Only if you kept the flap on the headphone jack…

https://www.gottabemobile.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-water-test-d....

According to the article, the flap was to protect the USB port. The other internals were protected by an internal gasket on the removable back cover.

Only if you made absolutely sure that the battery was secured tightly - from the same article. Out of the 200M+ iPhones that Apple sells every year, how many people do you think wouldn’t put the battery and the cover on perfectly?

The same applies to gluing the rear cover back on, except instead of simply ensuring you've applied enough pressure and the gasket is in good condition, you now need to check that you've soldered the battery properly, positioned the glue correctly, heated the glue enough that it melts but doesn't fry your phone, and applied enough pressure evenly.

Well you don’t have to do anything. Spend $69 - $89 and let an Apple certified repair company to replace it and if they do something wrong, it’s covered under warranty.

Ah, there's nothing better than being granted the opportunity to burn money.

You bought an iphone and worried about spending $30 extra dollars?

All I'm saying is that you used to be able to get smartphones that were like this, and they weren't any more expensive than any other smartphones. (EDIT: I was wrong, they were about $25 more expensive.)

So this is demonstrably possible. The only reason I can think of that it's not done anymore is cost savings.

Modern phones are packed to the brim with features. My phone has a goddamn LIDAR scanner! I really don’t think it is feasible anymore, and I think most people would prefer an extra 2-300 mAh over swappable battery. Of course replacing it once by a dedicated shop each 3 years should be possible.

And shaving 0.3mm of the thickness!

Kyocera has been doing it for years.

https://fdn2.mobgsm.com/vv/pics/kyocera/kyocera-duraforce-pr...

I don't want my phone to look like that by law.

Only actual people who must have an IP68 battery replaceable phones are that kind of people. Others just go for an iPhone and just pays for shop replacements few years later.

Galaxy S5 did it

It looks awesome.

Looks like what a 15 year old at a 90s LAN party would have their desktop themed to.

Yeah, more like $200 on price and added trait of overheating.

> The last two waterproof phones I had had user-replaceable batteries, a USB port, and even a headphone jack.

Asking unironically: what were they? I want such a phone

My GoPro's are waterproof yet they have removable batteries. It's not impossible, but it does mean they have to be every so slightly thicker.

> so slightly thicker.

Maybe if they decrease size of display, it wouldn't be that bulky. And we would finally get a phone again that is not wannabe tablet.

> Maybe if they decrease size of display

But how are you gonna show all the ads, dark patterns and newsletter signup forms? We can't afford to miss out on all that growth and engagement.

Small screen size doesn’t stop them. They just block the entire screen with that junk!

Waterproof with an external case.

No? My Hero 10 and 11 are both waterproof on their own up to 10m, as long as I use the included battery door (can’t use the optional doors that allow direct access to the USB port, or the media mod).

There is a dive housing that can handle up to 60m depth, but that’s a special case.

But really waterproofing the phone doesn't require gluing everything together to within an inch of its life, just a gasket and a few screws. Yes it will add $5 or something to the cost of a phone, totally worth it, and will improve repairability in general to boot.

You make this claim but have you ever worked in product design for something trying to achieve an IP water and dust ingress rating?

It is far more than "just a gasket and a few screws". The rating can't just be good on unboxing day. You want it to hold even after a few years, several drops on the floor, in cold weather, etc.

Watch makers solved this problem decades ago - there are very reasonable mechanical solutions to waterproofing. And if some limited components need to be sealed (i.e. the USB port requires special shielding) that sealing can easily exist in a device that is otherwise reasonable to maintain.

Watch maintenance has been done by skilled professionals using generic tools and (generally) generic components. Waterproofing is an excuse used to limit our ability to repair and maintain our devices and maybe because somebody didn't like the appearance of a screw face or screw cover on one side of the device.

Do most watches have ports that are designed for thousands of uses? My smart watch sure does. But of all the possible avenues by which its waterproofness might fail, that connector is #1. I'm pretty sure its custom, as the cable has actual pogo pins to connect.

Strictly from a product design and especially hardware design standpoint, I get the resistance to easy replacement of certain parts. Designing for a replaceable battery means designing your seal to withstand at least twice as many battery replacements as the law requires, or you make sure you have enough replacement seals stockpiled to cover the number that will be replaced, or you use a a commodity seal (think an O-ring).

Apple eventually made ~86 million iPhone 8 and 8 plus. Let's say that's representative of any given model of phone. How many millions (billions?) of seals is that? How much does that cost to store? To distribute? How much does that affect the cost of the phone?

I am fully behind right-to-repair. I won't work for companies that have lobbied against it (and as an embedded hardware and firmware guy, that's significant). But there is a measurable, monetary cost to designing things to be repaired. Either we accept that only the richest n% of e.g. phone manufacturers can afford to stay in business, we as the consumer accept lower performance at the same price point, or both.

All of that said, my point regarding connectors with finite cycle lifespans is relevant. These physical devices themselves have a lifespan. What is the point of replacing a battery when the charging port, headphone jack, physical buttons, touch screen, etc are spec'd to fail well before the average battery does? What about if you have the same iPhone 8 soldering problem, where the phone can't actually survive being put in the back pocket of a decently tight pair of pants? How does government regulation regarding batteries reverse the trend of people buying cheap things because they cost less?

These phones have been made before at scale, I'm sure we could manage: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s5-6033.php

> What is the point of replacing a battery when the charging port, headphone jack, physical buttons, touch screen, etc are spec'd to fail well before the average battery does

Parts often/usually last far in excess of what they're spec'd for as I'm sure you know. And many of the things you list aren't critical to operation like the battery is.

And they also required the flap to be closed for it to be water resistant.

Yes but USB C has solved that problem.

Which modern phone has a removable battery and is water resistant?

The vaunted Samsung s5, you still had to make sure that the battery was very secure and just right.

> https://www.gottabemobile.com/samsung-galaxy-s5-water-test-d...

> If you remove the battery, the Galaxy S5 will remind you to make sure the back cover is back in place securely.

Apparently the brand new iphone 14! https://www.ifixit.com/News/64865/iphone-14-teardown

The new law apparently doesn't require a user to be able to replace the battery by hand. Just that it is serviceable.

The iPhone has always been serviceable by an authorized Apple dealer or if you’re good enough and brave enough by the end user wiling to use the iFixit guide.

So, you're saying the answer to your own question was "basically all iphones"?

I think the new law would basically mean the end user doesn't have to deal with glue now at least.

The answer to my question - was that you could spend $69 - $99 to get a battery replaced by an authorized Apple provider and if they broke something or didn’t do it right, it would be covered under warranty.

I can also make a tiny little thingy waterproof, but it’s much harder to do with a mini-computer that is insanely powerful, has a whole camera department, can be used as a semi-professional video recorder, can withstand drops, and has a 1+ days battery life at least.

Also, it is just ingenious to attribute everything to malice — is a modern combustion engine also irreparable because of some conteo, or is it irreparable simply because for efficiency reasons they had to use more precise technology with smaller error margins, where one’s fatty human hand just doesn’t cut anymore?

They solved it in a way where they don't guarantee you that it is water proof for more than 2 years without service and appropriate maintenance and it stops being water proof as soon as you open it.

How does the case size of a watch compare to the movement size?

Are you prepared to have a similar ratio for your phone? Basically the phones we have now with a permanent, very durable waterproof case?

This is precisely the point. It’s easy to make a durable case if it can be more than twice the size of the components it’s encasing.

Why are you comparing ratios of office vs wristwatches? You should be comparing phones with wall clocks. Those things are mostly empty.

Controlling water in machines is not new, neither is phone design. It's been done a million ways and all of those ways have certain trade offs. It's just another design challenge and the flipside of your comment is a suggestion that there isn't some person other than me that is up to the challenge. Customers can make their own judgements about looks and size versus (replaceable battery) functionality as they always have.

The fact is gluing is simpler and cheaper but most importantly it reduces the repairability of phones by third parties. Quite often trying to repair a phone will cause it to be destroyed, making replacing a battery more risky and difficult. Companies would love not to have to use glue, but <design excuse>! Nothing at all to do with built-in obsolescence.

I'm sure many people want a repairable smartphone and a replaceable battery. Of course, there are many that don't. I don't understand how it make sense to force those people, that don't want a repairable phone and a replaceable battery, to get such a smartphone.

Because the cost of the waste these throw-away phones generate isn't priced in. There is a societal cost that isn't being paid by the firm or the consumer.

Honestly, it probably only adds a few bucks to the BOM and the consumer who doesn't care about repairability still likely comes out better off in the long run because their phone lasts them longer and/or resells for more because it isn't junk after 3 years.

Iphones are arguably not too repairable, yet they absolutely dominate the whole market in their lifetimes - often having 2-3 owners.

Yeah iphones were premium/valuable enough that people would go through the trouble to repair them even if they had to deal with some glue.

With android phones the resale value/demand wasn't there (also due in part to bad software support lifetimes which would also need to be addressed) so they'd just get tossed/shelved after 2 to 3 years even if they were perfectly functional.

Users of cars pretty routinely replace seals that are under a lot more extreme enviroments and abuse than a phone without issue. All of the ones I've dealt with pretty much are "just a gasket and a few screws" Sure, there needs to be some design process to get there, but let's not pretend that doing this would be some unheard of technological advancement.

Cars are much larger and their seals are much larger. They consequently have much more play and far larger tolerances.

If you scaled the forces and subjected the car to the equivalent of dropping a phone on the floor it would be totaled instantly... forget about maintaining waterproofing.

Thus I stand by my original statement: people making claims like "just a gasket and some screws" have never designed a product under similar constraints and are making bad assumptions or straight-up Dunning-Kruger errors left and right.

the easiest way is to just separately encapsulate all parts that need to be removable (i.e. the battery + wireless charging coil in one piece and the rest of the phone in the other), and only have the connectors as the exposed pieces. A gasket around those and contacts far enough away from each other for good measure and you're good to go.

Plus the Samsung Active line never needed to go to these extremes to churn out perfectly fine waterproof phones at slightly higher than average prices. And they weren't the only ones with these sort of offerings.

That means double the casing which takes up space and adds weight.

I never claimed it was impossible. I'm only pointing out there are far more severe design constraints than a lot of people even understand, yet they confidently proclaim it is both a simple matter of trivial engineering and completely free of consequences.

What a bunch of crock.

I have this new Nokia phone with a replaceable battery. It came with the pin you can use to open it (probably costs a few cents to manufacture, but if I had plenty of time to spare, I could've made one with a sturdy piece of plastic and sandpaper). The "mechanism" that keeps the back panel is just a piece of rubber, probably the same kind you find on hermetically sealing food containers.

Also, very few people want their phones water-proof (what for?). And even if you really, really wanted that, you could like spend 5-10 Euro on a water-proof case.

> Also, very few people want their phones water-proof (what for?).

This is insane. So that rain doesn’t destroy it? So that spilling a drink doesn’t destroy it? So that dropping it in the toilet doesn’t destroy it?

Back when phones still had removable batteries, I had them rained on, spilled on, and even dropped one in the toilet. I then submerged that one in a bowl of rubbing alcohol for several minutes. In all those instances, I popped the battery out and let it dry. I've never had a phone destroyed by water. Worst case was buy a new battery! Back then non-waterproof phones without removable batteries also existed. I'm sure they succumbed to water much more easily.

I'd take a removeable battery over almost every modern feature on phones today.

> This is insane. So that rain doesn’t destroy it? So that spilling a drink doesn’t destroy it? So that dropping it in the toilet doesn’t destroy it?

If rain destroys your phone that is just plain incompetence from the design department. Or rather, they were not incompetent, but other forces made sure they were not paying much attention to water resistance.

My wettest experience with a smartphone was when I got surprised by heavy rain when walking to the hair dresser. I arrived soaking wet. Got the phone (a HTC Desire Z) out of my pocket, water was running out of it. I opened the battery lid, the hairdresser blew with the hairdryer for a couple of minutes and all was fine.

There's rain and there's rain.

Once my Google Nexus 4 died because of rain. Normal rain was no problem ever with it, even to make calls in a rain. But one day it rained very heavily with a wind so strong it was hard to walk against it. It felt like being in a carwash for ~ 10 minutes.

I was waterlogged up to my underwear. Nexus 4 was in my pocket and died. I put it to a bunch of rice and let it airdry. After it dried, the phone acted weirdly.

Lesson learnt: if the product doesn't specifically indicate a high level of water protection level, consider it not having ANY protection. "Resistant against spills" and other handwavy marketing mumbo jumbo has zero substance.

Before cell phones were common, wrist watches were. Very few of them were water-proof, and very few people wanted them to be.

Yes, if you were stupid and went swimming with your wrist-watch you would've killed it... and every now and then I'd hear a story about how something like that happened.

Water-proof watches were seen as a luxury, however small, that nobody really needed outside of like scuba divers.

I don't even know if my phone is water proof or not, and I had it since 2016. I never tried swimming with it or leaving it outside in the rain or doing any of the other stupid things you listed... why would any sane person do something like that?

It’s literally the most commonly used tool, hell, I have my phone on me more times than even my shoes! Of course I want it to be waterproof, people get their phones wet from any number of things, sudden rain, kid hosing you, phone falling into the sink, etc.

> people get their phones wet

No, they don't. And those who do have to expose their phones to extreme conditions might buy a protective case. Very few people expose their phones to conditions they know to endanger electronics... it's common sense not to use electronics underwater, unless it's the special kind that's designed to do that.

Si few people want their phone to be protected from water?

I wonder about this.

First, it seems like you could just make the phone part waterproof and if they dunk it, they have to replace the battery. I have ruined a phone by putting it through the wash, and I would have been very happy to just replace the battery instead of chucking the phone.

Beyond that, I wonder what the reality is for waterproofing needs. Are people taking smartphones diving? IP65 means it's resistant to 'spray' - like rain, not a firehose - and it seems like a battery compartment with a tight-fitting cover would be more than enough for this. IP68 doesn't apparently mandate a depth rating but recent iPhones are tested to 6 meters for 30 minutes. That's more water pressure than 99% of those iPhones are ever going to see.

I don't personally think the non-replaceable battery has anything to do with IP rating, it's because manufacturers want soft-sided batteries with more delicate terminal connections, for volume/capacity reasons.

Most waterproof norms are only valid for freshwater. Most usb/lightning ports rust after being subjected to salted water and you end up not being able to charge your device anymore.

Really? I've taken many an iPhone snorkling in the ocean, just in zipped pocket, and they have all been fine.

That's really impressive. I destroyed a Sony phone a few years ago just going for a short swim in the sea.

This can be largely mitigated by rinsing/soaking the device in fresh water to dissolve the salt.

This is just ridiculous.

See Jerry Rig Everything. He even says that there are solutions for this even for glued-up phones, manufacturers just don't want to implement them because they're for sure against battery replacements.

It's not like glue is some sort of magic substance.

> users want them to be waterproof

They also want displays not to crack. That is why lot of them are buying protective cases.

Are not sealed up phones overrate in this context?

As I keep mentioning, Nokia has been building hardened phones for construction workers, with replacement batteries, for ages, all the way back to their feature phones.

Yes, I am sure people want to carry around ruggedized phones like it’s 2005. I programmed them working in field services.

That doesn't invalidate their existence.

Did you actually use one of those ruggedized phones that were used by field service workers?

In a previous life I worked for Nokia...

They aren’t exactly things you carry around in your pocket.

http://www.n2ltd.com/intermec-introduces-latest-rugged-mobil...

Better search more appropriate examples, all the way back to first models.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5210

They can even fit into a pocket!

And every article says they were “splash proof” which is a lot different than dropping a phone in the water or forgetting to take it out of your pocket when you jump into a pool.

I want replaceable batteries in that I want to replace them like 2-3 years after purchase. Which is already possible for a negligible price.

You really shouldn’t want to replace batteries on the fly in general — it makes stealing easier (modern phones can’t be powered off easily without authorization) so you may find it before it loses power, waterproofing suffers, etc.

Of all the incredible technology in a modern smartphone, it’s too hard to make replaceable batteries?

Of all my phones that broke, none was due to fluid but all due to a cracked screen.

Yet I don’t see manufacturers add better screen protection, quite the opposite in fact.

So phone cases/bumpers it is for me now.

So is it waterproof capability or planned obsolescence? You all make it sound nefarious when it is just PM's doing what PM's do.

solved see galaxy s5

I asked Bard and Samsung started making IP57 phones during the Galaxy S4 era with its "Active" brand.

I don't. I just want it splash resistant - it's more than enough. just because there is a promile of morons that can't handle the phone doesn't mean that a lots of users should be prohibited from easily changing the battery... because of that lots of devices end up on landslide because users can't get enough charge I fit anymore...

I loved lumia devices - easily openable back to replace battery, nice materials (rubbery polycarbonate?) that offered nice grip. Having PC displays instead of glass would be awesome - no need for extra protective case because the shatter woild be a tning od the past. At the worst, a scratch resistant screen protector, which we all already put in the devices either way to help avoid screen cracks..

If the battery was easier to replace, the phones would still end up unusable either because the storage would wear out, the cell modem would become obsolete, the display would get burnin, or someone would drop it and crack the screen.

I'm sorry but what? I replaced my previous mobile (OnePlus3) because of the battery - after about 4-5 years it became quite difficult to get through the day on single charge, and in the world where everything is getting more "electronic" (tickets!) it became a problem.

Yes, id didn't have newest 5G, but guess what - my new phone has it yet I don't have coverage. Storage could wear out but are you really doing load IO test on it? screen burnin/crack... maybe if someone is glued to the phone "24/7" and doesn't take care of the device... but as I said - using good policarbon materials (including for screen!) would get rid of this problem mostly...

That's a sample of one but we're talking about millions in different countries here and a bit longer timescale than here. I don't think phones could last say 10 years with battery swaps and nothing else.

ditto, but right now people switch phones every two years, if not every year...

All my last phones the battery had issues, including two phones where the battery became a ball instead of a rectangle right after warranty ended. And the battery caused problems before the software.

I ended using even a KaiOS phone just to have a phone I could replace the battery. People keep moaning about phone being waterproof yet my phones fail on me nowhere near water so what is the point?

> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.

I don't see much hope of such a thing being decided soon, if ever. The incentives for politicians are mostly not aligned in this direction.

The much more realistic path towards having devices/software that can be used for more than 3-5 years is IMO if more people started supporting projects like postmarketOS, fairphone, shiftphones, Librem, (mntreform for laptops) and other such croud-funded and more open/free designs.

Once such devices/OSes work good enough to be usable in day to day life without serious hassle/disappointments, more people will actually use them and a community can grow, allowing the products to mature.

I think a very good example (in software) is the f-droid app store that has reached a sufficient level of maturity that many people now use it exclusively (instead of the Google play store).

These phones are unusable in a large part because of marketplace lock-in, and in another large part due to unavailable drivers. These things cannot be changed through "grassroots movement", these need to be recognized as mobile phone companies violations of consumer rights and be treated as such.

Not all of them are unusable. Fairphone and shiftphone are more expensive, but perfectly usable.

-- sent from my Fairphone 4

Fairphone runs Android... it's part of the problem, not part of a solution.

> The much more realistic path towards having devices/software that can be used for more than 3-5 years is IMO ...

i used any and all of my smartphones that long. no problem.

I agree that opening up the software side of devices is important, but this is still a huge win.

I and many, many other people don’t mind using a phone or tablet for many years, even with an obsolete OS. But battery life tends to be the #1 factor in this devices ending up in the bin.

In fact, by making battery changes easier with less intensive surgery, it’ll put even more pressure on manufacturers to allow for repurposing them with a different OS.

Maybe mandate a 5-year limit before a device must be allowed to be unlocked allowing alternative software to be installed, thus giving these disposable devices a far longer lifespan.

How long software updates are provided is part of the repairability score

https://www.heise.de/news/EU-Kommission-bringt-Reparatur-und...

Battery in my last device became too weak long before device was useless. Device was perfectly fine, just that battery did not hold long anymore.

I had a couple phones I really liked where the battery got puffy - ie, very very bad - while the device was otherwise great. Tried replacing with an ifixit kit, but the screen got borked in the process. Total waste...

I'm still running a pixel 2 which is almost 6 years old now. I had to have the battery replaced 5 years in. Although it's not the most practical you don't have to replace the full device. Manufacturers would prefer you do.

Yeah battery will virtually always be the first to go. Unless you crack the screen.

in my experience, it's the charge port that goes. My last two devices, each of which I had for 3 years, the charge port failed before the battery did. I just finished fixing my current one. Although I did decide to do a battery replacement anyways while I had the device open. But that was just because of how hard it is to open them at all. My battery health monitoring app said it was at ~80% health still. And while the charge port hasn't always failed on me in the past, I'm not sure the battery has ever been the reason for me personally, although I'm probably just lucky in that regard.

Basically, I'm not sure that any one "thing" is the thing that always fails. There are multiple common points of failure and generally speaking, phones are hard to service in any manner these days. I personally would gladly give up water and dust protection, as well as thinness in exchange for ease of serviceability. Unfortunately, that seems to be a relatively uncommon set of preferences (although obviously it's probably much more common in places like Hacker News).

> in my experience, it's the charge port that goes.

I have had this problem on a regular basis with all of the iPhones I have owned, and the problem has never been that the charge port is dead, but that dust and/or lint has gathered in it.

The solution is very simple: use a tootbrush or similar, preferably something plastic that won't break, BUT NOT ANYTHING METALLIC, to dig out the dirty stuff. Problem solved.

Sometimes it's been lint, and I've been able to clean it out, but eventually cleaning it out stops working.

Compressed air has worked well for me.

A wooden toothpick works very well.

This is why I only buy phones that support inductive charging. It's really not an expensive feature and it saves so much wear and tear on the charging port.

There are several things that limit the lifetime of a phone:

  1. Battery
  2. Software
  3. Charge port/headphone port
  4. eMMC storage runs out of writes
  5. Accidental damage
  6. Screen scratches
  7. Wanting more RAM/storage and faster processing

Batteries are getting better, and we can extend the life of a LiIon battery by about 5X by limiting charging to 80%. If batteries inherently had as short a life as they commonly do in phones, then electric cars would be doomed, but there's no real reason why we can't get phone batteries to last 10 years or more.

The software can only be solved by constant effort. There are certain things that could possibly be done to make it easier, such as arranging the device-specific stuff so that the effort already spent on producing a newer set of software for a newer device can be more easily back-ported to the older devices. I think this will only be solved by legislation, such as a law saying that the software must be updated for X years, or even just a law saying that the support duration must be very clearly advertised with the phone allowing consumers to make a choice.

A USB-C port is rated for a minimum of 10,000 plug/unplug cycles, which should be enough to charge the phone once a day for 30 years. If that isn't actually being achieved then we need to ask why not.

The eMMC storage is a problem with many phones. My phone is just starting to slow to a crawl because its main storage is old and it takes a while for it to perform certain writes (or something - it's hard to get an accurate picture of what is happening in there). There is zero information that a consumer has available when deciding which phone to buy to tell them which ones will have a problem with this. This seems to be a fairly obvious target for a law, similar to the software support duration.

Accidental damage - I remember reading a statistic about how the average phone survives a ridiculously short time before being dropped and broken, and I don't get it. I haven't dropped/broken a phone ever. I guess we just let the people who are constantly dropping their phones pick up the tab on that one.

Screen scratch protection is also getting really good now. My current phone has lived in my pocket for several years, and there's almost zero scratching on the screen. Just don't keep your keys in the same pocket.

In terms of replacing a phone because you want something better - I had a look recently to see about replacing my phone. The ones on the market at a comparable price to what I spent on my current one had specifications that were really not much better at all. It doesn't make sense - if a phone with those specifications is deemed suitable for today's market, then my old one with almost identical specifications should be fine too.

So, I don't really see any barriers that aren't insurmountable to a phone lasting several times longer than they do at the moment. Ten years should be easy, 15 years should be possible. At the moment, it's more like 3 if you're very lucky.

Drivers / firmware aren't quite the right solution. They're tied to obsolete android, so they'd still be useless.

They should have to provide documentation for every IP block in the device, source code for any drivers, and the ability to unlock the bootloader.

This would make it easier for people to back-port modern android / iOS, or just run linux on old devices.

Actually the EU RF, product liability and cyber security regulations rather point into a direction that disallows use of aftermarket firmware that can delay onsolecense and encourages lockdown. Instead of overregulation we need create an economic system that encourages sustainable use of resources. The EU just does what they can do best: regulate

> we need create an economic system that encourages sustainable use of resources

Which would require regulation, or you have way too much faith in humanity. Regulation isn't bad, just dumb regulations.

Totally agreed but good regulation needs a vision and common values beyond a common single market (alas we just do more regulations centrally in the fear to get regulatory fragmentation decentrally)

Proper cost attribution of externalities could provide an alternative to regulation... unfortunately the only way we currently have to measure these externalities is regulation. Directly regulating the bad outcome instead of the externalities that contribute to it is less likely to lead to misaligned economic incentives.

Regulation is not a bad thing - though within the US a fair amount of regulations were constructed to increase the barrier to enter a market at the behest of lobbying.

It seems that they are too good at it, to the point of outlawing new competitors and even hobbyists who simply can’t afford to deal with the paperwork; eg see the shit-show that security regulation around OSS.

https://hackaday.com/2023/04/21/the-cyber-resilience-act-thr...

What on Earth should the EU do, that’s their job.

All firmware should be open source, including drivers and particularly graphics drivers. It boggles the mind that a hardware manufacturer refuses to make available the source of the software that actually runs the hardware you paid for.

IMHO releasing full hardware documentation is far better.

Incidentally, a lot of cheap Chinese phones based on Mediatek have plenty of leaked documentation available, and a thriving aftermarket community as a result of that.

I find it ironic that one of the few phone brands adressing all these issues (replaceable batteries, rootability, 5+ years spare parts sales) happens to be the ultimate "Chinese brand" phone: Unihertz :p

No woke bs marketing, no coorporate white washing, no marketing with "green sustainability": they just do it instead of talking about it.

And the result is that nobody knows about it.

Doesn’t need to be hyperbolic bs marketing just to advertise that your phone has these features.

> The problem is not really the battery anymore.

Huh, why not? I'd love yours too, but battery is also good. What do you do with a superb open source phone where you need to replace device because battery is dead and you cannot replace it? Let's please aim for both and everything!

They made plans to enforce manufacturers to provide updates for longer (3/5 years for OS/security updates) [1]. Though you might argue that 3/5 years is not enough, this seems like a more effective way to elongate the lifespan of an average user's phone who might not be comfortable with installing and using an alternative OS.

Not sure what the latest update on this is. IIRC the planned penalty was to make the manufacturer give full refunds to the consumer for devices that violate the requirement.

[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/eu-smartphone-updates-rules...

I’ve made a similar suggestion on HN before. Have a minimum support period for internet connected devices, and once you stop updating after that minimum, you’re required to unlock the hardware and open source everything.

That can't work, because the suppliers will be bankrupt already. However one could something like Portico, which keeps journals in archive and releases them to the public if the original goes down. Manufacturers could be forced to deposit all the source code for the software they release on their product, and the deposited source code be released to the public after X years if there is no support for security updates any more. The difference being, if they don't comply the EU can withdraw the products from the market _before_ they're sold.

That would be great in theory, but who would actually review and enforce that?

Without really strict rules in place this would be doomed to fail. You would need to have a huge number of people whose job it would be to review every single software/firmware submission.

Would you mandate that companies must deliver code and build scripts that can be built with a single command and produce usable software/firmware?

Otherwise companies would probably submit random archives of plausible looking code that will never be usable because it depends on 100+ proprietary components.

Why don't they sell updates? Even if they open source everything, I'd pay for them to support my phone for longer and I imagine the margins on a SW update outweigh the cost of producing more hardware.

> Why don't they sell updates?

Because given limited resources, companies prefer to spend their resources on what pays the most. Manufacturing updates may be comparable or even more expensive than making new devices.

If this is a priority for you, you could vote with your wallet and purchase a fairphone next time your current phone dies. They provide fairly long software support and always had replaceable batteries.

That doesn’t work at all, and is just some capitalist dream.

It'd totally work if people gave a shit (but they don't, and prefer purchasing new shiny Samsung every other year anyway so it doesn't work indeed)

The battery is still a huge problem, this is just clouding the issue with something else. Batteries wear out and have a fraction of their lifetime in a few years and can be replaced for under $20

> Please, EU: bring a law that forces manufacturers to release their drivers / firmware whenever they stop updating a digital device.

I want to believe that something so good could happen.

Apple mobile devices seem to get deprecated when the hardware is no longer meaningful. The last two deprecation were (a) only 1GB of RAM and (b) 32-bit chips.

Yes but replaceable batteries are a good start and a more pressing issue. A phone with a 4+ year old battery is useless even if you have all the software for it.

Not my experience… I replaced my iPhone 6 because it was slow, not because battery was bad

And since 2018 I have iPhone XR, and the battery is fine still. So is the phone speed. I’m not changing it anytime soon

The battery probably made it slow: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/apple-settles-wi...

> I replaced my iPhone 6 because it was slow, not because battery was bad

iPhone slowness can go hand in hand with batteries going bad, especially in the iPhone 6 days. Apple phones will limit peak performance when it detects the battery voltage can't handle it without too much of a voltage drop. From what I understand its now an opt-out setting, but for most of the iPhone 6's life it wasn't an option.

If you opt out of it your phone will suddenly turn off, which is definitely not an improvement over being slow. Having the opt-out is nonsense and an example of bad regulation.

This isn't the only reason an old phone would be slow though, batteries are not the only consumable component in a phone.

For sure. I've had devices slow down from storage wearing out as well.

The software slows the phone down so not create current spikes that the aged battery cant handle

Do you remember the whole phone throttling issue on a bad battery?

Back in the feature phone days there were zero updates.

If one was lucky, maybe with developer tools there was a firmware update, and even those happened at most once.

This is apples to oranges.

Feature phones weren't a substitute for personal computers. They weren't as necessary of an accessory as it is today. On the other hand, standards governing how those phones worked weren't changing as fast, so, given good care, you could use your phone for 10+ years.

Updates today are a way to force users into buying a new phone (eg. my banking up decided not to support an older version of Android, phone vendor doesn't produce updates -- I have to buy a new device).

There weren't updates because there weren't banking apps which could've forced you to abandon your perfectly functioning device.

> Feature phones weren't a substitute for personal computers. They weren't as necessary of an accessory as it is today. On the other hand, standards governing how those phones worked weren't changing as fast, so, given good care, you could use your phone for 10+ years.

I am quite sure that many people across the African continent and Asian see it differently.

Specially those that were using Symbian devices.

I'm mostly familiar with North Afrika, but I can tell you this: at that time in places like Egypt or Morocco you couldn't access government services from your Nokia, it wasn't a thing. 2FA was unheard of. Contactless payment is still a novelty, but definitely didn't exist at the time prior to smartphones. There weren't banking apps.

Best you could do on your phone is to play snake or send an email.

And if we are talking about places like Zimbabwe... there might have been like a hundred cell-phones in the entire country.

As for Asian countries? -- well, places like Japan or Hong Kong weren't much different from Europe. Places like India or China, by and large, didn't have coverage. Even relatively well-off Russia only had cell towers in and around big cities. In Russia at that time there were very few people able to afford a high-end Nokia phone, but even if they had one, those wouldn't be the people who needed a replacement for a PC, nor would they ever use their phone in such capacity. Due to poor economical situation all electronics were seen as a way to prevent wealth from depreciating. Few people who did buy expensive cell phones had no interest in using their advanced abilities, nor was there anything to use such a phone for.

I think Apple would never tolerate that. I can see them lobbying political parties in order to sabotage EU cohesion if that gets proposed.

Like they never would tolerate being forced into USB-C or being forced into allowing other app stores?

Its a good precedent to have. There are solutions to the software issue you mention. They're not perfect but for some hardware, they do work.

If the software problem ever gets solved, you WILL want to be able to replace the batteries won't you? You can and should fight both battles since they serve the same purpose.

The precedent is also good for devices other than phones.

Is this really [0] the most [1] important issue [2] that the EU should be focusing [3] on?

Going by HN traffic, it appears that what the EU is for is to redesign the iPhone to get the details right that techies disagree with Applle on. We live in extreme times with some remarkable challenges - the EU is wasting bandwidth on this triviality. And it isn't a phone manufacturer, it is probably not going to make phones cheaper or, on net, better for consumers.

Please EU, behave rationally and focus on creating a peaceful and prosperous environment. Stop generating headlines about backseat driver phone redesigns.

[0] https://theconversation.com/poland-dreams-of-building-europe...

[1] https://www.iea.org/commentaries/europe-s-energy-crisis-unde...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65235579

[3] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/key/date/2022/html/ecb.sp220...

The EU is not one guy sitting in the office trying to find time to deal with one issue at a time.

It’s an intercontinental organisation with 30.000 workers, 705 elected seats in the EU Parliament, and the European Council that sits the heads of state of every EU member state.

It better be able to deal with more than one subject at a time.

Indeed. After the vote of the Parliament, the Council needs to also approve the final text. But in practice the ministers only rubberstamp whatever Coreper (the ambassadors) have approved, and Coreper deals with dozens of matters in any one meeting:

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/meetings/mpo/2023/6/corep...

>> We live in extreme times

I thought fear-driven hyperbole ended with the expiry of covid lockdowns. On to the next end of the world story.

If these are normal times, then we really must question what the hell the EU is doing as part of its normal operations (hint: see the headline at the top of this web page). There are a lot of urgent problems to deal with and political bandwidth is being spent on an obsession by politicians and/or bureaucrats who think they have better design chops than Apple, world's premier category-defining phone designer.

It'd be stupid in the good times. It is still stupid in the current times. Let Apple do what they want and focus on keeping people warm, safe and with a roof over their head - all things that are at risk right now. Spend some time on diplomacy trying to calm the re-arming armies down. In Germany the AfD has gone from nothing to nearly 20% in the polls over the last decade; something is really badly wrong with "normal" in Europe to get that sort of political realignment.

Exchangeable batteries are not going to help.

The amount of assumptions you need to defend your anti-EU stance!

First, the EU doesn't have that much power. It's restricted to commerce and a small part of intergovernmental policy. Defense, tax, criminal laws, education, wellfare, etc., are all outside its remit.

Second, this doesn't take that much "political bandwidth." Someone proposes it, they discuss, end of. This is not an attempt at extending the parliament's power, or controversial.

Third, where do you get the idea from that Apple makes the best design decisions for consumers? They're a rather capitalist and very American company. They exist to increase profits and shareholder value.

Fourth, even something that is well designed from one perspective, can be bad from another. Repairability is one such aspect. The EU is not very activist when it comes to ecology, but at least they get this right.

Fifth. The A fucking D. That's partially on the neo-liberals. Their grubby little hands have made life for certain groups hard and taken away any prospect. Hence people turn to extreme protest parties. For another part, it's on extremist politicians, of course, but also those on the "good" side, with their holier-than-thou attitude. That drives people to the wrong side. None of these is anywhere near the authority of the EU. Make the SDP go back to its roots, and vote for it.

> Third, where do you get the idea from that Apple makes the best design decisions for consumers?

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-popular-phone-brands

If someone decides to buy the phone that is best for them, most likely designer of that phone is going to be Apple.

If you like maybe there is an argument it is Samsung or a Chinese company - but fact is that Europe, as far as real-world results, doesn't have a person on the continent who is willing and able to make a good phone. They certainly don't have someone like that working for the EU.

> First, the EU doesn't have that much power.

Less power they have, the more it matters what they draw attention to.

You're either some anarcho-liberal, or you're not even trying. No point in discussing.

Ridiculous take.

Companies optimize for profit, that’s it. Capitalism only optimizes for that. Regulations are the means we can mandate some other values taking any kind of priority. Otherwise we would still have coke putting cocaine into our drinks.

Optimising for profit happens to be more effective than what the EU does. Apple can convince bystanders to spend days working hard to trade for a phone. They do that entirely with good design, strong QAQC and persuasive advertising.

The EU gets convinces people to do things with fines and, ultimately, threats of jail time.

Now if one design people want to own and the other design only takes hold because of threats and fines, we ought conclude that the mandatory design is the weaker one. People aren't paying for replaceable batteries. They're paying for tough, cleanly built & waterproof phones. That is why there are sometimes actual queues outside Apple stored as people try to buy iPhones - people really think Apple designs great phones. For the EU to manage that they'd need a man with a truncheon standing off to the side forcing people to line up when they don't want to.

And they're doing this while Europe is being hit by crisis after crisis. This is a terrible time to be trying to reduce the quality of phones in the EU. It is bad enough in a good year. It is a terrible time to be drawing attention away from the actual problems that Europeans are facing. They should be working on making things cheaper and better for EU citizens.

So how exactly would capitalism prevent children from working, improve work safety, make food products only contain safe ingredients? All of these are solved through laws and governance.

What a bunch of nonsense and whataboutism.

Mobile phones are very important for European citizens: there's so much stuff that depends on them... companies require their employees to use them for 2FA, governments use them for logging into various government services, it's the preferred method of interfacing with banks, supermarkets, post office... my son's school has a phone app, which is the only way they communicate school schedule, or stuff like teacher's absence, going on field trips etc.

Apple is just another empire of evil that needs to be regulated in order not to treat its customers like slaves. It's absolutely not a waste of time to make them play nice or gtfo.

Reducing e-waste is an important part of addressing climate change, which is the most important issue, so: Yes.

>Please EU, behave rationally

that'd take actual work from the EU.

Agreed, its not merely the battery. But wireless headsets don't have user replaceable batteries anymore, while the device itself still works. No matter the software, the dying battery killed the product.

So I see it as a starting point, and we need further targeted iterations, including the one you pointed out (thank you!)

Aha..just the matter of forcing obsolescence in order to raise profits in modern economy. Please excercise only on yourself, not on me. Another thing, it may be useless from your point of view. But most of the people are using phone just for calling - strange isn't it :) ?

My wife is possibly about to be forced to throw away a $8k pair of hearing aids because after 6 years they are no longer supported by the manufacturer's software for hearing care professionals so it's likely she won't be able to get them readjusted.

It's one chunk of the whole smartphone problem.

Software can come after (or during).

Let's amplify postmarketos a bit ..

> Why would you want to replace a battery in a useless device?

I agree with what you say, but even phones I had that became unsupported and I couldn't replace the OS in didn't become useless. They still worked.

A user-replaceable battery would be useful for them as well.

I have been thinking this a lot! There so many technology that could be still use. Ipad 1 , old phones, i have been salvaging laptops with linux, and apart from video or heavy specs things they work better than new laptops with the microsoft OS.

A million times yes. My phone practically became useless overnight since banking apps refuse to open on my Android version. No option to update to a newer version, no option to access important accounts without some phone app.

That's a very worthwhile point but one about a different issue. Consider also the possibility that if my device has been bricked but the battery is still doing OK, I might wish to use it in a different device.

If I could control the software and swap out the parts, I would probably still be using my iphone 4, the first device I felt got depreciated out of existence long before it stopped being useful.

I think we should not really extrapolate from earlier smartphone designs, we have seen incredible improvements yearly in the early phase.

It has considerably slowed down in the last 3-5 years, so it makes sense to only mandate longer lifespans nowadays.

No it’s both.

The EU is ensuring the cell phone companies start by fixing at least one issue. They can then move on to the other.

>>> Please, EU

you know... you could also try asking the US government to do it...

Yeah, and ask God too while we're at it.

Are both note true?

We should have both. Replace battery, components, and software access.

It's not an either-or. We need both.

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