Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Removable batteries were standard in the early days of mobile phones (and laptops) out of necessity: batteries in those days just weren’t very good. They didn’t last long, took hours to charge, and wore out relatively quickly. You’d carry a spare battery around and swap over when your first one ran out.

Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!

View on HN

I remember early cell phones (not smart phones, mind you) having weeks of standby time, or something like 20 hours of talk time. These had replaceable batteries. I don't recall people carrying spare batteries being a thing..?

Some of my early phones had spare batteries. They most certainly did NOT have weeks of standby time or 20 hours of talk time. We are talking late 90's.

Later, as phones and batteries got better, the spare batteries became unnecessary. They still degraded fast enough that there was a market for replacement batteries and they could indeed easily be replaced. We are talking things like the Nokia 3310.

Even later, the need for user replaceable batteries pretty much disappeared.

These days, it is entirely gone.

You can in fact still buy those kinds of phones and they still have removable batteries.

Standby times were indeed great in those days because those phones weren’t doing very much when they were idle. (Weeks may be an exaggeration, though!)

You might also be misremembering talk times, unless you had a phone with an exceptionally large battery.

A typical device like the Nokia 3210 had 3-4 hours talk time, which is far less than modern smartphones.

Last Nokia I had, I only charged it about every two weeks. I used to go on business trips and not even bother to bring the charger.

Mandating removable batteries does not _force_ you to buy a second battery. It _enables_ you to. By proxy this enables you to fix a failing battery yourself, at home. Replacing a battery instead of the whole device would create less e-waste. Just an example.

Further to the above, my Nokia (32|33|51)10's battery lasted a hell of a lot longer than any iPhone I have owned.

I lived through these times and what you describe is some alternative timeline to mine. Phones that could last several days of active use on a single charge had replaceable batteries with similar lifespan to those today and I don't recall anyone around me owning spare batteries to swap on-the-go. In fact, my Nokia 3410 only got its battery replaced in 2018 when I dug it out of the drawer (and I wasn't even its first owner in the family back in the day). Today's smartphones need battery replacement much sooner as they draw and charge with much more current and burn through the cycles faster.

> Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!

My current iPhone's battery capacity is already starting to decrease and it was never great to begin with (needed it for work). If it was replaceable, I'd do what I used to with Android phones years ago - get a spare, if the old one is really bad or turning into a pillow, then recycle that and keep using the replacement, otherwise could use both side by side and didn't even need a separate charging bank.

Lots of people will look in the direction of getting a new phone altogether, I might have to do that as well, turning the whole phone into e-waste, instead of giving it 5 more years of lifetime.

And it's not just that - most phones will throttle themselves on a deteriorated battery to limit current spikes that could cause brownouts. So not only your otherwise perfectly fine phone doesn't keep charge for long anymore, it literally becomes slower as it ages just because of its battery.

All iPhone batteries are replaceable. And since the iPhone 16 or so, they’ve already improved the design to make it compliant with the EU battery regulation.

It’s the Apple Watch, AirPods, etc that are more of a concern...

Not true, they may have not been as good but the phones also didn't need so much power. I never had to buy a new battery for all the nokias I owned all the way until Nokia the company died.

The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.

I remember how jarring it was to switch to the early smartphones that had to be charged daily. I was a teenager back then and my parents weren't happy to see my phone being plugged in every day. They caught up with times a few years later ;P

A battery being replaceable has little to do with longevity or energy density.

You're confusing swappable with replaceable.

It's not for when you run out of power its for when the battery stops holding a charge. Phones almost always last much longer than their batteries.

I’m not, I’m just explaining why swap-ability is no longer as necessary or useful as it once was, and unlikely to make a comeback.

Smartphones have always had replaceable batteries, and in the case of the iPhone, they’ve been compliant with the upcoming EU battery regulation since the iPhone 16 or so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com