Hacker News Reader

Comment by eloisant | Hacker News Reader

I don't need to be able to swap a spare battery like we did 15 years ago.

However when your battery is old, and drains fast, it's really nice to be able to order a new one and easily change it by removing 4 screws.

Not having to perform surgery on your phone, heating it to remove glue, etc.

View on HN

I'll never forget the feeling when you get an old phone, replace the battery and it's like brand new again. People no longer need to replace their phone every year anymore so being able to just replace the screen and battery makes the device practically brand new.

I was expecting the bew folding screen to be really easy to replace, given that its basically floating behind a frame, but turns out no! its actually so built into the frame as to be a full body replacement with all the accompanying surgery

Another thing you can do: scroll through your app list and delete all the ones you don't use.

And if you keep your phone in flight mode when you're not using it, you'll quadruple your battery life or more. Both because the radio is off, and also because apps aren't waking up the CPU to spy on you every few minutes, since they can't transmit it.

Quadruple? Depends on how you're counting I suppose. The problem with using flight mode is that the phone then becomes useless at its job as a phone, i.e. a device that other people can use to call you.

Highly depends on signal strength, too. Having a phone with only one bar of LTE absolutely murders battery life, so that claim is probably accurate in that circumstance.

I wouldn't want to design the phone around an event that happens every 3 years at minimum.

Sure, but so far I've replaced my phone screen once and the battery never, I suppose both would be equally easy though. Why is heating a big issue but removing screws not? Shouldn't we mandate user-replaceable screens too? Soon you'll end up regulating all phones to be modular.

> Soon you'll end up regulating all phones to be modular.

That would be great, obviously there would be tradeoffs (not as thin, potentially less waterproof) but that seems like the right direction to go in.

I don't really see the value of regulation requiring a certain preference, given that there are tradeoffs. I owned a modular phone previously, and it was, as you say, not as thin and not waterproof, and not dustproof either. Given that it takes like 30 minutes to change the screen or battery on my current phone (which is not modular), I don't see why my preference should be disallowed by EU regulation?

I doubt any EU court will stop you selling a waterproof phone, but they will stop you making your flagship phone waterproof specifically for the purpose of making it hard to repair. They do have common sense, you know.

So what do you want to change, actually? My point is that the waterproof phones I've owned hasn't been hard to repair, because heating a phone to remove some glue, is not hard. The point is that the waterproofing glue, for me, is a worthwhile tradeoff because it adds like 10 minutes to the repair process.

Obviously, if you want to introduce new regulation, it must be because you want to change something, right? Or is the regulation about preventing a hypothetical scenario that's not the case right now?

> I don't really see the value of regulation requiring a certain preference, given that there are tradeoffs.

Reducing the amount of manufacturing for phones, and thus reducing the impact of the species on the environment is an extremely sensible goal, given that basically all resources are limited.

If you can do that while making things cheaper for your populace, then it's a double win.

Seems like we very quickly went from "there are tradeoffs" to "modular phones are objectively the best in all aspects". So, where's your proof of that claim? In my experience (as stated above) it's not the case.

The modular phones I've owned probably used more resources than the non-modular ones, because I needed to repair them more often. But hey, at least the repair was marginally more easy.

And yes, modular phones might have gotten better the last few years. But then you need to show that, not just claim it.

Yes please! That would be great. I would love to just be able to replace a screen easily.

And really this is what this law does already.

> I would love to just be able to replace a screen easily.

Yes, as I said, I've easily replaced my screen on my phone from 2022 already.

My point is that the definition of "easy" is different for me and GP (is it "easy" to remove and apply glue?). So which definition do we need to write into the law?

People were probably saying "I'd love to avoid tracking cookies on all websites" back before the EU cookie law too, and look at how that turned out.

> People were probably saying "I'd love to avoid tracking cookies on all websites" back before the EU cookie law too, and look at how that turned out.

The problem there was industry lobbying. What the EU should have done was one of two things:

- Forbid third party tracking entirely, completely

- Or mandate that a technical flag (e.g. Do-Not-Track) be respected by law

However the advertising industry would have been decimated (rightly so IMO) and billions of euros are coming from that so they lobbied for this stupid compromise that made things a lot worse.

They are now doing the latter: There will again be a DNT flag under the recent proposals, but it still has to go through rounds of lobbying and watering down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com