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Comment by adaml_623 | Hacker News Reader

Cool. The manufacturers will figure out a way to make nice phones with a longer lifetime.

Because the EU forces them to.

Engineers have become experts in selecting components so that they fail right after the warranty period.

Replaceable batteries just means they will make something else weaker instead, preferably something that fries the device once it fails (see https://youtu.be/7cNg_ifibCQ?t=238).

It's too dangerous not to, as nowadays phones (or computers in general) don't really need to be upgraded that often to remain useful. No manufacturer wants a repeat of the 1080Ti.

> No manufacturer wants a repeat of the 1080Ti

I think I'm out of the loop. What does this mean?

It's too good, as long as you don't need 4k, it still runs the newest games at full quality with more than acceptable performance. It has 11GB VRAM. And it's a 6 year old GPU.

NVidia made a video card good enough that people who bought it had no need to upgrade for 4-5 years afterward. It hampered sales of cards for two generations afterward.

Wow, Apple engineering a computer to fail destroying all the data after the guarantee and lying to their customers why their computers failed is pretty damning.

Did anything come out of this?

I wish you were right but I have zero faith that Apple would ever willingly follow through with this. A depleted battery is an opportunity for them to sell people on a new phone who don't realize they can get the battery replaced. It also totally goes against their whole ethos of non-repair. Mandating USB C was easier because Apple already did that with the Macbooks, so it wasn't that big of a leap. Removable batteries, however, they would claim would require some expensive, impossible redesign.

Regretfully I don't see this coming to fruition. Apple will find a way, by hook, crook, or lawsuit, to get out of it.

Alternatively, it'll be another excuse for them to claim to revolutionize computing to cheers by bringing back the old replaceable battery with some more proprietary stuff and carefully hidden statements about the water resistance not working afterwards.

The same Apple that is prepping to open up to sideloading right now?

From your lips to God's ears...

Not so long ago some people claimed apple would rather leave the EU market than implement USB-C or open up the app store.

They complied (or are in the process of complying) with these regulations.

Afaik the proposed battery act allows either swappable batteries or a minimum "lifetime".

> Not so long ago some people claimed apple would rather leave the EU market than implement USB-C or open up the app store

It's just a case of Americans underestimating the size of the EU market. But the large corporations that already do business in the EU know very well that they can't leave a market that represents half of their revenue.

Or they just create one phone for the EU market and don't market the rest?

That just doesn't happen because you lose economy of scale. The EU actually has a ton of soft power through this, enough for it to be a term in geopolitics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect

Europe is about 20% of Apple sales internationally. It's not that much power.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/382175/quarterly-revenue...

I don't think many companies would be able to take a 20% overnight drop in sales without it causing some major issues.

But the adjustment is not without cost itself.

Is the cost of a complete redesign > lost sales in EU? Then don't do the redesign.

The redesign is a one-time cost. Lost sales in the EU will be ongoing until it happens.

That's true, but a new product line has on-going update costs and warranty support costs as well.

Which is exactly why it makes sense to not have a separate EU version with the extra costs that would bring, i.e. the Brussels effect in action.

Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version.

It seems clear that there will be some downside to the replaceable battery version, whether it's size, cost, weight, ergonomics, water resistance, etc. Will the convenience of having replaceable batteries and not importing be worth those downsides? We'll have to see.

> Which could make for a really interesting experiment - how many people would buy the EU replaceable battery edition of the phone vs. importing/traveling to a non-EU country nearby to buy the other version.

Assuming everything else is close enough.

I know there's an ocean between me and the EU, but importing a phone becomes significantly more difficult than it needs to be based on which cellular frequencies are supported.

Sure, but I'm thinking about stuff like just going to Nordic countries or even the UK. A lot of Europe isn't that far away from a country that doesn't follow EU rules. I was under the impression that you could, for the most part, buy a phone in the US and use it in the EU anyway these days?

Here in Norway (one of the two nordic countries to be not in the EU, the other is Iceland), we adopt more regulations from the EU via EØS (EEA) than most EU countries.

So we're basically part of the EU without the voting rights and toll union benefits..

Besides, our governments and most of the people cross "isle" are very much into the green/circle economy thing. It would get adopted from the EU even without being part of EØS I think.

Personally I think it would be great to be able to have a phone longer, I absolutely hate throwing out working hardware like the 2010 mac pro I used to have but apple decided not to support any more. The funny part is that someone has now made a hack/patch so it runs the newest os x anyway [1]. It was never the hardware that was the issue, just lack of support from apple.

[1] https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

That seems unlikely, since it would multiply the design costs.

But since I am in the EU I wouldn't mind.

If they do, and it turns out that people generally prefer the EU model, other regulators might follow.

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