Five year update pledges don't mean much without removable batteries | Hacker News Reader

Five year update pledges don't mean much without removable batteries

androidauthority.com

30 pointscomputerliker13 comments

I think people don't realize that the reason many batteries today aren't removable is because they've been hyperoptomized to have maximum storage capacity and a removal would require significant hardware modifications.

With removable batteries also generally comes reduced battery size. Pick one.

I’d pick removable batteries. For me, if I need hardware capabilities beyond that of a 5 year old phone, I’ll use a laptop.

I also don’t think it’s a binary choice. Given the amount of phones currently in production, some of them could have removable batteries.

From a quick look, roughly 20% of the models on sale do have that.

Razor thinness is a self inflicted design constraint that nobody asked for.

This. If you want more longevity, you can just not drive the batteries so abusively and they'll last quite a long time. There's a setting for this on devices from most major brands now, it basically locks out the top and bottom portions of the battery's voltage range for improved durability and sometimes reduces charge speed a bit. You can also do this manually with an app like Accubattery and raising the Low battery mode setting to kick in at a higher charge level. 10 years of battery service should be practically achievable on consumer electronics

This was definitely true years ago, but in 2022 I'm skeptical. After all this is the exact same argument laptop manufacturers have been making for over a decade now, and framework had diffinitively exposed that as a lie. It seems the same gains should apply to phones, plus phones are larger than ever now anyway.

I pick thicker phone.

My 'thin' phone came with a case anyway.

I'm not even particularly convinced of the tradeoff. My old windows phone the back just pried off so no extra thickness there. You have potential savings from being able to move the sim and SD cards.

Further if it was that 'hyper' optimised, why could I get a phone in the 00s where the battery lasted a week, and today I'm lucky to get a day. There are obviously other considerations than battery life, and I would contend battery life is far down the list.

I'll pick reduced battery size, thanks.

Absolutely, I don't buy anything that has fixed batteries for that exactly that reason.

What phone and laptop do you have today? I am not even aware of current generation laptops with removable batteries at this point. Maybe Lenovo?

The framework laptop has an replacable. But you only need to look at the business notebooks, they usually have replacable batteries.

I have an old Lenovo X220 with removable battery. Unfortunately the mobile carriers shut down the whole US 3G network (or at least around here) with hardly anyone batting an eye, so now my old phones are effectively bricked. I grimaced and got a Moto phone with an integrated battery, but made sure that replacing it is not too hard. Replacement cells are not too expensive, and swapping packs is a matter of taking out a bunch of tiny little screws and putting them back in, but no messing around with insanely fiddly and breakable connectors like (some) iphones have.

I have played with the idea of 3d-printing a replacement back for some other phone, just to be able to use standard batteries (18650 or whatever) in it.

In a laptop I don't mind as long as it's user-replaceable.

I'm typically not going to lug around an extra laptop battery, but I want to be able to replace it when it starts to fail.

I would rather my phone was like that too, but my current one does not have that "feature".

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