- Waterproofing. Fewer seals means more resistance to water ingress.
- Compact size. Standard battery sizes rarely fit thin or irregular designs.
- Better battery life. An integrated battery can be designed to fill all available spare space in a device.
- Cost. Integrated batteries involve fewer connectors and parts.
- User satisfaction. Users often blame original manufacturers when the problem is actually poor quality 3rd party batteries. This was extremely common back when most laptops had removable batteries.
And why do arguments in favor of removable batteries apply to phones and laptops, but not headphones, vehicles, cameras, etc? Just let people buy the devices they want. There’s no need to have the government force people to use things they dislike.
Both my car and my DSLR have user replaceable batteries. My headphones don't because they are wired.
My point is that users freely choose different types of batteries for different applications. It makes no sense to coerce everyone else into choosing your favorite type of battery.
Where is the choice when all manufacturers arrive at the same conclusion: it's better for profits not to offer replaceable batteries?
The key thing the EU are ruling on here are phones. I replace my phone or laptop battery every 3 years at average! Does it need to be removable for that? Hell no. Sticky tape, glued in I don't care. I will pay apple or whoever to replace it. 30 minutes of labour is fine for this interval!
What pisses me off are the people who are too fucking cheap to pay for a phone battery from the manufacturer but will throw 10x the cost on trivial repairs on a premium car while whining about it.
As far as I can tell, the manufacturers are doing a pretty good job at occassionally setting your phone on fire and exposing your data themselves.
EU should really f**k them hard about this behavior. It's 100% planned obsolescence.
Log the producer of parts is okay but intentionally make them non functional is not.
Most laptops just whine about third party batteries and you can just nuke the vendor battery junk to get rid of it.
As far as I can tell this is not accurate. I want user-serviceable batteries in all devices. Phones might get the most attention because they're the most ubiquitous, but I wish that all LiON batteries were standardized and user serviceable.
History has countless examples of how the market is very bad at accounting for externalities.
People may very well want just a "brick of glass", but regulation comes in and drives innovation when it turns out that selling people what they want in the short term actually needlessly harms society in the long run.
"What the people want" actually has a lot of nuance and variability over different timeframes.
"What harms society" actually has a lot of nuance and variability over different timeframes. I don’t think anybody can define it, actually.
Regulators making nuclear power hugely expensive and activists making it wildly unpopular thus condemning us to burn coal in 2022 quickly come to mind. Or the idiocy of banning plastic straws in the west while the ocean drowns in fishing nets from Asia.
On the other hand a smartphone has pages long list if specs. And users have divergent preferences for those specs.
The market is only able to find a common denominator that makes everyone equally unhappy. In doing so it transfers power to the few manufacturers who now make choices for the users. Even worse, manufacturers copy each other and follow fashion trends.
It is almost impossible to find a phone that has a replaceable battery. It is very hard to find small phones. It is very hard to find phones with headphone jacks. It is very hard to find phones without a punchhole or notch for the camera.
These are all things people desire, but either not strong enough or not enough people or both.
I like the iPhone mini but not enough to sacrifice the flexibility of Android.
I like displays without cutouts, but not enough to sacrifice the 4 years of updates Samsung offers.
Etc. Etc. Etc.
> I like […] but not enough
> I like […] but not enough
Sounds like the market has managed to understand perfectly the things people actually want in a phone versus the ones they are just paying lip service to.
Taking such a long list of specs with wildly contradictory requirements and create compromise products that satisfiy the most is an extremely complex issue and something the market is uniquely suited to do - I am not aware of another mechanism that can do that, maybe a future AI.
Headphone jack is a minuscule cost (you still need the DAC for the speakers).
There are now magnetically attached Bluetooth devices that provide a headphone jack to an iPhone and make twice as thick.
This showcases perfectly that there is a market for an iPhone with a jack, but Apple has the power to decide for everyone.
A user has the options:
- use an old phone(for how long?)
- sacrifice the jack and stay on iOS (give up)
- sacrifice iOS, repurchase all apps (are they available? alternatives?) and other purchases, and find some phone that still has it (gradually all flagships other than Sony dropped it)
This is not a free market, it is a market with plenty of obstacles to entry (some natural some imposed).
And the following of fashion trends (mostly follow Apple) make the situation doubly toxic.
In a captive market it is sufficient for one player to demonstrate the market will accept a worse offer and other players will follow through.
This may sound like blasphemy, but capitalism is actually not compatible with the free market.
The simple fact is, unrestrained capitalism is ugly.
A company that has become wildly successful will equally hold a lot of financial power. The same company is often likely to engage in lobbying .. exchanging that fiscal power for actual political power.
Without regulations we end up living in world driven by the singular need to make more and more money.
These corporations are not able to factor the good of human kind into their plan because that's got nothing to do with their very reason for existence.
Regulation is the only way we can address this.
The most successful and influential companies of today did not even exist 50 years ago.
> the good of human kind
Please define “the good of human kind”. Be specific.
Soviets did most of their crimes “for the betterment of all mankind”. It’s a wonderful cover.
I've been clear enough in my initial comment. The fact you're asking this second question makes me feel you understand I have a point.
That's been a solved problem for a very, very long time. Even older battery-operated dive watches have user-serviceable batteries. My Tekmagic is user-replaceable. The gaskets and tolerance ranges are well-understood for this sort of thing.
We have IP6X-rated USB connectors. Charge port is a solved problem.
Gaskets and seal plates are gaskets and seal plates, nothing really special about them. Solved problem.
The battery probably won't need to be replaced for a few years, we aren't talking a coin cell, we're talking a mini-pouch like what already exists in these watches.
I do work in this industry. It's a solved problem, has been for several decades.
But that's not what will happen. Instead people will have to buy the devices manufacturers force on them.
The problem is that making a modern phone is ridiculously expensive, and not enough customers want removable batteries to make the investment worthwhile. Samsung made phones with removable batteries. Not enough people bought them, so the product line was discontinued.
Apple can’t force you to buy any of their products. Tim Cook can’t send men with guns to your home and put you in a cage. The government can. Anyone who uses that power to force people to make phones with removable batteries is absurdly authoritarian.
>>Anyone who uses that power to force people to make phones with removable batteries is absurdly authoritarian.
Do you think any and all regulations are authoritarian? Governments everywhere, not just in EU, try to legislate based on what's best for the society. As the simplest example, they force manufacturers to limit transmission power to protect users from too much RF exposure - is that authoritarian? Or just a good idea that protects people? What if customers would prefer phones that have a stronger signal, at the potential expense of health consequences?
Similarly, we can decide that it's better for the society if phones have removable batteries, because in theory it will lead to less electronic waste(which affects us all). I don't personally think that's true, I think even with removable batteries people will just buy new phones every 2 years anyway, but I wouldn't describe this move as authoritarian - just misguided.
Could you point me to AAA-battery powered noise cancelling headphones? No bluetooth necessary.
I have a pair from 2014, and I love that as long as I have some spare batteries, I'm never stuck with headphones which I can't use because of low charge, and that I don't have to charge yet another device. That pair has no bluetooth, so power usage is low: one AAA battery for 30-40 hours of use.
When these are dead, I won't find a replacement, because manufacturer does not want me to use the same device for eight years. They want me to have the integrated battery dead in a couple of years and buy a new pair.
You’re demanding that the government force people to make things that they no longer want to make, usually because the product is no longer profitable. Someone has to pay for the workers and factories needed to produce these products. Better it be you than the >99% of taxpayers who don’t want battery-powered wired headphones.
If you're laying up your own prismatic cells from a reel of battery film, why not? If you need a whole separate distribution chain, fuck it, we use the same battery as last year.
So while I am 100% in favor of right of repair, I wonder if the law of unintended consequences will lead to more difficult warranty claims.
Plenty of other devices such as outdoor cameras have replaceable batteries with no warnings.
Shavers have a water proofed interior shelled battery that although usually not replaceable, technically can be since all but 2 flat contacts are sealed.
Designing batteries for said water protection incurs extra cost, and is cheaper to just seal in, ensuring the financial burden of the design failure is on the consumer, this law helps end that practice.
This is some insane ramblings.
Non-replaceable batteries contribute to lowering the price. If the producer can expect to sell more copies of the same product, the price of a single item can be lower.
It's not entirely true, if you don't buy a new phone and simply live with a battery not holding power for more than a day, you get both cheaper price of the phone and a technically working phone.
Of course someone with higher expectations for battery time will have to buy a new phone sooner, but if you can't afford it, it's valuable to you personally regardless.
I now have an ASUS phone, and fully expect the same to happen in several years.
Why did you buy the ASUS phone if you don’t expect to get support for it?
The sad reality is that the experience of running an off-brand phone with an easily-replaceable battery would, long-term, be much worse than running a locked-in flagship that LineageOS builds for.
Device manufacturers see that as a bug, not a feature. They are starting to pair genuine parts to a specific device, which will completely lock us out of 3rd party repair options if we accept and normalize this behavior.
See for example:
- "The iPhone 14 Continues Apple’s Digital Repair Lockdown" by iFixit - https://www.ifixit.com/News/66879/iphone-14-parts-pairing-re...
- "iPhone 14 Pro Programmed To Reject Repair" by Hugh Jeffreys - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2WhU77ihw8
- The long list of Louis Rossmann's rants on the topic
See for example: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apples-self-service-r...
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/21/23079058/apple-self-servi...
The 79-pound repair kit is what Apple uses in its stores to avoid damaging phones that remain under warranty.
If people want to buy a bunch of cheap tools and risk damaging a delicate phone, they shouldn’t expect Apple’s help.
Really though I think what's important is that we should expect help from Apple. It might take EU regulations to force that, but what that really says to me is that as consumer in the US, my bar for what to expect from corporations is set way too low.
My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned -- I want them to (be able to) work on my device in the event that I don't have the tools, skills or patience to do the repair myself.
I don’t see how. The less reliable the device is, the more business they get. The more reliable the device is, the less you spend on repairs. Sure seems like opposing interests.
All that repair shops can do is provide commentary and inform consumers about whether the OEM is serious about repair or whether they're just greenwashing their image and by all accounts, Apple's self-service repair program is about as anemic as their Apple authorized service provider program.
This is clearly not true when we’re discussing user replaceable batteries or the like. It’s a trade off, like most things in engineering.
There are many extra ways things can go wrong by making components such as batteries easy to replace. Poor contacts, oxidation, mechanical breakage, battery compartment doors popping off, ingress of dust and fluids, looser tolerances for the batteries etc.
Nobody discussing this in good faith can deny that these issues exist.
Yeah that definitely sounds more convenient than a removable battery.
You must be strongly opposed to right to repair, since repair shops are incompetent to even replace a battery in your view.
User-replaceable batteries are just the first step. What we should all be pushing towards to reduce waste and emissions is a no-compromise right to repair, with easily accessible parts, tools and schematics.
One commenter said this legislation doesn’t make sense because they get a new phone every three years.
Even if they do, it would reduce demand if the phone continued to have parts and software for someone else to use.
Regardless, it matters what your pricing power is.
For a luxury finished product - you price on what your consumers will bear (with some maximization curve).
For a commodity battery - then maybe.
Though, I'm not sure I follow your logic why this means more batteries will be sold.
Same faulty logic for injket printers. They're extremely cheap so sure, you're "saving money" for a period, but the scales tip after one or two refill ink cartridges
Replaceable batteries will increase e-waste because there will be a lot more broken phones.
That should be up to the user to choose, as it is now.
Contrary to what most phone manufacturers would like you to think, no, devices do not suddenly stop working if they go a week without an update.
For example, my old sony xz3 is a 2018/08 phone with software update discontinued since 2020(?). But there are actually 3party roms that can update it android 12.
Indeed, but the issue is that the phone manufacturer no longer supports the phone and release OS updates. And on Android, you could install unofficial mods to upgrade to a more recent version of the OS, but then some apps (banking apps for example) refuse to work because of... reasons, again making the phone unusable. And in a majority of cases, this has nothing to do with the hardware no longer being capable.