Zero, zip, nada.
A right to repair law might mandate that any device with a battery also have the battery sold, by the manufacturer, for a reasonable period of time. That gives you a practical right to repair the device by replacing the battery, and it's well-defined.
"User replaceable" is not well defined. Does it mean you need to be able to do this with no tools at all? If not, what tools make it not 'user replaceable'? That no glue is used? Solder?
My watch is literally a cell phone, and I don't welcome law which might make it bulkier or more awkward, to mollify people who want a plastic hinge to pop out their smartphone battery and swap in a new one in the field.
The battery in my smartphone (and watch!) can be replaced by the manufacturer. Right-to-repair is about making sure that the owner of a device can do things themselves or from a third party, without licensing from the manufacturer: so selling consumable parts to all comers, providing some manuals maybe. It is not about whether you have the manual dexterity or special tooling to perform the replacement! If you want to optimize around that part being very easy, buy a product where it is, like the Dragonbox Pyra.
A battery is a consumable and should be user-replaceable. It might be a bit fiddly, with tiny screws and fragile connectors, but shouldn't require heat guns and chemicals to remove adhesives...
(And if we're about to replace billions of vehicles with EVs, perhaps consuming the entire planet's supply of lithium, we should be thinking very carefully about how those batteries will be constructed, replaced, reused, recycled - and ensuring that we don't let capitalism create EVs that after a few years are almost as disposable as few-year-old iPhones...)
Louis does not want to impede on Apple's ability to make devices smaller or more compact, as that is what the vast majority of customers prefer. Louis, as an independent repairman, has spent 10s of thousands of dollars on the appropriate tools to repair these devices at an incredibly small scale. The problem comes when he needs to buy a replacement part he is physically unable to get the part. Apple, in some cases, will forbid the supplier from selling the part to anyone but Apple.
It's not a question of difficulty. Louis is equipped with every tool and all the time of the world, but Apple is directly impeding his ability to repair customer devices by refusing him access to the parts. That is in large part what his bill aims to change - not to force Apple to go back to 90s style clip on batteries.
The vast majority of apple customers have Stockholm syndrome, or at least don't know what they're missing.
The first gen MacBook pro had a battery that just popped out and could be replaced. It extended the life of the computer, and was practical because you could carry an extra battery for long trips. You could say their customer wanted to lose the battery, but I doubt that's true. More likely, people who dislike the user hostile design stop being customers.
There is some nuance you are missing here. Mandating some design decisions, such as "user replaceable batteries" limits the products that make be made and sold and unfairly adversely affects users with different priorities (such as water proofness, durability or bulk.)
However, there are design decisions that we should outlaw because they impose an unreasonable burden on repairability. I think it is reasonable to prohibit companies from attempting to detect non-OEM or refurbished components and bricking devices. I think it is also reasonable to prohibit companies from usong IP laws to legally attack refurbished component suppliers and third party repair services.
I think pressure to make devices more repairable could he accomplished by mandatinf inclusion of standardized repairabilitu scores so the consumera have better information available when making purchasinf decisions.
I think these were just typos, but my initial assumption was that a cipher was embedded in this text for a minute.
My guess is people just want to be able to take their device to a repair shop and have the battery replaced.
My biggest gripe is that you cannot find OEM batteries from the manufacturer. The batteries I have replaced (through some effort) have been generally a disappointment. Particularly laptop batteries. The replacement market for laptop batteries is a scam.
A lesser extreme is the southbridge/northbridge and how CPUs are becoming SoCs. If that fails, you pretty much have to buy a new CPU, when previously you could technically replace it if you wanted. Would have such a version of the R2R law prevented this?
There is obviously that "loophole" where a company can still deliberately make a product difficult or impossible to repair just by virtue of that product's design. However, if the law is implemented, any covered devices that can be repaired, regardless of how hard it is to repair, will be repairable by third parties without having to deal with legal gray areas just to be able to acquire tools, parts, and information that they will need to do those repairs.
A better solution is that the manufacturer must provide battery replacement services at a cost specified at the time of purchase and only allowed to increase at the rate of inflation.
Acceptable, why turn an entire device into ewaste for a single component dying, especially one with a known limited service life, like a battery.
10 year warranties minimum on all electronics. Regardless of size and fragility. Any electronic device that can't last 10 years in service is unnecessarily contributing to ewaste and should not be allowed.
User replaceable batteries to avoid using battery life decay as a means to drive sells of "new" versions, something that causes e-waste.
To be honest, don't stop at batteries. Any component in a device that can not last 10 years while retaining atleast 75% of its "ability" must be user serviceable, no exceptions.
User serviceable is defined as any service a user can perform where the OEM will replace the device at no charge (not even shipping) if the device breaks during or because of the user servicing it during normal warranty.
Replacing a device under warranty resets the 10 year timer. To discourage OEMs halfassing it for 5 years and hoping for low warranty claims.
We can not allow companies to treat the earth like a garbage can.
Probably Airpods thrown away every 2 years for 50 years is less ewaste than a single laptop, and those don't last 50 years.
So does banning Airpod-like devices really make sense as a policy to minimise total ewaste?
If you want to have the ability to purchase ten year warrantied devices, that is a separate issue. And no one, no one, is going to 'reset' your ten year warranty at the time of repair/replacement. Never going to happen.
They’re easily the longest lasting in ear headphones I’ve used.
Of course some vendors didn't like that and put chips on their batteries.
Apple batteries are typically much smaller than what is in androids, because their chips are less power hungry… same goes for Tesla, their cars are more efficient… so standard battery packs would harm their overall product
Don’t buy a device with a non replaceable battery if you don’t want one… why do you need the government for that?