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.