We Need a Revolution
fairphone.com
fairphone.com
While people generally won't admit to replacing an entire phone/laptop due to a degraded battery, it's a significant nudge to get people to do just that, with battery replacement being made inconvenient and/or costly.
It usually ends up being more expensive to replace the battery (even doing it myself with an iFixit kit) than to get a new one with carrier subsidies and whatnot.
That seems a lot more reasonable to me. There are a lot of legitimate technical and design reasons for why batteries are not user replaceable today.
Why don't you buy a phone that has a user-replaceable battery, if that's what you want, and let me buy the phone I want to buy?
You are free to opt out of replacing your battery on a phone that allows it, but you can't opt in to replacing your battery on a phone that doesn't allow it. If there's to be a standard, that standard should clearly be replaceable batteries.
If you mandate everything has to have replaceable batteries, you restrict the ability for consumers to choose devices that prioritize other things.
Only logic that I would say could be used is an environmental concern, but you'd need to really show that replaceable batteries would lead to significant improvements in the amount of e-waste we generate. If everything has a replaceable battery, but only a few people take advantage of it and the average lifetime of a phone remains constant-ish, it's really not valuable.
I think the replaceable battery thing is very much a HN bubble issue. It's not like there aren't phones with them. If more people wanted them, more people would sell them, but most people prefer the additional battery life, increased water resistance, and thinness of modern phones.
> If more people wanted them, more people would sell them, but most people prefer the additional battery life, increased water resistance, and thinness of modern phones.
You're overstating the preferences and availability of alternatives here. All the best engineering talent went towards sexiness hype cycles, little went into making phones with that were more eco friendly.
Lots of people also liked Tho-Radia, a radioactive cosmetic from almost 100 years ago. That's not a justification for permitting it.
For myself, and nearly everyone I know, water resistance is a must have and battery replacement is the "niche feature". I've lost WAY more phones due to water related accidents than I have to bad batteries.
However now that we've seen the establishment of these consumer systems, I think it's quite fair to begin requiring the corporations making these gadgets to respect the environments in which they were able to flourish while incurring/leveraging many externalized costs. These corporations won't begin to reduce their rate of externalized environmental debts without government regulation until it begins to damage their profit and forecasts, by which point it will be far too late...
Unfortunately, this marketplace has only the illusion of consumer choice because the flagship mobile devices are unilaterally designed by entrenched trillion-dollar companies. Beginning the modularization of these ubiquitous tools through their most environmentally-impactful components seems like an encouraging start to creating a 'real' marketplace for mobile phone technology. As others in this thread have pointed out, this regulation will require infrastructure to be most effectively and can most certainly be screwed up/sabotaged to the point of tragic ineffectiveness but I believe that if there is a place to begin this struggle for consumer freedoms, it is clearly with batteries.
If people want to buy phones with a non-replaceable battery, that is OK I guess, but we need of fee or deposit to prevent them from dropping that cost on the environment.
Edit: come to think of it, we probably also need a fee or deposit for replaceable batteries. But at least it could be smaller, since it is just for the battery. We probably don’t want a deposit for every piece of electronics, just because that would be annoying.
We need to get back to sensible environmentalism. Otherwise, you can justify pretty much anything.
The issue isn’t whether or not you are fine with a little bit of waste. That little bit of waste has a cost. The cost is paid by the planet, not you, if the phone just winds up ina dump. I haven’t suggested banning phones without replaceable batteries, just making sure that you or your phone manufacturer somehow pay that cost.
Focus on bigger ticket items. The elephants in the room.
I will absolutely not keep a phone any longer just because the battery can be replaced.
For a while, phones were gaining 50-100% performance per year and noticably better screens+cameras. Now it's down to a few percent and minor camera updates are the main selling point.
Reusability is about not being selfish.
From 2027, all batteries must be replaceable, FTA:
"The regulation of the European Parliament and the Council will apply to all batteries including all waste portable batteries, electric vehicle batteries, industrial batteries, starting, lighting and ignition (SLI) batteries (used mostly for vehicles and machinery) and batteries for light means of transport (e.g. electric bikes, e-mopeds, e-scooters)."
"The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user"
Earlier iPhones were quite easy to swap a battery in, the main issue then was availability of decent-quality replacement batteries.
You can make waterproof phones with swappable batteries.
Consumer choice is a blatant lie.
We shouldn't humor every antisocial choice in the name of freedom.
1. Batteries can still be replaced.
2. The battery is a major contributor to the ewaste in a phone. End-user-replaceable batteries means replaced batteries are much more likely to be tossed than recycled.
If your concern is ewaste contributing to the ecological crisis, here are some much better ideas than user-replaceable batteries on phones:
- require manufacturers provide one free battery replacement
- require 24-hr turnaround
Or, for the people who like heavy-handed government regulations, flip the convenience/cost calculation, by, e.g., requiring a waiting period or fee when making a new device purchase.
It's so obvious there are better ways to approach this from an ecological standpoint that I can't take this kind of argument seriously. People like to talk about the ecological crisis, but won't actually spend any thoughts on it. Oh well!
How many people still use devices from 20 years ago? Jornada's had replaceable batteries and were far more configurable than today's devices. They still got tossed. As phones go, RAZRs are another example. Most are just laying in landfills today. The list goes on and on.
The e-waste problem goes wayyy beyond replaceable batteries. Nowadays you can't even send outdated tech to developing nations. The Chinese keep a lot of those nations well supplied with affordable recent phones for instance.
Tech improves, and no one wants the old stuff. That's the problem you have to solve to address the e-waste issue.
Yes, tech improves, and no one wants the old stuff. But realistically, there isn't anywhere near the level of innovation with new phones as there was 10 or 20 years ago. The phone I bought 5 years ago makes all the same calls, sends the same messages, browses the same internet, takes the same photos, and runs the same apps, as the phone I would buy in the shop today. I'd be quite content to postpone upgrading for 5+ years at a time, and I suspect most people would be too.
Tech improves, for a while. In some ways. And then it slows down significantly. Welcome to the S-curve.
This one is easy to counter. For the majority of low and medium end phones, by the time you need your first battery replacement, the cost of having it done in a shop will generally be close to, or exceed, the value of the phone itself. The last time I had a phone with replaceable batteries, I was able to purchase several spare batteries for a fraction of the cost of a shop replacement.
Screens and shells should be repairable, of course.
Did a couple times on old laptops, but the modern batteries are much better than those.
I suppose I would mind the trade ofs less on a laptop.
For Windows you can use something like NTLite.
In particular, the phone is very susceptible to water. Having carried it for 1.5h in my pocket during rain caused permanent damage to the camera and charging module - something to keep in mind if you're an outdoor type of person.
On a plus side, the customer service was excellent and the repairs were straightforward, but with a better sealed phone I might not have had to perform them at all.
Wow, that is a horrible trade-off!
Another good example is Patagonia, a brand I personally love and buy. They are better than many other brands that don't give a shit about the environment, but in the end they exist because a lot of people buy their stuff. Sure, it's great now that they donate the profits, I guess.
But in the end, convincing people to just not buy stuff would be the best thing to do. Companies that are trying to play both sides are suspect to me.
I sort of agreed with you, but only up to your conclusion. Imo, this kind of all or nothing outlook tends to let the dogmatic be the enemy of the pragmatic. I find it unrealistic and impractical. I also disagree with the notion that there might be a "side" that has some kind of monopoly on being genuine, because it claims some sort of purity of ideals. That's not the color of reality and you'll have to kill a lot of people to create that utopia, either before or after. Mobile phones are here to stay. If out of two companies, one spends its resources trying to convince people to stop using them, while the other just acknowledges the need and settles for nudging the culture toward repair rather than replace, I think the latter is the one being "real".
As for the company's financial and social incentives, I don't know Fairphone enough to know if what you implied would be true about them. I'd say that a company can aim for profitability and self-sustainability, and still hit all their other targets, including the environmental ones. Generally, it's when you aim for growth at all cost (e.g. you took some vc money) that all other objectives take a backseat or go the way of the door.
Patagonia existed when they made mostly pitons and they existed when they were a niche brand and they exist as a major brand. It's hard sometimes, especially with financing schemes, to shrink after growth, but many businesses function fine with a satisfactory market size to keep operations running.
As an investor, I might not put money in a company that declared it wanted to slow down replacement of its products because of the environment by building longer-lasting products. But as a consumer, I would definitely consider buying them.
Maybe you could be interested in Purism, which is a Social Purpose Corporation: https://puri.sm/about.
https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us/articles/983618898804...
Completely unacceptable explanation to me, but at least there is a writeup of their position.
How and why?
> Part of that strategy is ... not including those that are becoming less pervasive, such as the headphone jack.
For a phone with a mission like the Fairphone, the headphone jack will not become less pervasive. An audio standard that has existed for over 100 years will not vanish in 5, especially not without a valid alternative. On the contrary, it's a must have feature to support their mission. So this whole line of reasoning is just wrong.
> To support maximum longevity and because of the IP rating, Fairphone 4 does not feature a headphone jack
If you look at other phones with a good IP rating, they can come with a headphone jack and be fine. The Sony Xperia line has some modern examples.
> Including the headphone jack would have made the phone longer and thicker.
Given how big the phone already is, and how small phones with the headphone jack are and have been, I do not believe this. I believe that it made their job easier and changing nothing else, it would have made the phone bigger. I refuse to believe there was no alternative method to fit it in.
To note there that other vendors made the same claim, sometimes specifically for phones where there then was empty space where the headphone jack would have been. So there is a history of lies in this area, which makes this claim not trustworthy, regardless the different source. Apple lied about this with the iPhone 7, the most prominent example.
I'm not sure what this means. The oal of Fairphone is to be environmentally friendly and modular. A headphone jack being absent or present isn't directly related to either of those things.
> An audio standard that has existed for over 100 years will not vanish in 5
I mean, how long ago did Apple first announce they would be dropping it? Many other phones, tablets and laptops have also dropped it. It decidedly is vanishing, at least from consumer electronics.
> If you look at other phones with a good IP rating, they can come with a headphone jack and be fine.
Because they made different compromises than Fairphone had to.
> Given how big the phone already is, and how small phones with the headphone jack are and have been, I do not believe this
Why would they lie?
> I believe that it made their job easier and changing nothing else, it would have made the phone bigger. I refuse to believe there was no alternative method to fit it in.
I mean, they were pretty detailed in their reasoning, and you can look at their schematics online. I don't think they could have included it without making the phone chunkier and less competitive.
> which makes this claim not trustworthy, regardless the different source.
That doesn't track. Someone lie about it once so no one making the claim can be trusted? I'd say Fairphone are being pretty open and trustworthy so far.
The phone is decidedly less environmentally friendly if it leads to user ditching their existing headphone and buying ones with batteries instead. This is directly related.
To your other points, check the video by Louis Rossmann about the impact and feasibility of the headphone jack, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bRdL0StldJM&t=0s. I would only repeat myself.
EH, that's a stretch. Due to the way the industry is going, most users are going to have a pair of wireless headphones anyway. And if not, they can buy a cheap adapter that they wouldn't get rid of until they got rid of their headphones.
> To your other points, check the video by Louis Rossmann about the impact and feasibility of the headphone jack
My other points are not against the impact and feasibility of the headphone jack though. I don't have anything against it myself.
I just don't think it's reasonable to assume Fairphone is lying because Apple did, and really that seems to be the crux of your argument.
My issue is more with the completely unnecessary and never explained by the project removal of the headphone jack. Well, and that the timing was pretty obvious profit maximisation.
So this angle really doesn't make sense to me, they either have to start offering products that compete with the flagship models, or try something like Framework is doing with laptops?
And I'm not making a blanket statement that higher price is equal to longer lasting, I'm fairly sure the foldable phones lose in average situations to non foldable ones just out of differences in usage and construction, and gaming phones with active cooling I guess too.
My Librem 5 will have lifetime updates, since it runs GNU/Linux.
I wish their usb-c to 3.5mm dongles can be repaired.
By the way Sharp still making IP7/8 MIL-STD-801 flagship phones with 3.5mm headphone jack and microSD card slot in case you don't know. Don't say bs like 3.5mm jack lose waterproof.
There are real business running out there to repair and modify those.
With the headphones they advertise, if they're any good at all, they could last me a decade or more since I can easily replace the battery when they start degrading to the point they're unusable.
That is, I think, for most consumers, something people would be willing to get into easier and faster than their phone buying preference.
it will become more difficult to teach how to build computers going forwards...
then again, it has always required a special kind of curiosity to learn about computer internals.. what I'm corncerned about is that we will continue to punish that kind of curiosity as computer technology has become critical infrastructure.
People would shit bricks if they had to pay the prices we paid 50 years ago for items "built to last" or at least "be reparable." Let's face it, they had to be repairable because you'd be working on them. When was the last time the average US consumer has fixed their TV? Washer? Dishwasher? When I was growing up those items frequently required repair. You bought brands that you knew would have parts available for several years to come (that's one of the reasons everybody bought from Sears).
I have no desire to return to those "good old days."
No, the real issue isn't continually buying new and shiny things - it's the fact we can't recycle the material from those once new and shiny things to make new things. That is the actual problem. If I can trade in my iPhone and Apple can recycle the majority of the material into a newer iPhone then we've eliminated a lot of waste and I get a new and shiny phone.
That is the revolution we actually need.