How do you think smartphone manufacturers will comply with EU's replaceable battery regulation?
I have a feeling they're gonna charge like $200 to $400 more then blame the regulators.
Battery replacement is an issue, but is easily solved with good design. I don't need the thinnest phone that's difficult to hold, a few extra mm won't affect my life negatively. I'd rather have something usable and maintainable.
My biggest gripe however is the built in obsolesce of software support life. Perfectly good electronics are rendered useless by the system not receiving software / security updates after a couple of years.
Only EU is doing the right thing here for consumers.
Some manufacturers have longer support than others. I don’t know how to encourage that but maybe there needs to be a minimum acceptable
That's how all computing hardware works since the early days of the industry apart from x86 architecture. Not sure why people only started noticing that recently after literally decades of software obsolescence.
Routine updates. Until recently hardware was getting better at such a rate they'd upgrade before software became an issue. The power increase curve has mostly plateau'd over the past several years so the incentive to upgrade is significantly lower so people are keeping their older hardware for longer and suddenly seeing the problems. That and the average user is now getting more aware of security updates.
Samsung somehow managed to include removable battery, a headphone jack and SD card slot in the XCover 6 Pro while maintaining ip67 rating and a price of under 700 euros. I'm sure they'll be able to figure it out.
It's available for ~400€ where I am
looks around
.............why's he talking about my phone?
I've got one too!
I'd like to see a requirement for microSD card storage. The cost of storage an phones is entirely deplorable
Oh yea. One of the reasons why I went for a Samsung A-Series instead of the S-Series is the microSD card slot. Yes, that slot is just soooo goood.
I can get an A series phone for like $400 with IP67 Water Resistance, and buy a $130 1TB MicroSD card and Voila, a 1TB phone. The cheapest Galaxy S-Series phone with 1TB storage is a $1500 Galaxy S-Something Ultra.
Like bruh, I don't want to pay $1000 more if all I want to do is watch youtube videos with it.
I can have an offline wikipedia, like 10 TV shows, a few movies, the top 100 of my favorite Youtube Videos, thousands of books (that I'll probably never read), cat photos, more cat photos, cat videos, and even more cat videos... etc...
I have a mini computer in my pocket.
Sadly no replaceable battery tho 🤷♂️
Begrudgingly
Just a couple of years back, you would get replacable batteries, at least from "phone shops" with dedicated tools.
Designing a water tight enclosure which can be opened to replace a battery isn't exactly rocket science. It doesn't need to be as easy as a fairphone.
Sure some brands will do malicious conpliance and guess what, people will bux from other brands.
Hopefully, the phone manufacturing oligarchs don't collude and collaborate.
Wasn’t it actually apple with the adhesive strips that can easily be removed when a current is applied? Such tech would be awesome if more generally available
It sounds like the regulation is weak enough that the manufacturers won't have to do much. I have to say batteries or chargers have gotten better. Batteries used to fail all the time, but they last much longer now. So people are less bothered.
they will put the battery in a section not waterproof under the back cover. the replacement battery will come with a waterproof glue circle around the contacts. when replacing it, you will rub off some old glue and seal it again by inserting the new one. water can enter the back cover, but do no harm there.
They'll make them replaceable and ignore waterproofing them for 99% of models citing the added difficulty in making a good seal without being able to glue it shut. Which is arguably true. It's possible, but more difficult to design and much more likely to fail.
They’ll make them replaceable and ignore waterproofing them for 99% of models citing the added difficulty in making a good seal without being able to glue it shut. Which is arguably true.
Take a look at Samsung Galaxy XCover 6 Pro
it's still in production and being sold lol
I never said it was impossible. I said it was harder to both make them replaceable and water resistant. And they won't bother to do both for 99% of models, they'll just drop the water resistance to comply with replaceable battery requirements. There might be a few that they bother and then sell at inflated prices.
That's a ruggedized phone, most people don't want a phone that's twice as thick and doesn't provide anywhere near twice the battery.
I don't know why waterproofing phones became de facto standard. How often will that waterproofing actually come to use?
Having worked in retail phone repair for 15 years, both for a major US carrier and privately... A lot.
I saw water damaged phones every single day, and I'm hundreds of miles from an ocean, sea, lake, or any major body of water. That's just from mistakes near things like backyard pools.
This is because waterproof devices will be might be exempt from having to have replaceable batteries.
Some manufacturers are already eyeing an exemption for batteries used in "wet conditions" to opt out electric toothbrushes and possibly wearables like earbuds and smartwatches. The exemption is "based on unfounded safety claims," states Thomas Opsomer, policy engineer for iFixit, in RepairEU's post.
They'll either make the phones dumb again, or make the batteries replaceable again.
If they do the latter, they'll probably just make them even thinner, requiring you to replace them more often.
they'll make smaller shittier batteries that die more quickly so that they can charge more to replace them and put proprietary control chips inside them so either third party manufacturers of better batteries will have to "violate copyright" in order to make them work or YOU'LL be required to "violate copyright" to make them work, thus locking most people without the technical skills to circumvent the 'security' into only buying the shitty 'official' batteries until MORE regulation comes along to make them cut that shit out. In the mean time they'll be blaming the regulations for the shittiness they adopted.
If your battery is replaceable, there will be cheaper 3rd party options.
We will have to see.
Apple can charge $400 more, but if Samsung doesn't, then they will lose market share.
And the EU is still one of the worlds three biggest markets.
So I am not really concerned.
And worst case, I switch to a Fairphone, which might not be bleeding edge, but it is still a better phone than my previous gen flagship Samsung or the flagship iPhone that came before it.
I see it as just running 2 years behind.
I need to see the regulations before I make a prediction.
They will sell repair kits.
As far as I know, they'll have to include it with the sale of the phone in order to be compliant.
Not the battery itself, but like the tools to do the battery replacement.