The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries | Hacker News Reader

The EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries

theverge.com

217 pointsZacnyLos328 comments

I think this is fantastic news. It will be interesting to see how it affects the amount of phones that get discarded.

I think the next bottleneck is likely to be software longevity. This has improved a lot lately!

But basically I think phones have now reached a place like laptops and desktops where HW capabilities are stable, and there's no good reason for devices to be obsolete in 5 years any more.

I wonder if regulators said "your software has to get security updates for 10 years" would that be enough to get mobile SoC vendors upstreaming their HW support and Google streamlining the Android update process? (To Google's credit they have already done a _lot_ of positive work in that area as I understand it).

The second proposed legislation from the article seems to require that at least 5 years of updates must be provided after the device was last sold. This is far more than many low-end and mid-range Android phones, moreover many Android phone manufacturers start counting after the device was released, not last sold.

Interestingly, they also seem to put upper bounds on how quickly these updates should be rolled out. Eg. functionality updates must be rolled out within 6 months after another phone from the same brand has that update. So eg. if Samsung makes Android 12 available on their flagship phone, they also need to make it available within 6 months on the other phones that were sold to up to 5 years ago.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...

This is such an improvement over the status quo.

Is it? It is going to meant that Android can't take advantage of the high end features of the new phones that are being released, and that old and slow phones are going to get updates that makes them run even slower.

To top it of, it is not like manufacturers are into throwing away money, so this will likely mean that prices on the cheapest phones will increase more.

> It is going to meant that Android can't take advantage of the high end features of the new phones that are being released

That's perfectly ok, what you don't have you can't use.

> and that old and slow phones are going to get updates that makes them run even slower.

It would be up to the manufacturers to ensure that this is not the case. One way to do it would be to reduce bloat.

> To top it of, it is not like manufacturers are into throwing away money, so this will likely mean that prices on the cheapest phones will increase more.

This makes no sense: manufacturers are competing with each other, if the prices on the cheapest phones will increase more then surely someone will exploit that.

Maybe it'll play out differently on the low-end, but on the high-end it seems there's been some "soft collusion" where one manufacturer raised prices, and others saw that as a signal they can also raise their prices.

Yes, that is a problem, but that's a different kind of regulation (anti-trust). The EU also tends to be pretty good at busting such things, but they take their sweet time to do it.

In the low end, surely you'd get more standardisation. Same processor, screen, Bluetooth and mobile chips.

So that from an update pov it's easy. They can always differentiate with cameras, batteries, cases etc.

So a communist phone for the lower class?

That’s the not-nice way of saying the same thing.

I’m not sure if I am for or against that without more thought.

I'm still on a dumb phone and that's because I think spending $800 on a phone is ridiculous. And it's not like I can't afford it.

An iPhone SE is half that. A budget Android half again. Both completely usable, just won't replace your mirrorless camera just yet.

There are other reasons.

I spend money where I spend time: phone, chair, monitor, mattress.

I rarely drive so my car is 19 years old.

I use my phone daily (right now!) so I have the newest one.

Why explicitly the newest one?

I’m on the apple upgrade program. So I just pay monthly. I could skip a year and own the phone, but don’t really care. I want the best cameras. Life is too short.

Exactly. Normal people have already replaced their computer with phones so how old is the PC that HN commentators use? Five years?

Phones are appliances that are being used up to 10 hours every single day. And sure you can keep repairing them but at some point buying a new one will actually be cheaper.

I'd love some honest mattress advice.

I'm on a pixel 6A. It cost me under £200 factoring in the trade in deal that let me trade in a 10 year old phone (if you don't have one eBay one for £5).

And there are plenty of reasonable smart phones for less than £100 these days. You can get something like a Motorola E13 for under £70 that will do everything most people use their phones for well (beyond the camera being nothing special, but we're comparing to a dumb phone).

Standadized parts are an idea from the industrial revolution, not communism.

White-labeling an oem part is not exactly the kind of communism Marx was known for

I think it's more that higher price = more flagship. A higher price is in itself a sales argument to a certain audience. If you just want a competent phone there's no reason to buy a flagship one.

Yes - at the very high end, smartphones are a luxury goods market. There's an old adage in luxury goods that "if your product isn't selling fast enough, raise the price".

IDK, I always save up and buy flagships, and convinced my wife to do the same, because that's the only reliable way to guarantee neither of us will have to suffer through a phone that chokes under its own stock software, and is a constant pain to use. So yes, I'm one of those for whom "higher price = more flagship" is an argument, mostly because so far, "most flagship = bestest specs" and "= most care taken by the vendor".

The "collusion" was 5G. Everyone raised price, thanks to Qualcomm?

>This makes no sense: manufacturers are competing with each other, if the prices on the cheapest phones will increase more then surely someone will exploit that.

You assume it costs nothing to maintain software for old phones.

It wouldn't if they opened up the hardware.

So release a handful of budget models and support them well instead of 60+ per year.

If the hardware was more open it wouldn’t even be a problem. People could pick and choose ROMs best suited for their phones and use cases, just like Linux. Newer phones could use bleeding edge features for their HW, and older phones could use more stripped down versions to preserve battery life.

That is the first good suggestion I have seen in this thread. We just need to make it illegal to not allow you app to run on an open device.

I mean realistically there's never been a good reason that phone OS's are as specific as they are. The driver situation is absurd. The most common highly integrated feature - the camera - doesn't even really run on the phone OS anymore since there's usually an image processor of some sort inline.

I have absolutely no problems with running a USB-C on the phone and component manufacturers to get their act together and figure out an open standard to support common components (i.e. basebands, cameras, audio routing, security chips) so hardware can be supported after release (which I would hope in practice would just be "in the Linux kernel tree").

What percentage of consumers want to pick the ROM their phone runs?

This is great because the more expensive phones get, the less likely people will want to replace their 2-year old phone with a new one.

Plus, those new high end features...there have been barely any new features in a smartphone in the last 5+ years (I'm exaggerating a bit of course). Check out Fairphone. That's an interesting project!

Isn’t this the ultimate “let them eat cake” argument? There are many people in the world who can’t afford anything but the cheapest phone.

Those people don't live in the EU. And anyhow the higher cost of the phone are balanced out by the increased longevity and support of the device. Lifetime cost may very well be lower when people end up replacing their phones less frequently and just have to swap a battery.

Has the EU also made poverty illegal?

Sort of? Almost all EU countries have social welfare nets and public services strong enough to have people's basic needs covered. I think in most countries welfare even directly covers basic phone plans.

We aren't in a situation where we need to allow environmentally damaging products here for the sake of the poor because they're not out on their own. This sounds like the old pro-sweatshop arguments people sometimes made about developing countries.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/they-have-homelessness-in-europ....

Poverty is a relative thing, not absolute. As for your link downthread - homelessness has many more causes than just not being able to afford a place to stay.

So what are those many causes where people have money and choose to live on the streets?

IDK, cheapest phones don't work, and I don't think the store price was ever that clear a differentiator, as telcos routinely disrupt this signal. You can easily get the newest flagships, and phones from the next price group below, cheaper than you can get mid-range phones - as long as you're willing and able to sign up for a 1-2 years contract.

Outside of the US and a few other companies, people pay full price for phones.

Eventually, always, but not up front. Poorer people "prefer" somewhat higher price that gets spread out over years, to paying full price up front.

(I put "prefer" in quotes, because it's less of a choice, and more the only option they can afford.)

Most countries don’t do two year contracts - people have to pay the full price up front.

It means you'll be getting a "This phone isn't available in your country" pop-up when shopping online and all SKUs sold in Europe by the maker's subsidiary will have different model numbers. Of course, because of the need to support the phone for longer on patched kernels and the impossibility of charging for updates, the phones will be more expensive. The removable battery will also mean that the phone isn't waterproof.

Wasn't the Samsung Galaxy S5 waterproof despite having a removable battery?

It was less so than later phones, but it absolutely handled its intended use case of browsing reddit in the shower

In recent years I think phone hardware has managed to outrun software bloat. My latest phone doesn't feel any faster than the previous one and it didn't noticeably slow down after three Android updates. Five years of updates would probably be fine.

Phones nowadays are pretty powerful, even on newer softwares older devices are pretty usable. I actually still daily drive an MSM8974-powered Android phone with an Android 11 custom firmware, and it still runs much better than some of the cheapest phones on the market.

Not necessarily. Software support can just mean security updates, which would already be great. Newer versions can also roll out features dependent on hardware strength only to devices that have the necessary hardware for them. And (if the manufacturers don't do the exact opposite on purpose) could lead to longer usable operation without doubling ram every 3 years.

It would be interesting if a side effect of this proposed legislation, Android manufacturers stop pumping out new models as aggressively. It would make sense if that's how it turned out, because these manufacturers would effectively be crafting their own support nightmares by continuing to put out new models at a high cadence.

This in turn should make for better parts availability since the window that any given model is manufactured in is wider. It'd also incentivize sharing parts between models where possible.

All in all, positive for the end consumer. It might've been a problem in the earlier days of smartphones, but the category has more or less plateaued by now and so the benefit of high model churn with each new model sharing little with its predecessor is dubious at best.

Or it actually accelerates the model pumping. If the software has to be supported for 5 years after it’s last on sale there could be a perverse incentive to roll SKUs like crazy even if there are not any actual changes so you only have to support for the shortest possible time.

That would still effectively be 5 years of updates which is a hell of a lot better than what most manufacturers currently offer.

Sure it would be, but I think the implied point above was that including the period the device is sold (what's that? say three years), the total support time is much closer to the ten years that was being discussed up top, and pumping out more new devices may shorten that back to closer to five years.

Does having 3 devices that you are supporting for 10 years make more work than 10 devices you support for 5?

Because while that doesn't make sense in my head, I could easily see that being the methodology used by the Android device manufacturers.

If these ten devices are mere SKU updates, then maybe yes, they create a sliding five year support window (plus however long they're being sold), instead of a ten year one. Keeping software working for a five year old hardware platform sounds a lot easier than doing that for a ten year old one. A lot less Git branches also.

If the ten devices are mere SKU updates made solely for the reason of getting around the regulations, then the company can expect a rather huge fine :^)

Of course, but any increase is an upgrade to the current situation.

Fantastic point. Chinese manufacturers pump out SKUs like crazy - several new models every six months or so.

Of course, it might turn out as theluketaylor says but I doubt it

Maybe that's just waiting on some settled precedents on what's really a new model. Could this be brought before a judge who'd then possibly rule that SKUs 1, 2, and 3 are essentially the same device and should thus count as such for the purposes meant here?

I would love if this software support needed to be printed on the box. Sort of like EnerGuide or the Nutrition Facts. Feature updates: N years, Security Updates: M years ... This way consumers can actually try to factor in the lifetime of the device when purchasing. Oh this device costs 10% more but will get security updates for 2/3 longer, so it is actually more economical. Then if the company doesn't comply with the label they need to provide full refunds or a replacement that will get updates.

In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years.

I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating, and disks due to cell degradation, but it's certainly a mystery.

That interpretation is incredibly generous to the companies that benefit from you feeling a need to replace that phone.

It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.

I like to call it "premature obsolescence". I don't believe that the manufacturers actively try to make your old phone get slower.

Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower.

Maybe I am being pedantic, but I think it is different: it is _not_ that manufacturers actively pay their devs to make the phones slower (which would be planned obsolescence), but rather they _do not pay_ the devs to make sure the old phones _do not get slower_. The latter is "passive", that's (to me) premature obsolescence: the manufacturer could fight premature obsolescence, but it has a cost (and obviously they don't want to pay for it).

There's some degree of active involvement with this. I've long suspected Apple to do this for example. The best version of iOS for any iDevice is usually the one just before the one that they use as the hard cutoff point.

Granted, my big example of this is quite old (the iPhone 4 would run iOS 6 really well, while on iOS 7 it was a glitchy, slow, battery-draining mess) but it does seem to be a common trend (my last Apple phone, the iPhone 5 ran quite well on iOS 9 but would just have a complete breakdown if you installed iOS 10).

They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.

“ They were IIRC also caught red-handed a couple times deliberately releasing updates to older iDevices that would just wreck their battery life and have a few lawsuits pending about that.”

Are you going to just drop an inflammatory statement like that and not even try to provide any information to back it up?

Is google down or something?

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...

That has nothing to do with "wrecking battery life" though. They added a fix to prevent the device from turning off early due to battery brownouts at lower states of charge. It did result in reduced performance (and they got a lawsuit cause they weren't open about why/how they did it) but this wasn't causing excessive battery drain.

Lets not use this case as a scapegoat and pretend that slowdowns don't exist in iOS.

Pretty much from the first iPhone model it's well known that newer iOS releases will slow down your phone and/or make your battery drain faster. I even remember when they actually broke wifi on a lot of phones with an update and pretended that the hardware was defective all the time (which it wasn't). Hell I'm looking right now my old iPhone 8 which got a new genuine battery, and it's a lagging, hot mess so I only use it when I don't want to burn the battery of my new phone.

My good colleague resisted updating her iPhone 11 to any newer version of iOS from the one she got, but couple of months ago she couldn't install her banking app anymore so she broke down and updated the OS. Instant laggines, and battery lost close to 40%. Just like that. She got mad, and when the madness subsided, she bought a new iPhone. Mission accomplished for Apple.

All of this could be much avoided if they would allow you to install previous versions of iOS, but they don't for obvious reasons. And before anyone mentions security, that is a load of BS because even previous iOS versions get patched up. So planned or premature obsolesence, the user just gets frustrated with an old phone which hardware-wise might be perfectly fine, but software-wise an unusable mess and buys a new phone. I hope the forced user battery replacement works, and I'm sure they could look into these forced software updates which are also largerly contributing to larger problem at hand.

The specific accusation was about 'wrecking battery life' and the source was the 'batterygate' lawsuits. This has nothing to do with a scapegoat.

Honestly, "it's well known" is anecdotal at best. If you're actually saying it was a problem that battery life dropped 40% from going from one update to another, then media would pick up on this. That's not a small amount here, you're saying battery is now 2/3 the previous runtime. If that was actually reliable and measurable, show me an article that has done testing on before-and-after from one update to another.

The Batterygate was just a partial response at iOS significantly slowing down even one generation old iPhones, and I don't want to go into that because that's not what I want to discuss.

In your second paragraph you completely dismiss my experience I guess because it wasn't published by some online zine which is ridiculous by itself. Online forums like reddit are full of these, my experience says the same, and pretty much the big majority of my friends have iPhones in this neck of woods and there is no question on whats going on. Why there are no articles about it? Dunno, maybe because by now its an old story as this is going on for decades now so it's an accepted fact. Maybe because in US people buy iPhones more often then in Europe so the effect isn't that noticeable? I don't know, and it's not in my interest to care.

So I'll put my claim into negative and ask you this: are you claiming that iPhones are not slowed down by newer updates? Are you claiming that perfectly good iPhones even as new as 1.5 years and older are as performant as the lastest gen iPhones with the same iOS (even with brand new batteries)? If so, thats an extraordinary claim and the burden of proof rests on your shoulders.

Are you also claiming that you're casually able to install previous versions of iOS so you could get performance back? If car industry did the same after software updates whole industries would collapse. Does your PC even do this nowadays? If you install an OS which actually slows down your computer, you can still re-install a previous version to get your performance back. Not so on the iPhone, you're locked out of that option and we'll screw you, buy a new one.

“caught red-handed” implies an intent that is not supported by the evidence.

The design of the battery in the 6 turned out to be problematic once the battery reached a certain age. After lots of reports of iPhones shutting down suddenly, Apple issued a software update that slowed down those phones so that they didn’t shut down. They then redesigned the battery and this was not a problem in later models.

You talk about a general slow down of phones when the OS is updated. That is most likely due to increased processing needed in later OSs. The early phone CPUs had barely enough processing to do what they needed to do so the added demands of a new OS would drag them down a little. Over time the cumulative effect would add up. This is not unique to iPhones. I have heard the same complaints from Android users. Fortunately modern phone CPUs are powerful enough that they have the cycles to spare and slowdowns are rare.

I have an iPhone XS. For what I do, the hardware is still perfectly capable. I use basically the same apps I used 5 years ago. Except now, I often can’t run more than 1 app at a time. I’ll have an app open, switch to another app and it’ll reload from scratch. Then when I switch back to the first app, it too will reload from scratch. Multitasking can be very painful.

My understanding is that apps use more RAM now because newer phones have more RAM. The result is that older phones with less RAM will aggressively kill apps because there just isn’t enough memory to go around.

As a developer I can see both sides of the coin. On one hand, I know it would be possible to reduce the memory consumption. On the other hand, I realise this would also cost more money. But it isn’t malice. Just a choice.

Apple as a manufacturer have gotten a lot better over the years. I remember when iOS updates made the iPhone 3G literally unusable, but that isn’t the case any more. I’m running iOS 16 on my iPhone XS with no performance issues at all. I expect iOS 17 to be just as fast. They also implement features to increase the longevity of their phones, like reducing performance and maximum power delivery when the battery is degraded. They were lamented for this feature but it genuinely saved my iPhone 6S which kept on shutting off.

I haven't noticed this at all. My phone is 4 years old and feels just as fast as always. My previous one I remember thinking how snappy it was after a factory reset when I sold it on. The one before that died. The one before that kept its speed but the battery turned to shit and I couldn't be bothered trying to get it changed. I'm just about to replace this one but it's still in great working order so one of my kids wants it as their first phone.

There was one Android device my wife had that got slower and slower and it was a known issue with the disk.

Android seems to suffer from a phenomenon similar to "Windows creep" where performance decays over time for no reason in particular, even for users who are good stewards of their devices. It's more of an issue for some devices than it is for others for reasons that are unclear.

I used to think this at well, but then I removed all of the useless apps I'd gathered over the years. The improvements were almost instant. Installing apps doesn't have a noticeable impact on general system performance, but install enough of them and you'll find everything mote sluggish than you remember.

My phone feels as fast as the day I bought it, which so far must've been about four years ago now. It came out with Android 9 and is currently running Android 13 through a custom ROM.

Newer devices certainly feel snappier, but the old phone works as well as it ever did, except for the battery carrying almost half of its original capacity. I still have my OnePlus One and I can't say it feels like the phone is slower than when I bought it.

I think the slowness is caused more by the change in perception thsnt be degradation of hardware and the ever growing software bloat. Modern phones software comes with fluid, high resolution, high speed animations and transitions everywhere that don't work well on older devices. Once you turn those off, you'll quickly find that many older devices will work just as well with modern software as they did with their older software.

Bargain bin devices that come out with specs that can't even run the factory firmware are the exception, of course. However, that segment seems to have shrunk significantly since I last looked into buying a phone.

Regarding my own case, it was a Google Nexus 5X. Performaed a factory reset, but the phone is still super-slow.

100% sure that this is not perception. I'm talking about seconds-long delays.

Regarding the acquaintances, I don't remember (or know); I think a couple of them were old Samsung Galaxy S models. Again, factory reset didn't help.

I guess that as parent posted, this problem affects some models more than others. I'm still really curious about the technical cause :)

I believe several generations of Samsung devices have a hardware issue with their flash storage that will make the storage slow down to a crawl before bricking itself. The problem only appeared a few years after release and it doesn't seem to affect every device either. Google and Samsung were most commonly affected if I recall correctly.

My old tablet suffers from the same problem. It's quite frustrating to use because of it, but luckily I'm only planning on using it for postmarketOS and that can boot from the SD card slot.

Other brands didn't have this problem and the problem has since been rectified in the Pixel/Galaxy lines. I suppose some very cheap devices may still be using trash flash storage chips, but it's no longer an issue with Android phones from the past few years.

I have a 9 year old phone (Galaxy Note 4, yay for removable batteries!) as a daily driver, now on LineageOS and while it is true that removing the bloat will help a lot, it is very clear that the slowdown is real.

Among the most noticeable worst offenders is Google Maps, but many apps get slower update after update while not offering much more than cosmetic changes. Websites too, many apps are just websites bundled with a browser anyways. Apps that didn't receive updates for many years are as snappy as they ever were.

I had a Samsung Galaxy S2 and a Nexus 10 which both suffered from flash related problems making them incredibly slow. Samsung never fixed that nor was there ever a recall.

I also owned a HTC One M7 which worked well for a very long time but it also got slow even though there were no hardware problems. The M7 worked just as good from day one if I factory reset it, it only becomes slow again once all the apps are updated. What I think is happening here is that apps move to the newer Android API but keep compatibility with older Android versions through compatibility layers, and they compound so once the entire compatibility layer stack becomes "too thick" the CPU gets bogged down and the whole thing becomes slow...

I finally made the switch last year, but I used a moto G (rather popular model, at least in Europe: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/osprey/ ) for some 6 years.

It did slow down at one point, but it came back to life after installing lineageos, so now I blame bloat for the slow down phones suffer from.

The bottleneck on the Asus phone I replaced recently and I had since 2017 or so (before that I had T-Mobile G1 for maybe 8 years) was the glass - it breaks really easily because there is no plastic protection along the edges as it used to be on older phones.

How old? I'm still using two LG V20's from 2016 and don't experience issues.

> CPUs deteriorating over time due to heating

I might be wrong, but AFAIK this is not a thing within the usual timescales.

It can't be excluded. I remember a friend of mine overclocking his CPU (around 20 years ago!), and notificing that the maximum clock they could achieve, would decrease over time.

I guess that when put under thermal stress (which may be the case for some phone, for whatever reason) may actually have a measurable effect.

It's probably due to old battery causing imperfect thermal control then extreme throttling. Phones are not really well tested on aged batteries since it's hard to artificially make such one that fits well to real world scenario, and manufacturers also don't have good incentives to do so.

One contributor is that most models get a mid life major Android version update after 2 ish years and those don't work as well as the launch versions. It's unlikely to be hardware problems you suggest. Flash ftl slowdown due to filling up or fragmentation from use might contribute though.

There are some jank debugging tools on Android (eg system tracing found under dev settings), would be interesting to see what they report on a fresh vs slowness afflicted device.

> But basically I think phones have now reached a place like laptops and desktops where HW capabilities are stable, and there's no good reason for devices to be obsolete in 5 years any more.

Unless you care about your phone working as a phone. 2G was discontinued years ago, 3G is rapidly being dropped by the carriers and how much longer before 4G is discontinued?

> streamlining the Android update process? (To Google's credit they have already done a _lot_ of positive work in that area as I understand it).

What exactly is Google doing? Apple released a security update for the 2013 iPhone 5s earlier this year.

Even in your example you point out that 3G "is being rapidly dropped" but it's not dead yet. The iPhone 3G came out in 2008. So just today, 15 years later, it would still work on most networks (certainly I can still use 3G in Australia).

3G is alive and well in IoT.

All of the US carriers are shutting down 3G.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/the-3g-shutdown-how-will-it-aff....

What I implied was it might not be a big thing for smartphones, but there are a lot of IoT devices out there that will fail the 3G sunset.

Then there's still wifi of course. Admittedly, a phone without cellular connections is less useful, but it could still be used to function like a tablet that's simply kept at home etc.

> Unless you care about your phone working as a phone

Most of that is a chicken-and-egg problem. 3G was dropped because very few phones were still using it, and you could not run 3G on the same frequency as 4G/5G. If phones lasted longer, more people would've remained on 3G, so they would not have dropped it. Furthermore, 4G and 5G can share the same equipment and frequency due to Dynamic Spectrum Sharing, so there is no technical reason to quickly get rid of 4G like we wanted with 2G & 3G.

3G was dropped because the same frequency could better used for 4G. Unless you somehow found a way to get around the laws of physics.

Not here in the US. The carriers wanted to discontinue 3G for years. They really only started it in earnest in 2018. It took them about 3 years longer from the first dates given to finally kill 3G. It sound to me as if 3G phones didn't bite the dust as fast as carriers assumed or customers refused to upgrade at the rate they expected.

That's the situation in the US. In most of the EU, you can expect either 2G or 3G to be available for at least five more years.

Nope. 3G is being shut down in Finland as we speak. Should be finished by early 2024.

It's pretty well explained here what Google is trying to do: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-project-mainline-modu...

That being said, Apple is atm way better in providing longterm software updates, but that doesn't mean Google isnt doing a lot of work there also.

Next to that, there is already a lot of apps that are updated through the Play Store instead of an OS update. Mail, Dialer, Android Auto, Photos, Camera, Keyboard, Contacts, Clock, Play services, ...

They’ve been “trying to” do the same thing since 2014.

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

And none of those apps help when there are security vulnerabilities at lower levels.

> Unless you care about your phone working as a phone. 2G was discontinued years ago, 3G is rapidly being dropped by the carriers and how much longer before 4G is discontinued?

First 4g devices were released in 2012, in 2014 you could find sub 150€ 4G devices. If you bought the last 3G phone in 2015~ (there were still 3G phones after that, but nothing reasonable), 10 years of network support is still reasonably within reach.

> To Google's credit they have already done a _lot_ of positive work in that area as I understand it

They haven't. I've extensively worked on their Project Treble, and they did a beautiful work to perfectly versionize every behavior OEM might depend on, or version driver APIs. They could use that to provide long term support (which is what I do in my own project, the foundation is very sound), but in practice they use it as a way to obsolete code faster:

Before Project Treble, Android kept whatever code was in use. So if some OEM was still using a 5 year old code path, and it was still working fine it would remain.

After Project Treble, every driver API has a new version every year, and the older ones will be deprecated (read: purposely broken or completely removed) within 3 years.

Before project treble, OEMs could maintain the Android for their platform quite effortlessly for 5 years, nowadays they have to rewrite whole parts of drivers after 3 years.

someone will come and say that since Project Treble OEMs have been upgrading for longer. But I consider it's completely a matter of timing, the smartphone market stagnating. Look at nVidia Shield and fairphones for reference.

Qualcomm is still terrible at getting their SoCs supported in mainline kernel and as a result as soon as they stop providing updates to the kernel fork you're SoL.

This can happen as early as 3 years after initial SoC launch

>I think the next bottleneck is likely to be software longevity.

My girlfriend recently dropped (and broke) her iPhone X. She then bought a used Galaxy S9. The S9 is a few months older than the iPhone X.

Despite that, the app for our home alarm is not supported on her S9, because for some unknown reason it requires Android 11+, and the S9 only supports up to Android 10.

The battery is indeed the HW part that has the most decay.

But in that 5y time-frame the SW part is the one that is the most problematic.

It would be nice to be able to replace the ROM easily after the EOL of the device.

Will self-regulate itself immediately, as then incentives to have longer life is real and you cannot force customers to just buy another device because you decided it's time.

By "replace ROM easily" it means that one has the access (keys) and documentation to do it.

Is ROM really used anymore? It seems like these days, everything is OTA update compatible.

Customers aren’t forced to buy new devices, they just no longer get software updates after N (5?) years. You would need an alternative OS, like a version of Android that lacks google apps or something.

"ROM" is just used as a term for the system image. It is no longer truly "read only". And replacing that is often intentionally made difficult by cryptographically signing the image, making it impossible to boot a custom one.

Oh wow, that’s a weird anachronism that I didn’t expect. Here is the explanation from wiki:

> The term "ROM" is sometimes used to refer to a ROM device containing specific software or a file with software to be stored in a writable ROM device. For example, users modifying or replacing the Android operating system describe files containing a modified or replacement operating system as "custom ROMs" after the type of storage the file used to be written to, and they may distinguish between ROM (where software and data is stored, usually Flash memory) and RAM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Read-only_memory

So what was once a very hardware term had become a completely software one.

The sad part is that you can't even do "ROM" replacements, it won't work for most people. Many countries have multiple apps that you more or less need to function in society, there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones, not just via the official app store, if custom firmware is to make sense. Otherwise that old phone isn't going to provide much value anyway.

10 years of software update isn't actually unreasonable, if you can replace the battery on your phone easily. An iPhone 7 for instance is still a pretty useful phone for many, and I don't see any use cases that would chance that in the next couple of years.

It's not just the official store. Google Safetynet, used by a whole lot of essential android apps such as banking apps (particularly essential in the EU after app confirmation became legally required for online transactions) and also completely unnecessarily by a lot of frivolous apps, prevents implementing apps from functioning in open/rooted android installs, unless you jump through a bunch of hoops to fool the app about the device's rooted state.

> there needs to be a requirement for those apps to be installable on jail broken phones

That will not happen.

You can't just allow banking and financial software to be run on a compromised OS. It is great for you but terrible for older people who would be exposed to rampant criminal fraud.

The better approach is to force OEMs to support their phones for longer. 10 years is realistic.

I'm pretty confident that by most metrics custom ROMs are less compromised than OEM ROMs. It will have less malwares, I better sandboxing, less 3P backdoors , more up-to-date security updates.

1P here being the user/owner of the device

Depends on how you use it. Most people don't know you should not let your battery drain below 25%, and that the recommendation is to have it plugged in a charger as often as possible.

My Pixel 2 has probably more flash damage than batter degradation.

It is interesting that the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in. They don't make smartphone anymore so any regulations isn't hurting them. It would be admirable if they held the same standard for vehicles, including brands from the EU.

You don't hear about them, but they do exist...

Nokia has been sold, I don't know about any EU smartphone brands outside of Fairphone. The market is so small that adding regulation isn't hurting the EU, which is why its an easy target compared to the automotive industry.

> I don't know about any EU smartphone brands outside of Fairphone.

That's your problem then, don't you think?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_brands_by...

Now, whether all of these are actually manufactured locally or not is another matter, but the EU definitely is regulating its own market. As they have been empowered to do so.

I'm all for it. And I would love to see standardized battery packs for electric vehicles as well because I think that will be a much bigger issue in the longer term.

> That's your problem then, don't you think?

No need to play the man or be belittling.

Point still stands that the EU smartphone market is so little that any regulation isn't hurting them. Regulation on car repairability definitely would, hence why you stil need to visit the BMW dealer if you want to change the 12-volt battery or activate your heated seats. The EU will not likely do anything about that.

It is their market to regulate.

And right to repair is very much a part of EU regulations. Without those regulations you'd be in a far worse situation.

https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/automotiv...

If BMW idiocy gets you upset: don't drive BMW. My car is 25 and I can do just about anything I want on it. Your beef is first and foremost with BMW, and I'm fairly sure that if the EU deems this kind of behavior anti competitive it will be smacked down, even if the participants are all EU based.

You seem to want regulation to be perfect, but in light of manufacturer abuses it's a catch-up game.

https://www.automotiveworld.com/articles/how-far-will-the-in...

Is a good article on the subject, it also helps to see that there is a fine line between what has to be made available and be subscription free and where manufacturers may have some leeway.

I agree with you that changing out a battery (which is a pretty common affair) should never require a trip to the stealer.

It is their market but they don't have any significant participation in it, which is why regulation is easy. There isn't any significant downside to it for them.

I don't have beef with BMW, that was just an example. "Don't drive a BMW" is the equivalent of "Don't buy an iPhone" if you care about repairability. It shouldn't be like that.

You see correlation and infer causation but maybe the better way to see this is to realize that the EU is large, has a ton of work on their plate already and relatively limited budget to work with whereas manufacturers will always just see how far they can stretch it.

The number of EU companies affected by EU regulations is far larger than the number of companies from abroad. Your example fails because the same amount of regulation that applies to EU car manufacturers also applies to manufacturers from abroad. The EU is in that sense one of the fairest players.

According to your philosophy no amount of regulation on mobile phones would be acceptable because the EU has no big name phone manufacturer any more. But as others have already pointed out this legislation affects far more than just mobile phones so your argument simply fails.

The EU has time to responds to Apple rumours so it appears they have time to crack down on BMW, Mercedes and many other EU brands that limit user repairability.

So, you want them to target BMW, Mercedes and other EU brands rather than to address all of the car manufacturers in the same way?

That's exactly the kind of thing they don't do, and for good reasons.

As you can see from the link posted above they do a lot to ensure right to repair, but it isn't perfect. Give it some time.

Consumers are the whole reason as to why any market exists. You can think about regulation as "You have to do this to sell here" but also as "They have to do that for you to buy it here". The EU comes in agreement as to what kind of products they ought to purchase and this is the result. Your wallet is not the only way to vote in modern capitalism.

The wp article does mention gigaset and https://www.shiftphones.com/ but not Fairphone nor https://www.carbonmobile.com/ who as with shift and gigaset are building manufacturing in Germany (mostly north east). Shift has a plant in China and just does finishing in Germany. But that's a given, I believe. Can't source all things in one country. Or?

If everything that sourced a component or subassembly from China would disappear the world would be a substantially different place.

Hmm I can see Fairphone on that Wikipedia article...

There are regulations around repairability of cars for example. You just don't hear about those on HN. Plus all the safety regulations around aircraft, cars and aon on. Markets in which EU-based companies very much operate in.

Gigaset is a German company who manufactures and assembles in Germany. https://www.gigaset.com/hq_en/smartphones/ A German remarkting firm Volla sells them with their own Android. The swiss company Rephone also rebrands with upgrads the GS5 (6GB RAM instead of 4).

All the recent Gigaset phones have replaceable Batteries. I use a GS5 and a Rephone with SailfishOs.

Oh wow, I remember them from ISDN wireless phone times. All a bit large for me, but cool that they exist and do this :)

It's also perhaps of interest that one of the few alternative OS efforts is still being led by ex-nokia folk out of Tampere, Finland. Jolla.

Much of the Plasma development for mobile is spear headed by devs in Germany (KDE folk).

Point being, the heritage of Nokia is not quite dead yet.

I have one and it is a pretty good and solid phone. Not quite a smartphone (it runs Linux) and I very much like it. Absolutely indestructible, cheap and unbelievable battery life (so long I sometimes forget I have to charge it at all).

What model are you talking about? I'd like a portable Linux device. I was born too early for the N900, and it wouldn't get cellular coverage in this day and age even if I were to buy one...

N800 tough. They are pretty serious about the 'tough' bit, I'm fairly sure you could use it in hand-to-hand combat and at least the phone would survive.

Thanks, that looks like a pretty nice phone. Even has a microSD card slot and a 3.5mm jack. Also, I didn't know KaiOS was based on Linux. Is it exposed anywhere? Can you get a terminal on it or ssh into it?

Yes, you can, but I haven't actually used that. The camera is pretty crappy and there are some (minor) UI/UX issues, but overall it is very solid, it's essentially a repackaged 8110 with a focus on battery life and robustness.

It has dual SIM capability but if you use that you lose the SD slot.

There is also GerdaOS (instead of KaiOS) and you can run Debian on it. When I get my next phone (which could well be years, this one is now 4 years old and still going strong) I plan on running stock linux on it to see what else you can do with it. I paid about 80 euros for it.

> It is interesting that the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in.

The EU only regulates markets they are participating in. The only country that regulates markets that they do not participate in is the United States, and for the most part they seem to be doing so for fairly good reasons (such as with the anti money laundering and anti terrorism financing laws). Though of course you are free to disagree with whether or not you think those are good reasons.

Why are you ignoring what he means for an alternate interpretation of that particular sentence? He explicitly clarified that he’s talking about the EU not making smartphones. Your reply is more like hijacking his comment than actually conversing.

The EU doesn’t produce anything. You know, not everything works by lobbying on this side of the pond.

And he's wrong about that too.

Do any phones designed by EU companies move more than a million units per year?

Are you going for the record of all moving the goalposts comments?

How is that moving a goalpost? Reality is that since Nokia's demise something like 99.99% of phones sold in EU are Apple, Samsung, or some crap from China. Europe managed to produce couple of smartphones, 15 years ago, but tries to regulate the market as if they knew anything about smartphones at all.

> It is interesting that the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in.

It's great! Exactly because there is no conflict of interest.

(From another viewpoint, they have ASML which is crucial for the creation of these products so let's not pretend they are only on the consumer side of things)

> It would be admirable if they held the same standard for vehicles, including brands from the EU

This regulation does cover vehicles.

It also covers a wide range of devices, including ones that are indeed made by the EU.

Beyond that, I think "only regulate things you make" is a silly standard. The point of regulations are (or should be) to protect consumers, not to disadvantage companies. The EU has lots of consumers who buy smartphones and thus has a very legitimate reason to want to regulate them to protect their consumers.

One EV is like thousands or hundreds of thousands of headsets.

So redesigning Tesla cars will get a bigger result than apple AirPods.

And there is a Gigafactory in Germany that will be first up to make clunky Teslas. So they are definitely regulating themselves.

I mean if this is too onerous a regulation, the smartphone makers are free to pull out of the world's third largest market...

> the EU only wants to regulate markets that they are not participating in

This is incredibly inaccurate, there's tons of regulations in the EU for just about anything produced or imported here. One big example: cars, which the EU produces quite a lot of, see EURO emission standards for a specific example.

The EU doesn't make smartphones anymore in the same way that the USA doesn't make smartphones anymore. There's still plenty of design going on, but the manufacturing is outsourced to Asia.

I'd consider the being the buying side of a market as "participating" in that market.

Vehicles are definitely regulated in Europe (see that story with Volkswagen, an EU brand, cheating the regulation as an example [1])

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

EDIT: I realize this started in the US but EU countries also went after VW and other EU brands after that

While car companies obviously need to follow regulations, those regulations are quite lax compared to the USA.

We didn't have as big an emissions scandal in Europe because the European Commission knew about the manipulation as early as in 2010 but didn't act on it.

When it comes to regulation in the car industry, I can't help but feel like the car manufacturers are the ones writing the law. They'll gladly make the safety technology they're already building into every car mandatory to get rid of foreign competition, but when emissions come up, progress slows down all of the sudden.

This stuff happens everywhere regulation applies, though. I distinctly remember an absurd article shared here on HN that detailed how over in the USA there was a conspiracy by Big Pasta to alter regulations in such a way that would prevent European brands from competing, for example.

I think it can go both ways: heavily regulate stuff built abroad to reduce their profit, heavily regulate stuff made locally so that standard is too high for foreign competition to join the market.

Oh yeah, EU regulators huffed and puffed when it was discovered that they are not doing their jobs and actually are in cahoots with the industry. Great example there.

If EU, or maybe just Germany was even concerned about ecology they would heavily tax those heavy monsters of "crossover" cars and similar garbage and transfer that money to EVs, but they don't. Nobody touches EU car industry where it actually hurts.

As a European citizen I agree that the way car manufacturers are given the satin glove treatment is despicable.

That said, the EU does regulate every market it participates in. If you can find it on a store shelf, you'll find EU regulation about it.

One of the major driving forces behind the Brexit vote was to "get rid of all of the EU paperwork". Of course they still have to get their paperwork in order if they want to export to the EU now, but for their internal market they're free to ignore all the EU regulations if they want to. As it turns out, most of those regulations were quite reasonable so a lot of the old regulations remained unchanged, but they were definitely there.

This is a good observation.

It's easy to pass onerous regulations when you won't take an economic hit for it.

I would think the ban on petrol cars (2035?) does affect europeans manufacturers.

EVs should absolutely be required to use standardised and replaceable battery modules. (Replaceable by any competent mechanic, at least). Although theft would become a concern, when the battery pack makes up over half of the value of any EV.

But it's amazing how many people are so quick to essentially say 'F the planet, I don't mind buying a new phone every 2 years, and I really don't want my next iPhone to be 2mm fatter!'.

Is there a significant amount of electric vehicles that get discarded because it's too hard to change the battery?

Leaf is the one that needs most replacements so far, and there are swaps and upgrades available.

The fact that you can upgrade a 24kWh 2011 Leaf to a 40kWh battery makes me optimistic for the current-gen cars: by the time they need a battery replacement, we'll have better and/or cheaper batteries available for them.

We're just pissed that the rest of the world is not taking environmental issues more serious.

Related. Others?

EU: Smartphones Must Have User-Replaceable Batteries by 2027 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36394922 - June 2023 (13 comments)

European Union votes to bring back replaceable phone batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36361510 - June 2023 (605 comments)

EU parliament passes law on user replaceable batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36336190 - June 2023 (15 comments)

Non-replaceable battery? Not if this proposed EU law passes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129250 - Dec 2022 (234 comments)

EU legislation could bring back user replaceable batteries - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34085963 - Dec 2022 (23 comments)

Replaceable batteries are coming back to phones if the EU gets its way - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30867892 - March 2022 (14 comments)

EU to make it mandatory to use customer-replaceable batteries in household items - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30660953 - March 2022 (637 comments)

I hope there is a provision in there for laptops as well. All this glued in shit is just another plank in the planned obsolescence strategy.

Glue and soldering. Modern laptops aren't upgradable anymore.

That's actually in the article :) one of the two laws covers all devices with ~~batteries~~ portable batteries.

Thank you!

Edit: Hm, I re-read the article and I still can't find that passage, the word 'laptop' doesn't appear. Can you point it out for me?

"In addition to not offering the longevity loophole, Opsomer also points out that the battery regulation covers all products with a portable battery; it’s far wider-reaching than the phone and tablet-focused ecodesign regulation."

Almost didn't find it myself this time. But here it is:

> In addition to not offering the longevity loophole, Opsomer also points out that the battery regulation covers all products with a portable battery; it’s far wider-reaching than the phone and tablet-focused ecodesign regulation.

Ah! Then they really should give that factoid much better billing, including the title. Thank you once again.

Np :) And I agree, that really is an awesome part of this progress.

An interesting implication is that it apparently also applies to devices like the Apple Watch and AirPods.

Likely those will no longer be offered or will be twice as large in Europe as elsewhere.

I really don’t want politician directed design and engineering for my devices.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-9-2023-0237...

> (11) This Regulation should apply to all categories of batteries placed on the market or put into service within the Union, regardless of whether they were produced in the Union or imported. It should apply regardless of whether a battery is incorporated into appliances, light means of transport or other vehicles or otherwise added to products or whether a battery is placed on the market or put into service within the Union on its own. This Regulation should apply regardless of whether a battery is specifically designed for a product or is of general use and regardless of whether it is incorporated into a product or is supplied together with or separately from a product in which it is to be used. Placing on the market is considered to take place when the battery has been made available for the first time on the Union market, by being supplied by the manufacturer or importer for distribution, consumption or use in the course of a commercial activity, whether in return for payment or free of charge. Thus, batteries placed in stock in the Union by distributors, including retailers, wholesalers and sales divisions of manufacturers, before the date of application of relevant requirements of this Regulation do not need to meet those requirements.

So do EVs need replaceable batteries? Telos can longer integrate them into the structure of the car?

So do EVs need replaceable batteries?

If swappable EV battery form factors had been standardized and enforced from the outset, free of DRM and lock-in, we'd be enjoying incredible advantages by now. History will see this as a missed opportunity without a doubt.

No, The rules around replacing batteries (article 11) only apply to portable batteries and LMT batteries, and not to SLI, electric vehicle or industrial batteries.

The relevant terms are defined in article 3:

>(9) ‘portable battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 5 kg or less, is not designed specifically for industrial use and is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery;

> (11) ‘light means of transport battery’ or ‘LMT battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 25 kg or less and is specifically designed to provide electric power for the traction of wheeled vehicles that can be powered by an electric motor alone or by a combination of motor and human power, including type-approved vehicles of category L within the meaning of Regulation (EU) No 168/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council (43), and that is not an electric vehicle battery;

>(12) ‘starting, lighting and ignition battery’ or ‘SLI battery’ means a battery that is specifically designed to supply electric power for starting, lighting, or ignition and that can also be used for auxiliary or backup purposes in vehicles, other means of transport or machinery;

>(13) ‘industrial battery’ means a battery that is specifically designed for industrial uses, intended for industrial uses after having been subject to preparation for repurposing or repurposing, or any other battery that weighs more than 5 kg and that is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery;

>(14) ‘electric vehicle battery’ means a battery that is specifically designed to provide electric power for traction in hybrid or electric vehicles of category L as provided for in Regulation (EU) No 168/2013, that weighs more than 25 kg, or a battery that is specifically designed to provide electric power for traction in hybrid or electric vehicles of categories M, N or O as provided for in Regulation (EU) 2018/858;

Also Airpods?

Yes, see the quotes below.

Interestingly, the regulation apparently also applies to small devices like smart watches and wireless earbuds.

That's not great - those devices really do not have space for a replaceable battery. And no, I don't want them bigger than they already are.

I did a 10 second internet search and found earbuds that have a replaceable battery and are not bigger than usual ones.

https://pqearbuds.com/

Looking at the pictures on the website, they look to be about at least twice the size of the most recent airpods pro, and much larger than the very first airpods (which are massive compared to the more recent ones).

I would have compared the weight directly, but PQ website only shows the weight for earbuds+case together (70g), couldn't find the weight of earbuds alone anywhere. Apple's website lists airpods pro 2 at 3g and the case at 50g.

There’s certainly some compromises to be made for sustainability, but I don’t think they have to be a deal breaker.

As long as it has any impact on weight, battery size, water tightness or make the device bigger its a deal breaker for me.

Sounds like you’re incredibly lucky that current products just happen to barely not exceed your deal-breaking threshold. A few years ago you wouldn’t have found any products meeting your requirements.

If you'll recall a few years ago these products did not exist, largely because miniaturized battery technology wasn't good enough

Replaceability is not about space but design.

In particular this legislation lets the maker build sealed and compact products as long as there's a reasonable way to open them and replace the battery.

Replaceability is very much about space. LiPoly batteries are very dangerous without an outer impact shell. If they're bent or punctured they'll catch fire or explode.

Batteries sealed in a device use the body of the device as their impact shell so get more battery mass and thus storage for a given envelope. A replaceable battery needing its own impact shell will have less storage for the same envelope volume.

This is very much a space problem. For any given envelope a replaceable battery will end up with less storage than a non-replaceable battery.

> A replaceable battery needing its own impact shell

Why ? Current battery replacements are sold without an impact shell, and the main issue is to have to remove all the parts to reach the battery at the very bottom of the stack and then deal with the dirty gluing.

A design where you remove the bottom first, unglue the battery through pull tabs and stick the new battery would have exactly the same properties, the body would still act as an impact shell, the only difference being it's a 5 or 6 step process instead of literaly 55.

Current LiPoly replacement batteries are not sold as consumer items. You can't buy them off a peg at a normal retail store. Take a look at phone batteries sometime and make note of the logos everyone ignores.

A UR mark (its a backwards printed UR) is a UL certification for components meant to go in a UL listed product but themselves aren't individually certified as UL products. Not that UL or any other testing labs are the end-all be-all of safety but in liability terms they are important.

The UR testing means the component isn't outright defective for purpose when installed in the UL listed device. So if there's ever a lawsuit around a device and all the components are UR labeled and the product is UL listed the manufacturer is unlikely to be forced to recall that entire class of device.

In order for a battery to get UL listed instead of UR listed it needs additional testing (money) and any sub-models or major changes need to be retested. It's much easier to get UR labeling for a component that can only be used in the intended UL listed device. Phone retailers do not want component-only certified things sitting in warehouses in shitty retail packaging.

Besides the whole liability issue there's issue of scale. Manufacturing a hundred million widgets with glue to hold batteries in place is more efficient than screws. Screws require screw holes, assembly is slower, and screws work themselves loose with thermal expansion/contraction. Glue is more efficient for assembly and overall safer over the life of the device (measured in the total manufacturing run divided by defects from battery slippage).

Devices could require fewer disassembly steps but it would be at the cost of assembly complexity. A $1 more in assembly costs is an extra hundred million it costs Apple or Samsung for just one model of phone.

I know Apple is just evil and can do no right but there are reasons shit is built they way it is. iPhones are far sturdier and resilient than they were ten years ago and their batteries last as long/longer despite higher power draw of their SoC and radios. Part of that sturdiness is gluing pieces together to better handle impacts and batteries that have more power storage per volume because they do t need thick impact shells. There's pretty good odds that making an iPhone with less glue and more easily replaced batteries would lead to more phones going in the trash due to them breaking more easily.

Thanks for the details.

If I correctly get your point, the whole UL/UR system will need to be revised to adapt to more consumers directly buying replacement parts, as they'll expand beyond the nerds following iFixit tutorials.

On the glue part, sretch release strips are simple enough to deal with.

> If I correctly get your point, the whole UL/UR system will need to be revised to adapt to more consumers directly buying replacement parts, as they'll expand beyond the nerds following iFixit tutorials.

No, the underwriting and test labs system will not be "updated". User serviceable parts/devices would need significant structural changes to pass testing.

The whole point of testing labs is to give a liability sign-off for manufacturers. A UL listing just says "this particular product built to X specifications did not immediately explode, catch fire, or kill anyone during our testing". It means that design isn't immediately dangerous under normal use co dictions. The UR listing is really just a claim that the component can sit in its packaging in a warehouse (in normal conditions) and not explode, catch fire, and is unlikely to immediately kill someone before it's sent to be assembled into a UL listed device.

If a manufacturer is selling to consumers no retailer, wholeseller, warehouse, or shipping company will touch electronics without some sort of test lab underwriting. In order for batteries to get that underwriting they need to survive physical abuse tests that will cause most LiPoly batteries to explode or catch fire. Look up LiPoly battery fires on YouTube. It's common to use naked batteries with no protective cases in hobby projects.

In order to make LiPoly batteries that will pass those underwriting tests they will need outer impact and puncture resistant casings. For any given envelope for a battery the protective casing will eat into the battery's capacity. Depending on the material and envelope the casing could be up to 50% of the battery's volume.

Internal layouts for some phones would be untenable if the batteries were user serviceable and required a protective shell. The L-shaped batteries in phones like the iPhone XS would be an impractical shape.

The difference between a high capacity battery and bomb is really only the discharge speed. Lithium is incredibly reactive with oxygen. The only reason they're relatively safe to keep in your pocket is they're wrapped in a sturdy aluminum shell.

I once replaced a battery, not by breaking the device (ebook) in two, but by making a battery sized hole in the backplate. I knew approximately where the battery was and there was not much danger drilling in to the dead battery.

Now, this idea was better than I thought. I could use bigger and fatter battery just by covering it with adhesive foil. And I could even use AA-shaped lithiums if the device thinness was not important.

As regards to electrical connection, you use the connector and controller from the original battery and connect raw battery lines to the new battery of your choice.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/YxjgaVVpiPvygHXS8

I have never used a phone (nor a laptop) where the battery wasn't easily replaceable and to be honest I can't really imagine using one. Batteries can (and do) go bad and start expanding. Using a device where the battery isn't easily accessible feels absolutely distressing.

Which goes to show that the option is there and people don't take it because they simnply don't want it so this regulation is the EU being the EU.

The option is there indeed, although I'm not sure if the general population would be happy with e.g. an Openmoko phone back when I already was :P

Disagree. First, the devices with removable batteries are exceedingly rare right now. They also often enough are niche products. Second, it is not reasonable to expect every consumer to always think about what is right, and not instead to follow what marketing tells him to buy. This is exactly what regulations are good for and historically have solved.

Interesting argument against democracy that you have in there - we should go back to monarchy. After all, it is not reasonable to expect every citizen to think about what is right, since instead they follow propaganda.

The danger of manipulation through propaganda is indeed an argument used in political discourse, though in reasonable discussions when talking about direct and indirect democracy. The layers of parliamentary systems are partly a means of protection against manipulations. If you want to read an interesting and nice to read book that partly talks about this, then I'd recommend Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy.

Though a consumer decision is not the same as a political vote, at least the latter is not supposed to be similarly thoughtless, so there is no need to interpret my comment that broadly.

When a chosen official makes a law that the citizens have to abide by, that's democracy and not its opposite.

Yes people are too stupid to make their own choices. The EU should just start coming out with “5 Year Plans”. What could possibly go wrong?

The EU’s regulations must be why there is a thriving tech sector in Europe…

There is good development in the UK! Oh… they are not EU … The ones that downvoted this comment will be surprised in 10 years…

Europes tech sector is thriving, but it’s all boring technology that actually solves real problems that nobody cares about like SAP and shit so the HN crowd don’t think it exists :)

“Thriving” a bunch of SaaS companies? If you add up the valuations of all of the tech companies in the EU, do they sum up to the value of Apple?

That’s not even to mention the pay differential for tech employees.

Oligopoly and cartels are adept at serving their interests and not the interests of society and customers.

Regulation is not made for the benefit of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole. In this case, for the environment or the planet. I doubt that people don't want a planet to live.

Society as a whole is just a bunch of individuals. If its bad for individuals its bad for society.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

> used a phone

there are almost no smartphones where you can easily replace the battery these days.

While it’s probably not easily, it was (to me) surprisingly easy to change the battery in my OnePlus 5. The battery itself was glued, but not in a way that removing it would destroy anything else. The other parts just required normal phone repair tools.

Thankfully, in the niche I'm interested in it's still common. On my Librem 5 I can replace the battery with nothing but a fingernail to take the back cover out, and could do so the same way on all the other smartphone's I've used in the past too.

But there are options. And instead of having people chose themselves to pick these options and refuse to buy terrible phones the EU is instead saying it will use the force of government violence against other people so that only phones of their desired non-shittiness are sold there.

I really don't thinking bringing violence into this situation is called for. The EU is showing is an implicit assumption that people cannot make choices for themselves and violence must be used by the state to get them to make the correct choices. That's nasty and a very slippery slope to authoritarianism. As a human person with volition I simply chose not to buy bad, anti-consumer devices. It is possible. And I do it without the government threatening violence on my behalf.

Come on, what a stupid take.. what violence? Let’s also call out the EU next for “using violence” and disallows selling grinded shit as food.. capitalism doesn’t work without rules, period!

It’s as per the very Adam Smith! Libertarianism is absolutely divorced from reality.

Bad food causes actual physical harm to people. This is violence. Bringing in state violence to prevent this actual physical harm makes all the sense in the world.

Making a choice to buy a shitty phone with a glued in battery is not being harmed. There's no violence being done in this context. And there's no coercion involved.

As for, "What violence?", how do you think laws are enforced? I hope this helps you better understand my "stupid take".

Ok, let’s look at another example: gambling being illegal for kids. There is no physical harm being done in any way here, yet the “bad, evil EU” disallows it.

And sure, there is the enforcement part of each governing agency. Calling it “violence” is just click-bait headline level nonsense.

There are many regulations for minors that could never be applied to adults. Minors are not citizens with full rights; their activities are decided by their guardians and laws regulated minors infringe upon this lack of rights more often than not. That said, many governments and the DSM 5 do push the idea that gambling somehow invokes a lack of agency and control for the individual. In fact gambling disorder is the only medically recognized behavioral addiction (though it shouldn't be, this old wives tale is grandfathered in). It shows just how dangerous this kind of "they can't help themselves" thinking is in justifying bad laws that hurt people.

Pretending that laws aren't enforced with physical force just because it is abstracted away from your daily life and experience doesn't change that it is violence. The use of physical force is the one thing governments have a monopoly over and it is what makes them governments.

But it is bad for people... How can you not see that the government is protecting them from having to buy a new phone earlier, and the environment from easier separation of the different components? If it is a rule for all companies, it doesn't matter either way, economically speaking.

Your implicit assumption here, a very dangerous one, is that people cannot make their own choices and need coercion backed by government violence to make the right choices of phone to buy.

I acknowledge that shitty phones are shitty phones. That's why I personally have never and will not buy one. Other people's choices to buy shitty phones does not justify bringing in the government no matter how much it reduces waste. I'd love if people made that choice themselves but having the government force it is quite evil.

The people, themselves, are the ones electing EU officials and passing these regulations.

You are the one who is bringing "violence" up. Telling people that there are standards they have to abide by before you will be willing to associate with them - before the EU, made up of multiple institutions which are voted by and represent its citizens, will allow a certain kind of devices to be sold on its market - is not violence.

I have no idea how it could ever be considered "violence", given the fact that we are not talking about a law against human people - with or without volition - but against goods.

Was this comment written by an LLM?

You know those of us in the EU elect these people who write these laws, right? And there’s public consultations and shit?

What percent of phones sold in the EU last year had user replace batteries?

It seems like revealed preference is for devices without replaceable batteries.

No, it was just less important than choosing the OS. When everything is equal, of course people prefer replaceable batteries. This rule makes all phones equal, because it is obligatory.

Samsung makes Android phones with replaceable batteries - are those the leading Android phones in the EU? How is this feature so important the government must mandate it be present in all phones, yet not the most important feature when buying a new phone?

I recently replaced the battery in a Pixel 4. Definitely not latest-and-greatest, but also still just about getting feature updates. I think the biggest challenge for most people would be confidence, rather than it being intrinsically difficult.

iFixit sold me a kit with all the necessary (OEM) parts and (iFixit) tools, and they have a web page with sufficiently-detailed instructions.

Last time I changed a battery in a phone I paid apple $69 and walked the mall for an hour. Pretty painless.

Last time I changed a battery in a phone I used my fingernail to pop the back cover out and swapped an empty battery with a fully charged one in about 30 seconds.

That (or the independent retailer equivalent, and for an Android) was plan A, but over a year after formulating that plan, it hadn't actually happened. The kit was a smidge cheaper, and honestly I quite enjoyed doing it myself.

As a bonus, I still have the tools.

The pixel 4 reached EOL earlier this year, you should upgrade.

The only device I've ever seen firsthand that had its battery swollen was a Macbook. Battery was glued of course so replacement wasn't totally easy.

In the last decade and a half I have owned 4 phones total and I have yet to have one that has such a poor battery that it has needed the battery replaced before the phone itself was essentially obsolete. I don't know if maybe other people just use their phone so much more than me... Mine sits here on my desks and I look at it for notifications every now and then, maybe send a text... Thats it. Take a phone call once every few days.

My phone is a Pixel 2 from 2018. The battery lasts nearly 2 days without charging, easily. If I am about to go out and use it heavily on maps or GPS... I charge it, and I get an evening's use out of it still easily.

Maybe I'm just not the normal user. But for these people running batteries dead more than once a day and needed to replace a battery once every 2 years... I don't get it.

And this is a level of regulation that I don't think will actually do much to save batteries from landfills.

Meanwhile in Spain there single-use vape pens for sale in every Tabac shop that have small lithium ion cells in them, and people everywhere are literally buying and tossing those cells in the trash every goddamn day. I find them laying on sidewalks all the time. This is still allowed, but a battery tightly sealed in a phone that should last a normal person years is a problem?

So, you don't use your phone, and it doesn't run out of battery. Interesting observation.

The revelation here isn't that I don't understand batteries, it's that I don't understand how people use their phones...

I the last 5 years alone I've replaced batteries in:

- Pixel 4, more than doubling it's battery life

- Pixel 2 XL making it usable again

- One Plus 6 almost doubling it's battery life

So clearly mileage will vary.

No more waterproof phones I guess. This saddens me. I find it very useful when driving my bike outdoors with it being mounted to my bike.

Yeah, I honestly don't see the advantage.

What I would ask is that companies that create phones without replaceable batteries, should provide replacement by a reasonable fee (let's say no more than 9% the cost of the phone).

The problem that these bills are trying to solve isn't just consumer, it's End of Life management at the recycler level. Glued-in, Li-ion batteries over the years have caused so much headache for ewaste processors. Apple has improved over the years with their glue tabs, but it's still a big problem in the market as a whole.

https://www.popsci.com/energy/lithium-ion-batteries-recyclin... https://www.waste360.com/business/li-ion-battery-fires-unfai...

That is why I said that companies should provide a reasonably priced battery exchange program.

Contrary to how this bill is usually portrayed in the news, this bill allows for using screws and gaskets. Those are enough to make a phone waterproof. Lots of other waterproof equipment achieves Ip68 with only screws and gaskets. I don't see why phones should be any different.

No. There are already phones that can do this. For example the Samsung Xcover 5.

The Samsung Galaxy S5 has a replaceable battery and was waterproof, so they are not mutually exclusive options.

You have that little confidence that engineers can make things waterproof? all it takes is a sealed environment with a gasket and a bunch of screws. Making "clip in" backs that are waterproof is a challenge, but there's no reason that has to be the norm, screws have worked for centuries and don't break nearly as often as clips

You can still have a waterproof phone with replaceable battery through the revolutionary technology of gaskets ;-) There were several models like that already before manufacturers figured out it's cheaper to glue them

Price matters to consumers. If phones become more expensive because of this virtue signalling regulation it will be killed. The EU parliament is still a democracy.

Fairphone have replaceable everything and is IP54 rated [0], making it weather proof

[0]https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/103775548405...

Replaceable vs long-lasting batteries is not quite equivalent. You can have two replaceable batteries as easy backup.

I prefer replaceable.

If only apps could run on old smartphone so we don't have to change phone every 2 to 4 years.

Good luck using popular apps with an old phone, it's DESIGNED to run slower because Google constantly upgrades the android api, which constantly makes phones obsolete.

This is an excellent example of wirth law.

Iphone battery is already pretty close to replaceable by this law.

You need a common tool to get in (trident screwdriver is available in most DIY shops), then glue tabs can be pried by hand.

Doable for layman? Well, some people are afraid of opening up a device in any way. How do we (or, rather, lawyers) draw a line?

iFixit disagrees: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPhone+14+Battery+Replacement/1...

Hairdryer, suction anti-clamp, pick that must NOT be inserted more than 3mm or you break the device, both pentalobe and triwing security screws (screw types that only exist to stop users from opening things), numerous fragile cables that must be disconnected, and of course a glued in exposed cell battery.

I don't think we have to worry about this being classified as easily user replaceable with basic tools.

> then glue tabs can be pried by hand.

There should be no reason to use glue for batteries. Unnecessary hazard that can easily lead to house fire if you have to use force of a thermal source to remove the glue.

If you discharge the battery first it won’t catch on fire if you puncture or overheat it.. so, don’t replace a fully charged battery and you should be fine.

Yes. But you don't expect everyone to do that, when you think about safety. You assume the worst, not the best.

If we can’t expect people to be safe with accessing batteries we should make the batteries less accessible, not more accessible.

People know not to puncture a battery. But if you set it up to force them to apply force to a battery, some batteries are going to get punctured.

Which is the exact point of this law: the batteries should be designed to be easily replaceable.

> accessing batteries we should make the batteries less accessible

or use screws to secure batteries, not glue, you know.

> Doable for layman? Well, some people are afraid of opening up a device in any way. How do we (or, rather, lawyers) draw a line?

Start by not requiring a screwdriver in the process of changing batteries. I remember the early days of Samsung/Android phones where you only needed to pry open the back cover using your nail and the battery was easily taken out.

It's a small change but the layman will be way less afraid.

My experience was that those kinds of back covers would always come loose over time and/or after they were removed a few times they never fit properly again.

Maybe it depends on how they're made.

My Galaxy S5's cover never had any issues, even after a few months with a bulging battery. It stayed in place no problem, and the phone was still waterproof enough to not care at all about being in the pouring rain on a motorcycle for several hours at a time.

Those phones were not water resistant. While maybe not important to some, to others it is

The Galaxy S5 was IP67 rated. The back cover could be opened with just a fingernail.

Only if the rubber port was on the port. Not exactly engineering excellence.

Right. Although there wasn't any cover on the headphones jack, and apparently newer phones can have waterproof open ports.

Engineering excellence or not, the fact is that that old phone was both weatherproof and had an easily replaceable battery.

Don’t you think “only if the port was covered” and if the battery and the cover were put back just right are big caveats?

I don't know what you mean by "just right" for the cover. I just clipped it back on, without taking any special precautions, and it seemed fine under heavy rain. Granted, I didn't try throwing it in a pool, though, so I don't know if it would have survived that.

Furthermore, the port cover was just in the way if I didn't clip it back in, so I always did, and, as above, never had any issue.

While I agree that I much prefer not having an USB port cover, I think that's pretty much a solved issue, seeing how my iphone 7 didn't have one and survived just fine in a downpour.

My point is that it is absolutely possible to have an easily replaceable battery while keeping the phone waterproof.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-s5-smart...

> After every charge and boot sequence, the phone reminds the user to preserve the IP67 rating by securing the back cover and making sure the USB flap is closed. This reminder gets old fast, but is necessary considering how rushed and absentminded people can be

On top of that, to get a reputable battery for it that includes NFC support (because the NFC was built into the battery) was not that much cheaper than just taking an iPhone to an authorized dealer for replacement.

> > After every charge and boot sequence, the phone reminds the user to preserve the IP67 rating by securing the back cover and making sure the USB flap is closed. This reminder gets old fast, but is necessary considering how rushed and absentminded people can be

So because some people are absent-minded and don't pay attention to what they do (and it's not like you need to take off the cover every day and twice on Sunday), we should all suffer the consequences? Don't quite like that mindset.

> On top of that, to get a reputable battery for it that includes NFC support (because the NFC was built into the battery) was not that much cheaper than just taking an iPhone to an authorized dealer for replacement.

This is correct. A Samsung battery from a reputable store in France cost approximately the same as a replacement for my iPhone 7. Maybe a bit more, accounting for inflation.

But the experience of having my iPhone battery replaced was ridiculously bad. I had an appointment for the service, booked through the Apple website for a "certified" repair shop. Still had to wait in line for 30 minutes before I could drop off my phone. They required me to give them the phone's password for some reason, which required me to remove apple pay and whatnot from the phone before going into the store, then put it back on once I had my phone back. After taking in the phone for repair, they figured it would take about 6 hours, so they'd let me know it was done by... SMS. Right. So, I asked them to give me a time when they'd be sure it'd be done, since my phone would be with them. I come back at the agreed time, to wait for another 20 minutes in line.

The Samsung experience was walk in the store, ask the attendant where their batteries were, wait 5 minutes for him to grab it from stock (it wasn't a current model anymore at that time), go to the cashier, pay, pop the cover, switch batteries, put cover back, done.

So yeah, the issue is absolutely not one of price, but of convenience. Note that I could have bought two batteries and had a spare one when needed on my motorbike trips, instead of carrying an external battery pack or whatever.

> So because some people are absent-minded and don't pay attention to what they do (and it's not like you need to take off the cover every day and twice on Sunday), we should all suffer the consequences? Don't quite like that mindset.

So people aren’t intelligent enough to choose phones with replaceable batteries and the EU should regulate it.

But people should be intelligent enough to deal with badly designed phones that if you don’t do things just right you lose water resistance?

The issue is that the choice is vanishing, and the point of this thread is that it's likely not because of valid technical reasons (you could already get slim and waterproof with a removable back several years ago).

Honest question: do you know of any high-end phone with a replaceable battery? I know iphones don't have them, the Galaxy S line has lost it starting with the 6. The Asus Zenfone doesn't have it. Sonys don't. One Plus doesn't. I'm not famialiar with lower-end models, but I know the Galaxy A33 doesn't have a removable battery either.

And this is also spreading to other electronics, such as laptops. My 2013 MBP had a glued battery. I was able to change it after like 20 minutes of scraping that crap. That laptop was thicker than my current "ultrabook" which has a screwed battery pack (though it says it's not user replaceable - since it's new I didn't try to take it out yet, so I may be in for a surprise). There was ample space in the MBP for a bunch of screws under the back cover, and it wouldn't have interfered with aesthetics or anything else.

That’s just the thing, there are valid technical reasons.

Apple alone sells 200 million phones a year. If even five percent of people don’t secure the battery properly or the battery cover isn’t reliable after repeated removal - which happen to older phones back in the day - it affects a lot of people.

There weren’t that many reports in the west for instance about the physical home button being unreliable. But that did become a problem in places like China where older iPhones are bought and sold in the refurb market to a point where they were turning on accessibility options to have a soft home button on the screen to keep wear and tear down on the home button.

Can you imagine how much less reliable at scale a physical removable battery door will be over the five or six year possible lifetime of an iPhone? Apple claims to have over 1 billion iPhones in use.

And that’s an exaggeration. Apple has historically provided OS updates for five years and the 2013 iPhone 5s got a security update earlier this year.

I am a lot more sympathetic to wanting a replaceable battery in a laptop. While I can just click on “backup” of my iPhone, erase it before I take it in for service and restore it back, that isn’t so simple with a computer.

Heck when my work MacBook battery needs replacing, I have no idea what they are going to do since we have a four year replacement cycle. Will they ship me a replacement MacBook temporarily?

> Can you imagine how much less reliable at scale a physical removable battery door will be over the five or six year possible lifetime of an iPhone? Apple claims to have over 1 billion iPhones in use.

I can't, since my GS5 lived 5 years with me before I lost it, and never had any issue with water. It's not obvious to me that this is automatically an ureliable setup.

You're also talking about the refurbished marked. I actually looked at buying such an iphone and refrained, since being water-resistant is important to me because I actually do get my phone drenched somewhat regularly. None of the shops guaranteed the water resistance.

I don't doubt some phone manufacturers can and will choose to cheap out on the quality of components or manufacture so that their phone will lose water resistance if you look at it the wrong way.

But that doesn't mean it's impossible to do right, just as not having a user-replaceable battery doesn't guarantee that it won't take water.

My sealed with non-user replaceable battery iphone developed a bulge and became open to the elements when the screen started separating from the body. And it didn't just pop right out all of a sudden, the seals probably started decaying much before I noticed the screen being weird. Lucky for me, I wasn't caught in the rain during that time.

I can totally live with an alert that reminds me once in a blue moon to check that my back cover is well installed. I don't reboot my phone every day. The iPhone never reminded me to check whether, maybe, the screen was separating.

> with me before I lost it, and never had any issue with water. It's not obvious to me that this is automatically an ureliable setup

Samsung itself thought that it was enough of an issue to have constant warnings.

Now multiply your anecdote by 1.5 billion - the number of active iPhones in existence. What are the chances that 5% won’t encounter an issue over 5 years with more moving pieces if something as simple as a physical home button had reliability issues over the years?

> Those phones were not water resistant.

And it's 10 years later in 2023. If Apple/other big companies want to they can do R&D and come up with waterproof+dustptoof solutions.

Let's face it, they don't want to because it sells more phones.

> Start by not requiring a screwdriver in the process of changing batteries.

Thats not actually part of the law though, is it?

That’s not part of the law, and it absolutely shouldn’t be.

> Start by not requiring a screwdriver in the process of changing batteries. I remember the early days of Samsung/Android phones where you only needed to pry open the back cover using your nail and the battery was easily taken out

God no. With those designs you lose so much capacity to the extra stuff required to support it.

You effectively need two backs—one to cover the battery and another to cover the components inside. You also largely lose the ability to do non-rectangular/multi-cell batteries, which is critical to maximising capacity in many modern phones.

It will be left at the judge's appreciations if it ever come to courts.

Tbh, i can only see things go to trial if a consumer association (iFixit) deems the law not followed, and knowing consumer associations, they will first talk to and advice the offending company before going to courts.

Those tabs are not that easy to pull by hand. Very easy to break and then you're forced to pry out the battery, which is less safe than if it didn't need prying.

I know the glue is unnecessary because every time I've replaced a battery, I didn't glue the new one back in, and my phone performed fine.

Your last sentence is odd because obviously the glue isn’t something like thermal paste. It won’t affect performance.

The glue is there for structural reasons. Adhesion allows better rigidity by making use of the structure around it.

By performed fine, I mean it didn't cave in on itself and the battery did not disconnect.

> How do we (or, rather, lawyers) draw a line?

That’s literally what courts do.

People understand screws and covers, use screws and covers. The gluing is done because it's cheap and easily done on mass production scales. When people have to start prying apart glued together parts they get nervous and stop, especially on a $1200 phone.

I'm all for pro-consumer decisions like this but for me it seems like there is a choice to be made. It's either user-replaceable batteries or waterproof smartphones.

Note that wireless headphone batteries and spare parts should also be regulated.

I don’t know. I already have to click cookie buttons on every goddamn web site I visit, it’s annoying as hell. These EU initiatives can be a bit pointless.

Battery needs to be replaced like once every 2-3 years. Why change the device design to make battery user-replaceable when I can bring it to the repair shop?

They cookie banners are the fault of the website owners. They did this on purpose so the users would blame the laws.

Could have simple valued the Do-Not-Track flag but they didn't want to.

If thats true then their competitors will gladly not ask for permission and enjoy higher user satisfaction and the banners will disappear due to that long term.

But we all know thats bullshit and the law actually did cause this.

It’s almost like “the user will choose the best product” is bullshit. It has never been true, people are not rational agents, otherwise marketing wouldn’t work at all.

The best we have is to define small markets with strict regulations - within that some competition can happen that will tend to raise better products.

Especially since it's not like there is a manufacturer for every cell of the feature matrix. Every single option has its downsides, and the optimal option most likely doesn't exist.

All these sites make money from tracking, if they back out once the customers would knew they get screwed.

And not all websites have banners

Because most people won't:

- it's expensive

- it takes their phone away

If changing the battery is a one hour cheap deal, a lot more people may do it.

And I am very happy about those EU initiatives: this way I know what sites are tracking me and how much. This tells me which sites values annoying me with their banner so they can sell my data.

Have you noticed there is no banner on Hacker news despite the fact that:

- they serve in Europe

- they use cookies

That's because it's not about cookies, and the banner is only for privacy abusers.

> Because most people won't:

> - it's expensive

> - it takes their phone away

Ok, people don’t go to shops to replace battery now? “oh, it’s 99$ to replace the battery? I’d rather pay 1000$ for a new iPhone!” That’s a bit silly.

Most people don't have a $1000 iphone, which is even more problematic, because if you have a cheaper $3-400 phone, that $99 replacement would be very expensive.

Exactly this! I keep seeing this nonsense that a $70/99 store replacement battery is a great cheap deal.

Yeap, only compared to a brand new phone. When you have a cheap iPhone from 5 years ago and you compare the price of a battery replacement to the actual price of your phone it quickly become obnoxiously expensive.

Expensive? It’s like 50-70€ to swap an iPhone battery and you get a warranty for the battery.

There’s no way a user-swappable battery will be cheaper than that.

Back when phones had replaceable batteries they were nowhere near 50-70€. Half that, if that much.

They were also really tiny capacity-wise.

There you go. Half the price https://www.ifixit.com/products/iphone-8-replacement-battery...

In the US having a battery replaced at a shop is cheap and you can probably find a place that will do it in less than an hour. There are a few nationwide chains of third-parties that do it, plus numerous independent local repair places.

As far as HN goes it is not clear whether or not they are covered by GDPR. Yes, the site is viewable in Europe and people there can make accounts. But that's not sufficient.

GDPR asserts extraterritorial jurisdiction when you are either (1) offering goods and services in the Union or (2) monitoring the behavior of data subjects in the Union that takes place in the Union.

One of the recitals clarifies that the mere availability of a site to Europeans does not necessarily mean it is offering goods and services in the Union. The site has to envisage serving people in the Union.

You are probably the first poster I’ve seen in here who “gets it” about the cookie banners

If you aren’t being a bastard, you don’t need to show me a banner.

game changer

"I don't care about cookies"

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...

Better gamechanger: https://consentomatic.au.dk/

I don't care about cookies takes a very secondary approach to tracking privacy - if it can't figure out the cookie form, it'll just agree to whatever is being asked of it.

Consent-O-Matic will leave the window up if it can't figure it out so you can reject them yourself.

Edit: IDCAC also has been bought by notorious crapware antivirus scanner manufacturer Avast, so that's another reason to stay away from it.

> Why change the device design to make battery user-replaceable when I can bring it to the repair shop?

You'd rather go to a repair shop and pay a service fee for something that you can probably do in a couple of minutes at home?

>You'd rather go to a repair shop and pay a service fee for something that you can probably do in a couple of minutes at home?

HN userbase in a nutshell

I think that making battery replaceable by user will affect the phone design. I had a ton of first-wave Android devices back in the day. I don’t remember carrying an extra battery with me. Maybe someone did, but how many of total users?

Another point is that making a phone water-resistant is likely not trivial when you can take the whole back panel away.

My point is: are these dramatic changes worth it when the battery degrades only couple years after purchase?

I've replaced batteries with tools. It's a slab inside the phone and it tends to get somewhat hot, there really aren't that many places to put them, I have a really hard time believing making repairs difficult is not the main reason defining the current standard.

Now, things like bluetooth earphones, those I'm curious about.

Yeah, the waterproofing concerns me. Neither of the examples they brought up in the article had ip67 water resistance, which I consider a bare minimum after water damaging too many cheap phones. The best phones are more water resistant than that. As a meche, you'll always get a better water seal with glue than with screws or snaps. I can see this being a real issue.

Its so much worse in Europe too. Didnt realize until I traveled there after this regulation.

I want to be able to change the battery far more often - possibly every 8 hours if I'm using the phone a lot during an off-road adventure or other adventure where having a charging device isn't a great solution. When I used to travel a lot I had a smartphone with a replaceable battery and I carried several replacement batteries. Going from 5% battery life to 100% battery life in the few seconds it takes to change the battery was a very useful thing when I wasn't able to charge the phone easily. And no, battery charging bricks are not convenient. They are way more bulky and take far longer to charge the phone than popping in a fully charged battery.

You will be able to change your Tesla batteries after this as well!

I don't give a rats ass about Tesla or their batteries.

According to the wording of the draft legislation (according to the article):

It also says that spare parts should be available for up to seven years after a phone’s release, and, perhaps most importantly, “the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.”

This means, that basically every phone where you can unscrew the back, disconnect the connector, remove the glue with a pull tab, and put in a new battery, is already compliant. Its basically the same set of steps any corner shop repair tech would do (but its something you could do yourself).

It just states that manufacturers cant interfere with this process, and have to sell the parts to you for 7 years after purchase.

> Battery needs to be replaced like once every 2-3 years.

Having a replaceable battery is a godsend when you're traveling. Changing the battery in my Fairphone 4 takes less than a minute.

I also live in a small village without a repair shop (closest one is probably a 1-2 hour drive away). What a shitty option.

I hope this happens. Making a phone more of an appliance like a washing machine etc. I hope this happens for TVs too since smart TVs are a load of shit just now.

I feel like this will lead to more expensive or bulkier phones (or both!)

i think they want to address the chip shortage (or a possible repetition of the shortage) by extending the life of the smartphones - which doesn't make the smartphone producers happy.

I’d hate to lose waterproof feature on iPhone. For it’ll be dealbreaker.

Submarines are not glued tight, yet they are waterproof.

Much bigger deal for Apple is design. Exposed screws sealing the back cover would give Jony Ive OCD ticks, I'm sure

Submarines are also waaaaaay more expensive. Largely due to all the engineering and quality control that goes into what you’re talking about.

Thankfully, Jony Ive is gone. Though their design has only gotten marginally more practical since.

Every part of your first sentence is inaccurate.

Submarines are glued tight; all the body panels are welded together. They do this because making waterproof riveted joints is hard [0]. Riveted joints would flex and open up, requiring constant maintenance and caulking, and early riveted subs would leak trails of fuel behind them (and significantly into the sub itself!)

Second, submarines aren't even waterproof. There's lots of things that are hard to seal, like the spinning propeller shaft. Submarines have a natural advantage over your phone in this regard: all the water that leaks in can be pumped out.

Under the new regulations, phones can't be glued or welded shut, and there's not much room for a bilge pump in the average modern smartphone.

[0]: https://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?p=1518898

None of that really matters since we have the technology to seal phones now, Apple just chooses not to because it makes engineering, manufacturing, and designed in obsolescence a bit easier for them.

Galaxy S5 was IP67 certified despite having a removable battery.

iPhone users had to wait two additional years to get the same feature.

It's a solved problem - it's just that Apple dragged its feet on it.

And if you had the rubber cover secured tightly covering the ports…

FWIW, my old iPhone 7 started to have a bulging battery. It started pushing on the screen, which started separating from the case. Since I could see the innards, that thing was probably no longer waterproof. I'd have to take it in for service, and I'm not certain that they guarantee its water tightness after a repair.

Contrast this to my Galaxy S5. When the battery started bulging, I changed it with a new one, and I was back to the races.

Bonus points for the whole ordeal taking 5 minutes to go in the store, grab the battery, pay, and replace it. Compared to the circus that was apple's certified repair shop, which didn't quite understand how appointments work, and took 6 hours to replace the battery.

People always bring up the s5 and leave out the part that is only water proof if the cover is over the ports and if you make absolutely sure that the battery cover is on correctly.

Having replaceable batteries doesn't require phones to be built exactly like they were 15 years ago. It's more about the battery being a few easy steps away from being replaced rather than the current situation where you need a bunch of exoteric tools, lots of patience and disassembling about 80% of the phone just to get there. And then requiring even more steps in a potentially dangerous process to unglue it.

And by "easy steps" I mean not necessarily something that anyone could do with their own hands in 10 seconds (like the old phones), but at least something you could do with your own tools (standard COMMON screwdrivers and so on..) at your leisure within 10 minutes without having any prior practice, just following a simple guide. They CAN design something like this that also meets all the size, weight, cost, safety and water proofness characteristics of the current phones. They just don't chose to, either for lack of incentives (our competitors won't do it, why should we?) or just because they want to profit as much as they can on the back of their customers who know no better and has no way defend from this racket.

Why do you say that? There are many devices that are waterproof and have replaceable parts (cameras, watches, ...).

The iphone 14 already fulfills the EU requirements. It is not about “on-the road replacement”, it’s about possibility of replacement.

You won't lose it, it's possible to make phones with removable battery that are IP68: https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_xcover6_pro-11600.ph...

Apple hasn't lost the technology of gaskets, they just chose not to use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com