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ggreer

There are many advantages to integrated batteries:

- 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.

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>And why do arguments in favor of removable batteries apply to phones and laptops, but not headphones, vehicles, cameras, etc?

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.

That's a nice fantasy, but it would be simply impossible to build a device like my Garmin Descent Mk2 smart watch / dive computer with a user-serviceable battery while still maintaining 100m water resistance. It just can't be done. The extra seals would compromise water resistance and risk a leak when I'm underwater and need it most. And allowing for user-serviceable batteries would inevitably make it physically larger; it's already as large as a wristwatch can reasonably be.

Hey I thought capitalism inspired innovation. So why does nearly every phone being made today is basically a brick of glass you can't open?

Because that innovation is market driven and turns out "brick of glass" is what people want, no matter what you or I or the Brussels bureaucrats say.

> Because that innovation is market driven and turns out "brick of glass" is what people want, no matter what you or I or the Brussels bureaucrats say.

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.

History has even more examples of how planners and regulators are bad at accounting for… reality, really. Or the unexpected creativity of people bent on getting what they want in spite of "well meaning" regulators.

"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.

Quite wrong. The market is efficient at solving simple issues.

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.

> things people desire, but either not strong enough or not enough people or both

> 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.

Getting updates and not having a notch are in no way contradictory requirements.

Maybe, but I would bet they both impact the device cost while their rank on most people's desired characteristics list is not very high.

Non-notched screen is cheaper.

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.

You're incorrect.

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.

> A company that has become wildly successful will equally hold a lot of financial power.

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.

Your first statement makes no difference to what I'm saying.

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.

So since there's basically zero phones with physical keyboards that means no one actually wants them? I guess me and everyone else that have been angry about touchscreen only input for nearly the last decade just "dont want it enough"

"but it would be simply impossible to build a device like my Garmin Descent Mk2 smart watch / dive computer with a user-serviceable battery while still maintaining 100m water resistance. It just can't be done."

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.

Replacing a battery once a year in a laborious process isn't an acceptable comparison for a device who's battery lasts a week at best.

Nobody's saying that they have to be single-use batteries? Just that the rechargeable ones should be replaceable once they reach the end of their lifetime.

No that's completely incorrect. It is not a solved problem. Those Tekmagic devices have very limited functionality and are not real smart watches or fitness trackers like the Garmin Descent series. A smart watch draws more power than a replaceable CR2025 coin cell battery can sustain. (I had a similar old Suunto wristwatch style dive computer with a replaceable battery so I am very familiar with the differences.)

I think the point was not so much to use replaceable coin cells, but introduce a rechargeable lithium battery with a standard interface and form factors that can be adopted by all devices. It doesn't seem impossible on the outset, but no manufacturer has incentive to do so.

That is impossible. A rechargeable lithium battery the size of a CR2025 would be useless for a device which draws so much power. Make the battery any bigger and then you'd have to increase the size of the device, which is already at the limit.

Smart watches already use rechargeable lithium batteries of a few hundred mAh which are tiny enough to fit in the watch. You just need to standardize the interface and form factors across the industry. Again, not suggesting to use CR2025 form factor, you can always define a new one. Most watches in the market already use very similar battery packs, it just isn't standardized.

"No that's completely incorrect. It is not a solved problem."

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.

Agree on all points.

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.

Why should I pay for a battery from the manufacturer instead of other suppliers?

Because won't somebody think of the... Wait, no, I meant to say: "It's dangerous and a third party battery can set your phone on fire!" Also, "it will allow hackers to steal your data". /s

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.

Most issues with batreires in laptops and stuff come from vendor firmware that checks if its a genuine OEM part or not. Same with printer cartridges.

Yep, call pros to replace them every 3 years? Probably okay. Device becomes trash after 3 years because battery is DRM-protected and no longer produced?

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.

Oh I agree with that one entirely. One reason I buy apple shit is last year I got them to stuff a new battery in my old 6s which I bought in 2015 and they did it there and then in store. Second swap it has had.

No thats not the main issue. Most of the issues come from crap batteries not being anywhere near fit for purpose. I’ve swapped out enough (tens of the things) to see that as the average case.

Most laptops just whine about third party batteries and you can just nuke the vendor battery junk to get rid of it.

> Just let people buy the devices they want

But that's not what will happen. Instead people will have to buy the devices manufacturers force on them.

How are manufacturers forcing anything? They are all competing with each other for customers.

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.

I only sorta agree with this argument. It's like saying that headphone jack was removed because not enough people bought phones with them - and that's obviously nonsense, pretty much every manufacturer dropped them within a very short timespan, so there really wasn't any choice in that matter as a consumer. Especially for consumers invested into an ecosystem(apple), manufacturer took away that choice - and the cost of switching away to android to keep the headphone jack was greater than dealing with the inconvenience, so most people didn't do that - but that doesn't mean they wouldn't prefer to keep the port.

>>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.

> How are manufacturers forcing anything?

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.

And I miss the form factor of the iPhone 5. Does that mean Apple should be forced to make devices of that size indefinitely? I don’t think so.

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.

The problem with phones, even up through the Symbian ones that presaged the iPhone, was that if you didn't have the most popular phone model around you could not find a decent replacement battery after the product end-of-lifed. For a while Fry's was the only place. So with respect to 'the largest battery' it's a matter of whether it's really fruitful for your new model to have a battery that's 2mm wider than the old one because you shrunk some component and want the extra 10% battery life you get by doing so.

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.

> but not headphones, vehicles, cameras, etc

Both my car and my DSLR have user replaceable batteries. My headphones don't because they are wired.

I’m talking about EVs, not combustion vehicles. Also there’s no law forcing everyone to use removable batteries in any of those devices.

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.

> My point is that users freely choose different types of batteries for different applications.

Where is the choice when all manufacturers arrive at the same conclusion: it's better for profits not to offer replaceable batteries?

My very first cellphone was Ericsson t10s, removable battery was part of the case. Solves all of the problems you mention.

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