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Comment by washingupliquid | Hacker News Reader

...and Apple will be exempt due to a loophole in the law (80% after 1k cycles) making the law utterly pointless.

This makes no sense but I still see it mindlessly repeated to exhaustion. That mention is in no way Apple specific, it’s a quality of the battery itself. Any manufacturer is in the same position, not like Apple has a monopoly on batteries that hold 80% charge after 1000 cycles.

I don’t understand how this could be measured fairly though. What kind of cycles? What temperatures was it exposed to? Charged fast or slow? This is an incomplete set of criteria, which seems designed specifically to be meaningless / gameable.

To me this seems like saying you can sell a car with a sealed gas tank as long as it “gets 40 miles per gallon.” And GM gets to decide the test course for measuring MPG, which will be a 2-mile slightly downhill coast with no stopping. Surprise! All our cars get 40-60MPG!

The unspoken implication here is that if your phone still retains 80% after 1000 cycles, then it’s probably so old and obsolete by then that battery replacement would be a silly waste of time, so why burden people with these “onerous rules” in that case.

But in reality, nothing about that metric, even if it’s true, means that customers don’t need to replace their batteries. My iPhone 15 Pro Max is in dire need of a battery replacement, at 82% after only 714 cycles. Aside from the battery, I have literally zero motivation to replace this phone. The phone manufacturers hate the idea that the battery might get replaced, because in this day and age it’s pretty much the only reason a 2 to 3-year-old phone (especially a flagship) isn’t extremely adequate for 99% of the population.

In the US the EPA gets to set the guidelines for mileage testing, which GM has to follow. We've already had a major case in penalties for not following the guidelines via VW and emissions.

It will likely boil down to "typical use" so in the event that someone wants to bring Apple to court over it and demonstrate the issue, it could solidify what's currently a little vague. Laws aren't required to get it perfect out of the gate.

> then it’s probably so old and obsolete by then that battery replacement would be a silly waste of time

obsolescence is a spectrum, if a swappable battery mandate gives a small % of devices a few extra years it would be worth it... I already give old devices to family members and kids on the "free is better than nothing" spectrum and a swappable battery would have extended the life at least a few of said devices, in my personal experience

I keep hearing this over and over, but it's neglected to add that it sets a minimum durability requirement which applies only for a very small niche of ruggedized waterproof devices

Unless your device complies to MIL-STD-810G CN1 and has the certification to back it up your product will be required to add user replaceable batteries

>Unless your device complies to MIL-STD-810G CN1 and has the certification to back it up your product will be required to add user replaceable batteries

Can you provide your source for this? If nothing else, it's very surprising to me that an EU regulation uses a US standard as the baseline!

Edit: Having done a bit of reading on the standard, it also seems like the regulation needs quite a bit of detail if it really does rely on the MIL-STD, since the standard only defines test procedures, not pass/fail criteria?

Are you sure the loophole exists?

AFAIK, this is the regulation:

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj/eng

I don't see that exemption listed. The other ones are, but not that one.

Take this with a mountain of salt since I've not at all an expert, but with a little help from AI, it seems like the exemption lives in 2023/1670 [0]. The LLM claims that this and the regulation you link are interconnected, with the recital of 2023/1542 explicitly linking them.

0: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

Yup, that’s a pretty wild loophole. I think they’re targeting the lower end of the market probably to reduce most of the ewaste.

not really! at the very least it requires more thought around battery quality

the choice for budget devices is now

1. better battery

2. removability (likely more expensive and complicates water-tightness )

The supposed aim of this is to reduce e-waste. But when 90% of smartphones sold are iPhones and Samsung Galaxies which are exempt it makes this bill completely pointless, as the ewaste it will save is a small fraction of a percentage of the total.

> the ewaste it will save

well we agree that it will work at least a little, which looks like a good start to me

We agree that it works a little, but not that it is a good start.

If this bill had just targetted all battery devices it would have made an incredible change. But as usual it was lobbied into near non existence.

Why do we have to be content with tiny chips away at a serious issue instead of insisting it is dealt with properly?

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