Now require manufacturers to provide like 5 years of OS updates so devices aren’t insecure bricks once you get updates.
OR disallow banking apps from blocking custom ROMs/root, so you can just install your own updates ROM without losing updates.
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Huh? Which part?
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Oh shit, amazing!
This is a much bigger demand than the usbc charging. I wonder if they can actually pull it off. I’d be happy with simply the right to be able to use a fully independent 3rd party to replace a battery.
Anyone remember the LG V10? Mine came with an extra battery and a charging dock for the external batteries. Never plugged that phone up once in 2.5 years, just took 10 seconds to swap in a full battery.
European Union is doing the work the U.S. government should be.
U.S. government is too busy worrying about what people are doing in their bedrooms, libraries and doctor’s offices.Meanwhile, one of the US parties is trying to ban universal free school meals. Sad.
We don’t get free school meals in all European countries though. It’s fairly inexpensive where I live and people with low income do get it free but it’s not universal.
Not all countries have the same school hours. In some places, the expectation is that kids get out of school by lunch time.
Also, school meals are not the first line of defense when it comes to food insecurity, like it’s unfortunately often the case in the United States.
All for this. The amount of times I’ve needed to do a full reset that would’ve been so much easier with a removable battery is wild. Waiting 10 hours for it to discharge is nuts
I wouldn’t even care about it being super easily replaceable. It would just be nice if the phone wasn’t basically filled with glue…
Man I wish the US regulatory body would throw some wrenches like this at the tech companies here. They need a wake up call, start with breaking up Meta. Right to repair is also often gutted
The US leans very heavily into capitalism, so passing laws that make companies less money probably isn’t what the government has as a priority unfortunately. Companies can make a lot more money selling you a new device than selling you a battery, even if the battery has crazy markups like most manufacturers that have replacement batteries available do.
Regulatory capture is a hell of a drug
I used to have a phone with a replaceable battery and it was awesome. I would charge the other battery while using the phone all day, carefree. When it was about to die, I’d swap out the battery. It was basically like I had an instant charge of 100% on my phone. Those were good days.
And you used to be able to buy super battery packs too. You could get a pack that would power your phone for days.
Good!
Hell yes! This has been a big sticking point for me since they started being removed around 2016. I hung on to my Note 4 until it was tired around 2019/2020, bought an LG V20 as it was the most recent ‘flagship’ still using a removable battery, then I finally crossed over to the darkside with the S21 Ultra.
Hopefully options will open up over the next few years as even if you don’t want a removable battery, your preference shouldn’t dictate the entire market. The smart phone market is way too homogeneous where every phone is essentially the same in a mildly different brick shape with a different logo.
While that’s great, what I’m more concerned about is pricing for original replacement batteries. I don’t really care if I have to send my phone in for 2 to 3 days (which is what it took last time I sent an iPhone 11 Pro to Apple), what concerns me more is pricing. Especially with older phones, having to pay $69 to $89 for battery repair (plus shipping) is quite a lot. Self-service parts cost the exact same price from Apple currently.
The EU should forbid charging more for replacement or repair parts than the cost to manufacture them plus a small (!) markup.
Also, please extend this law to include all kinds of electronics (smartwatches, laptops, tablets etc.).
Especially AirPods and other true wireless earbuds should have replaceable batteries, as they are basically dead after 3 to 5 years, which just feels wrong considering everything except the batteries probably lasts a lot longer and when you get an expensive “battery repair” they just give you new AirPods.
undefined> The EU should forbid charging more for replacement or repair parts than the cost to manufacture them plus a small (!) markup.
I mean 100€ with labour and parts is not that unfair for a business in a western country. I assume that you need to work on a phone for at least 30 mins to to get everything done. And 100-200€ an hour for a working professional is not that outrageous.
I agree with you that the repair service can be expensive to offer, but the replacement part should still cost next to nothing. I can’t imagine a phone battery costing any more than $10 to manufacture.
What I’m concerned about is that this law is pretty useless without cheaper prices for original batteries to go with it.
It’s not that I disagree with you entirely. It’s just personally, knowing how to solder, and having had to replace batteries for both external and internal battery laptops recently, I’d rather not have this extend to laptops. As it is now with modern laptops, you just open up the housing, desolder the old battery, get just about any lithium battery from anything (those cheap USB power packs are great), and solder some wires from that to the control board. Going back to detachable batteries means having to deal with every single manufacturer’s proprietary awful housing and pinout slots. You either buy an OEM part from the manufacturer (if they still sell them) or risk a fire with third party batteries in awful housing. Detachable batteries is also how you end up with things like Lenovo using firmware to disallow third party batteries from charging on their laptops.
I feel it’s more important that housings should be user openable with normal tools (guitar pick, razor blade, screwdriver) without damaging the housing. HP is genuinely awful for this on laptops.
I’d imagine you’d have a hard time using USB power banks to form a battery that resembles (for example) a MacBook Air battery:
Considering most power banks use 18650 cells or similar (but even if they are thinner), I can’t really see how you’d form a battery pack that fills the space effectively on most notebooks anyway.
It’s also a lot of work finding the correct cells to use (form and size wise), ordering them, if it’s in a power bank prying that apart, desoldering the old and soldering in the new cells. >= 99% of all people would purchase complete, fitting battery packs for their model of laptop.
Oh wow, I went and looked up the MacBook Air, it looks like you could snap it being so thin. I’ll have to keep an eye out for one of those at the junk stores, I’ve not disassembled a laptop nearly that thin yet. Personally, I’d probably just end up taping a battery to the bottom of that if it came to it. Most of the laptops I’ve got are at least an inch thick, so it’s generally not a problem finding some space in them.
I recently picked up a T430, which turns out is an absolutely awful crapshoot with third party batteries that may just not charge thanks to Lenovo, or that just might stop holding any charge after a few cycles, or at worst manage to catch fire. Lenovo no longer sells new OEM batteries for these older machines, and as they get even older, finding new third party batteries will only become more difficult.
I think I might have left my thoughts a bit unfinished in my original comment. I think where I was trying to go with my issue with laptops being included in here is that requiring the batteries to be easily detachable won’t stop manufacturers from trying to lock you into something evil, something along the lines of a battery subscription like it’s printer ink. If anything it may encourage them to, and that’s a scary thought. What happens when they stop producing batteries for your locked down hardware? Can’t use “non-genuine” batteries, they won’t be allowed to charge. The average user is likely just going to toss it and buy another one, creating more e-waste.
What I feel should be regulated is the interchangeability of parts like batteries, similarly to how USB-C has been enforced. Innovation is great, but proprietary major components that are destined to fail prematurely to the rest of the device from normal wear and tear don’t benefit repairability, even if they are easily replaceable. Eventually that part will no longer be manufactured, and a consumable part that no-one else is allowed to sell to your users encourages you as the OEM to design that part to have a mean time to failure that’s as short as possible.
Sorry if this reads a bit disheveled, I wrote it kind of sporadically.
Stuff that 2 or 3 days with no phone just to change a battery!
This is why I got a Fairphone. I was done complaining about the direction of the mobile market and decided to buy a phone which lets me do all of this and has longer support for software and hardware. It’s the best phone I’ve had since the S3.
It only works for me because I like Android, live in Europe and have big enough pockets, though… the thing is a brick.
longer support for software and hardware
Not to rain on your parade (I love the idea of the Fairphone!), but that’s actually a bit of misadvertising on Fairphone’s part — the SoCs they use are very outdated and near the end of their vender firmware and driver support, meaning they get maybe 2 years of the full support you’d expect when you say a manufacturer “supports” something, and then however many more years of hobbled support. Additionally, they’re just really bad about security.
You’ve got me down a rabbit hole now.
Shorter than expected SoC support is one thing, but the hardware root of trust trusting AOSP test keys which was also stated by GrapheneOS is something else. That’s a total amateurish blunder and the only reason it’s not a complete disaster is you need to boot into EDL mode first to actually flash a recovery. The verified boot is practically useless.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I’m not purchasing another phone from them. Unfortunate, because I liked the removable battery and seemingly long support. Back to the drawing board.
Yeah when I found out about the Fairphone originally I was extremely excited and really wanted one for my next phone, but I use GrapheneOS my pixel right now so I figure I just check why it doesn’t support it and sure enough I found this stuff :(
I though about getting a Fairphone but it really didn’t work for me due to the missing headphone jack.
I’ve got on okay without it but I already had Bluetooth headphones. It was understandably a pretty unpopular move.
I kind of questioned it from their “sustainability” ethos, too. It means more people might throw away working wired earphones and buy much more complicated, expensive Bluetooth ones… which use more resources to make.
Man I wish the Fairphone had a US version. I totally would have bought one.
Look into the king Kong Mini.
Big enough financial pockets, or trouser pockets? :-). One reason I am discouraged from getting a fairphone phone is that I like smaller mobile phone screens.
I got the king Kong Mini 2. The opposite of a brick (it’s tiny), probably US compatible, and the back literally has screws on it for when you need to change the battery/sim. Also £80
I had the battery for my OnePlus 6T replaced, extending the phone lifetime for probably 2 years. It cost me about $100.
Forcing manufacturers to make batteries easily replaceable by the user without special tools and skills seems like it could make phones less lightweight and less waterproof. I would be fine if they just require manufactures to make it available as a reasonably priced service.
I’m fine with internal batteries, but please use some form of standard cell size and connector.
The EU already standarized chargers IIRC.
Yeah, even Apple has to comply
EU already standardized on the USB C connector.
Back in the day I used to just keep 2-3 fully charged spare batteries if I went out. No need for a battery pack to recharge if I can just quickly swap battery and get a days worth of charge instantly.
I used to keep 2 extras as well back in the day when using the phone for an hour straight would kill it and I was on the go. I agree that batteries should be more easily replaced and the current design philosophy of hidden screws hidden behind a glued together screen is crazy .
That said I think power banks are better. They store better they are universal so you can use them with different phones and devices and thanks to that theres less e-waste. They take longer to charge but if you know you need it you can just plug in before you get too low so you dont have to be plugged in to long.
Agreed that power banks are better for those uses, but it’s also about what you do when the internal battery has degraded.
