I like my phone thin and sturdy and I have no interest in replacing batteries myself.
Laptop manufacturers have been saying that for years, and look at the Framework.
I returned a M1 Macbook Air to get the Framework instead, so essentially, I've now paid 50% more to get a laptop with almost infinitely worse battery life when idle and 3-4x worse battery life in use. It's also slower, heavier, thicker, and has a screen resolution that a lot of apps don't know how to use well.
At this rate, I better be able to replace the battery because I'm having to do a full charge/discharge cycle multiple times a day if I'm not just constantly leaving it plugged in.
I love the idea of it in theory, but it's essentially a worse laptop than even the decade-old Apple laptops that did have replaceable batteries.
At least unless you put a big glaring "This laptop has 3 hours battery life" on the purchase page. Instead, they just repeatedly say how many Watts the battery holds and leaves you to assume that it's such a big number that it'll have great battery life.
The Framework and M1 Macbook Air weight the same at 1.3 kg, and are both 16 mm thick, according to the specs that I can find. Did it really _seem_ thicker and heavier to you?
Height: 0.16–0.63 inch (0.41–1.61 cm)
So they're the same thickness at their thickest point, but I'd guess that the Air has much less of the laptop at that thickness. I'd be curious about a volumetric comparison.
In the end, I wasn't even trying to say that the battery size mattered. If anything, the fact that it's a bigger battery almost makes it worse. They crammed more battery in and it's still a drastically worse user experience when it comes to everything about the battery.
Some of this is definitely because they're having to buy worse parts to try to make sure they're replaceable, and maybe that would improve if more places made parts for it. Maybe I could upgrade to a more efficient CPU/Mobo in the future, or a better battery, but then what do I do with the old one? I'm still contributing to e-waste.
And you can get comparable results in Linux, but you need to tweak it yourself at the moment.
The ports are great - I love that about the Framework, but having an HDMI port only matters so much if the battery is so bad you can't even show a fully movie on a TV with it not plugged in to power (and with a fairly beefy power transformer at that.)
I'm not arguing the Framework isn't more powerful on paper, but functionally, I just can barely use it. I was on a trip the other month and walked to a coffee shop in the morning to do some work and lost 20% of my battery charge on the way to the shop with it just in my backpack. Every minute using it I'm aware of how fast it's discharging in a way that literally no other electronic device I've owned in a decade has made me think about it.
Making better designs to allow for easier to replace batteries isn’t crazy hard either, current designs already tend toward that. This proposal seem to only mandate that “users should be able to exchange them with commercially available tools.” so it leaves a pretty wide array of options for the manufacturers. They could probably even make their own custom tools available if this is what it takes yo keep phones thin and sturdy as you want them.
It's important to remind ourselves that the metals in these phones are mined in part by people with very difficult life conditions, often so bad that they die on the job. We ought to be able to repair what they contributed to build instead of asking them to mine yet another pound of metal just so we can save 0.9mm. This will also reduce need for mining, which creates all sorts of pollution.
That answer is going to sound unpopular here, but deep down is how most people feel.
To be candid: in some matters, the regulators should not give a shit about how you want your phone.
Good for EU and their mandates.
And you do realise that no countries have complete democracy? Even Switzerland with their many referendums doesn't put every decision to a democratic vote. Partly for practical and pragmatic reasons, but also because some things are best not decided by the masses.
Or planes would cost slightly less to fly if they were not required to carry safety equipment.
That’s exactly because people like you don’t give a shit and corporations will do anything to save/make a buck that laws and regulations like this have to be made and enforced.
Either that or we come up with laws that keep us competitive without destroying everything around us. I hope that's what Europe will do and I will support regulation that takes a tiny bit of comfort away if it makes us more resilient in the face of climate change and geopolitical difficulties.
Regarding your second point, that's also objectively incorrect. When accidents happen, passengers, especially backseat passengers, become projectiles that cause additional injuries or excess deaths for other occupants. It's not just the dude not wearing a seatbelt dying, it's also the people around them.
Let’s be honest here: This is all of us to some degree. OP is just one of the few that admits it.
Or is your "to some degree" take into accounts degrees so small as to be meaningless?
I’m not sure exactly where we our disagreement lies, but I think it’s a mistake to dismiss small degrees of sentiment as those small degrees manifest as purchase decisions, which collectively manifest as multimillion dollar industries that are supported by those individual actions. Additionally, asserting that someone either cares or doesn’t care and that there’s not some continuum is a false dichotomy.
But we're talking about this line of discussion. Which was sparked by someday saying they didn't care and no one did. I objected to the latter part of that. It's bullshit that no one cares. There are ethical vegans and people who do all kinds of things because of personal responsibility.
Applying the golden rule, so why should anyone give a shit about what you think?
And yes, many, if not most people are selfish cunts in many ways. Myself included.
But that does not make it good. It is something that you, I, and everyone else should be deeply ashamed of.
You could do this #2 screws which are tiny, use 3-6 of them around the edge. Add a rubber gasket. And you have a water proof battery that is replaceable in under 5 minutes with a precision Philips head (aka those little screwdriver heads you get with the multi-head screwdriver kits)
Quite the opposite. I want larger/heavier devices. Make my phone a bit thicker and heavier and sturdier, please. I feel the same about a laptop. I recently got a new laptop, and the flimsiness of high-end machines was a turnoff. The salesman kept saying "but it's only X lbs, so much lighter" as though that was a selling point. But I want strong hinges, large replaceable batteries, etc. I could care less about 3 vs 7 lbs.
It really isn't that hard. Maybe a few extra days of design and development by a team of engineers. If that... Once you come up with your preferred design, it more or less can be replicated to every other similar device.
Still not a problem: The examples upthread of phones from many different manufacturers that had replaceable batteries, headphone jacks, and card readers and were watertight a decade or more ago show that those weeks have already been invested and paid for.