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?
Screens and shells should be repairable, of course.
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.
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"
You can make waterproof phones with swappable batteries.
Earlier iPhones were quite easy to swap a battery in, the main issue then was availability of decent-quality replacement batteries.
We shouldn't humor every antisocial choice in the name of freedom.
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 Nowadays you can't even send outdated tech to developing nations.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.
Tech improves, for a while. In some ways. And then it slows down significantly. Welcome to the S-curve.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Consumer choice is a blatant lie.
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.