While sounding nice in theory, these sorts of regulations will certainly curtail innovation while providing very, very little value elsewhere.
If people wanted removable batteries in their phones, they would buy them a lot. They don't.
If people wanted removable batteries in their phones, they would buy them a lot. They don't.
This argument gets thrown about every time companies make anti-consumer changes, and it completely ignores the information asymmetry and other dynamics at play. When I go to the store to buy a new phone, where does it list on the box how repairable the device is? Where does it show how expensive the repair will be? If I'm locked in the apple ecosystem, where do I buy an iPhone with a replaceable battery?
Your assumption that the market is driven by informed consumer choices presupposes that every buyer is an expert.
That may be good or bad, I do not know.
Samsung was the last major brand in the US to have one, and they made the choice to remove it.
Most of the Kyocera Duraforce line has this ability.
Kyocera's 'flagship' is high-reliability phones in absolute garbage environments.
Samsung's 'flagship' overheats and earns them class-action lawsuits.
Motorola's 'flagship' is a hinged throwback to the 90s.
Apple's 'flagship' is an overpriced piece of vendor lock-in.
Meanwhile my phone takes serious abuse and laughs at it. I've dropped it and watched it go more than 700 feet down the side of a mountain (Chambless Skarn) and BARELY chip the screen protector. Waterproofing still intact. Case barely scratched.
What you consider a flagship phone is a brittle piece of junk in my hands.
At least if it had registered memory there might be an argument that it has some radiation resistance, but no it's plain old LPDDR4x.
Ulefone Armor 29 Ultra has the same MIL-STD-810H conformance with "radiation hardening", 16GB of RAM and a flagship Dimensity 9300+. Just not a removable battery.
Yet it is currently working just fine recording video inside of our rad/AtOx chamber with multiple Strontium-60/Barium-137 sources surrounding it.
"LPDDR4x."
Wrong. LPDDR5 and it has its own error correction features (not as robust as ECC but it's still there.)
That's really neat, but doesn't contradict anything I said.
Also do you perhaps mean Strontium-90? ;)
> Wrong. LPDDR5 and it has its own error correction features (not as robust as ECC but it's still there.)
Their product page lists LPDDR4x: https://www.kyoceramobile.com/rugged-devices/duraforce-pro-3. Unless you have a better source I'm going with the manufacturer on this one.
> it has its own error correction features
Source?
Funny because the Qualcomm sm7450-ab snapdragon 7 gen-1 page lists itself as only supporting LPDDR5.
>also do you mean perhaps Strontium-90?
Nope. Strontium-60. 25 year half life compared to Sr-90's ~29. It's what we like to use in real space-environment testing on the ground. Nasty stuff.
>source?
You can actually probe your hardware and see what sort of ECC is enabled on a Droid phone. In this case, in-line ECC, so that means some of the RAM is actually sacrificed for error correction instead of having a dedicated extra chip (256 bit, 240 of that is data 16 bit is error correction.) What's awesome about that is that enabling ECC is simply a bit flip in firmware and you don't need the extra RAM modules installed - the installed memory can already do it. You don't need the extra hardware.
Those pages contain scarce technical information, it would be silly to say that anything not listed there is explicitly not supported.
Qualcomm's leaked datasheet says it supports lpddr4x: https://www.scribd.com/document/868805341/80-26135-1-AE-SM74...
> Nope. Strontium-60. 25 year half life compared to Sr-90's ~29. It's what we like to use in real space-environment testing on the ground. Nasty stuff.
Strontium-60 doesn't exist. It falls completely off the isotope table (https://inframatterresearchcenter.org/IsotopeTable.html). Strontium-82 has a 25 day half-life.
> You can actually probe your hardware and see what sort of ECC is enabled on a Droid phone.
Care to share how? I wasn't able to find anything on the internet and I'd love to know whether my phone has some limited ECC.
Speaking of which, does anyone want to do a list of "features added to smartphones over the last 10 years" vs "features removed from smartphones over the last 10 years" so we can see just what innovations are at risk?
People generally like small, thin phones, as evidenced by the billions sold. It really isn't much more complicated than that.
Maybe it is more complicated than that
I ran my LG G5 with replaceable batteries from 2016 through 2021, at which point there were no affordable replaceable-battery phones left. I bought quite a few replacement batteries, even trying aftermarket batteries with varying levels of success after the OEM LG ones were discontinued.
That is, of course, a problem for manufacturers that want to sell a lot of phones.
For that to happen there obviously needs to be a supply worth writing home about. Furthermore, speaking purely for myself, a removable battery is not a must but a nice-to-have. A lot of slabs that have removable batteries are out of the game for entirely different reasons.
Not really. If there’s no supply, it’s probably because the manufacturers did a market analysis and decided it’s not even worth it to offer that. So either their analysis is extremely wrong and it actually would sell, or the consumers don’t want to buy it that bad.
You got it surrounded. Why offer devices that you have to support for a longer time (e. g. enterprise models) when there's more money to be made when you enshittify (which obviously goes beyond just batteries)?
And I say that as an absolute supporter of the mandatory USB C. But I don’t think the average consumer cares enough about it that apple would have switched without being forced.
you can look at the lightning connector as an example. if you said "if people wanted usb connectivity they wouldn't buy iphones", nobody would take you seriously. and when apple was forced to switch, it absolutely didnt tank their sales because people just loved the lightning connector so much. the bad thing went away and it was great.
The reality is people don't want it, at all. At least not enough to warrant action. So the story ends there.
Also, the lighting connector is better than USB in every way. Mandating an inferior technology is an odd choice.
This whole thing becomes more obvious in the Android world, where models with various features do exist, but only in certain markets
Even then, this whole line of argument seems moot because if the battery still holds enough charge over time the regulations don't even require it to be replaceable
sort of missed the point. market dominance and lock-in means they already are the 800-lb gorilla, and removable batteries sit below where it'd move most people to switch
> The reality is people don't want it, at all.
lmao thats a good blither
https://www.androidauthority.com/removable-battery-poll-resu...
> Also, the lighting connector is better than USB in every way. Mandating an inferior technology is an odd choice.
right, except in the ways that matter and that people care about
lmao.
It turns out market consolidation is usually the biggest innovation killer.