Or DRM. Do you want battery DRM?
The Right-to-Repair discussion often ignores a key problem companies have: figuring out whether a device is under warranty (i.e. whether they’re obligated to repair the device for free) when it’s submitted for repair.
Some repairs make themselves obvious, and so make the removal of warranty obligation obvious. Other repairs—like third-party battery replacements, done following the Apple process for repair and with Apple OEM components—make the warranty status of the device illegible. If the phone accepted a new Apple OEM battery without saying anything about it, the user might be misled into thinking that the device is still under warranty. But it’s not. It’s been repaired by a non-authorized third-party. It’s no longer Apple’s fault if the device breaks, because that third party may have screwed things up inside the device in any number of ways.
This is, in a sense, a “chain of trust” thing. It’s the same reason Chromebooks have that on-boot warning in development mode. The user needs to be aware that the chain of trust between the OEM and the end-user has been broken; and that, when that happens, anything may potentially have been done to the device.
That’s not to argue against Right-to-Repair. Non-authorized third-party repair shops should have every right to operate as businesses, and end-users should have every right to do business with them. But Apple also should have every right to warn users that the chain of trust has been broken—because it has. The user knowingly broke it themselves! (And, of course, Apple shouldn’t have the right to misconstrue breaking the chain of trust as anything more than that. The battery health is unknown because it’s not an Apple-certified repair, certainly; but that doesn’t mean that the battery is bad, and it would be anti-competitive to claim that.)
I get where you are coming from but this isn't so cut and dried, as incompetent repairs are certainly capable of damaging or destroying other components. Someone I know once unknowingly messed up an antenna in the process of replacing a phone battery with an after market one, which caused all sorts of odd and intermittent symptoms with communication issues. Why should a manufacturer be expected to deal with that under warranty?
Part of the problem with consumer electronics is that they aren't really particularly designed to be serviceable, let alone user-serviceable. So it's not like a car manufacturer saying they'll refuse to warranty a rear shock because you changed your own oil or whatever.
I'm a strong supporter of right-to-repair, but I'm not convinced that should extend to forcing user serviceable designs where there is an actual design tradeoff. On the other hand this is pretty hard to prove - maybe all you can do is go after user-hostile design changes that serve no other purpose.
sigh
If such "basic math" exists, can someone please point me to it? Estimating capacity on a fully known, completely characterized cell is the bane of my existence.
Basic math that can help estimate approximate capacity of an unknown replacement battery- that's a billion dollar startup worthy technology right there.
As long as the chemistry is known it should hold true, sure, you'll get some variation based on load but you should be able to account for that pretty with some testing or careful probing at minimal current draw.
Accubattery seems to give a pretty good approximation using just this information at least, would definitely be sufficient for detecting cells that were fraudulent by more than 10-20%. If you want higher accuracy, yeah I'm sure things could get extremely involved, but many of the fraudulent batteries are 25-50% of the expected capacity.
If only it were that simple. In the real world, when you have a load that’s drawing from the battery, the voltage across the terminals will be different from the voltage on an open circuit for the same battery at the “battery level” (state of charge is the commonly used term)
To make matters worse, the life of the battery remaining at any point depends upon the current drawn from it. If you were to draw a smaller current, it’ll last longer - and this is purely because batteries are weird and has nothing to do with the charge curve. For something like a LED flashlight that always draws the same current - this isn’t a problem. A modern smartphone on the other hand is essentially unpredictable.
Then you have the numerical problem with integrating current over time - the errors add up over time too! Now you have to measure the current out of the battery with a high sampling rate with a great adc - it’s a massive power draw. Most modern fuel gauge ICs are moving away from measuring current because of all the trouble with cumulative errors.
I can go on for a while longer, but I think you get the picture.
> Accubattery seems to give a pretty good approximation using just this information at least, would definitely be sufficient for detecting cells that were fraudulent by more than 10-20%
Accubattery can afford to monitor multiple charge and discharge cycles before converging on a battery model. A smartphone needs to know what battery it has when you plug in your newly replaced battery to charge it for the very first time to ensure it doesn’t become a fire or safety hazard. Similar concerns with discharging a battery. Look up the exploding Samsung Galaxy note 7 for an example of how serious this can be.
> As long as the chemistry is known it should hold true, sure, you'll get some variation based on load but you should be able to account for that pretty with some testing or careful probing at minimal current draw.
If only it were this easy. I’ve had battery vendors - the people who make this stuff - give me specs on charging that battery that would kill the battery in 250 charge cycles.
It’s a very bizarre field to work in - many times, you can get away with very crude approximations and no one can tell the difference. But once in a while, a very very tiny deviation from the spec will give you exploding devices and have your product be announced as a safety hazard in every flight before take off (yay! free publicity...)
The challenge is that you never know when you can get away with something and when 1 in a million devices will explode on a tech journalist/reporter/reviewer.
With batteries, esp with Lithium Ion cells, nobody is going to take chances with approximations.
This is just plain silly, even Apple's current implementation doesn't prevent it charging the battery even if you plugged a garbage one in. Indeed they have the very same luxury of monitoring many charge cycles.
Immediately rejecting the battery and refusing to charge doesn't seem to be an implementation any phone manufacturer today has chosen.