The EU is displaying exactly the kind of political leadership we need in this topic: pro-consumer, pro-environment, and firmly against planned obsolescence. Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly. We only lost that standard when Apple’s 'walled garden' mindset infected the rest of the industry.
The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.
> Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly.
Phones back then were bad (so accommodating replaceable batteries was easy), and batteries degraded quickly (so it was a necessity).
Modern phones are smaller, need to be more water proof, stuffed to an unimaginable degree with components -- and modern batteries last a really long time.
I am not so sure it's a good idea to force them to become consumer replaceable again.
My iPhone SE (1st gen) ended up being pushed apart from the inside last year because the battery had swelled up. I could have had it replaced but the CPUs were a bit too weak for the modern world and the RAM too limited. A fresh new battery would not have upgraded the CPUs or the RAM.
Li-ion batteries have improved since 2016 so I expect the battery in my iPhone 16e to outlast the useful life of the CPUs and RAM in it.
> extract the remaining rare earths
More for the gold, I believe. There are youtubers who do it semi-professionally and are remarkably transparent about how they do it. It looks like the only really toxic fumes they contend with are a tiny bit of sulphuric acid vapour from their electrolytic baths.
I don't think we should ship the trash to Africa or poor parts of Asia. I don't see how replaceable batteries would have prevented my iPhone SE from becoming trash or have prevented my iPhone 16e from becoming trash in the future. Or preventing them from ending up in Africa/Asia, for that matter.
Edit: had accidentally written "back" in the first line when I meant "bad".
Edit 2: used the past tense by mistake ("expected the battery in my iPhone 16e").
>Modern phones are smaller, need to be more water proof, stuffed to an unimaginable degree with components -- and modern batteries last a really long time.
This argument always comes up when talking about replaceable smartphone batteries and headphone jacks. But Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.
I actually had a Galaxy S5 which I used as a GPS attached to my motorcycle's handlebars under heavy rain. It never skipped a beat. The only problem I had was that raindrops on the screen made it difficult to see the map. It was also thinner than the iPhone 7 which replaced it. Now I have an iPhone 14 pro which is even thicker than the 7.
I also had to replace the battery on that iPhone 7, which was an unbelievable PITA. Had to stand in line to talk to the service person even though I had an appointment, go away for a few hours, come back, stand in line again to pick up my phone. Fuck that. I'd much rather go to some store, buy a new battery, and replace it in less than one minute, on my terms.
So, yeah, pardon my French, but these tired arguments are just bullshit. There is prior art that proves them wrong.
> Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.
Also, Apple (and I assume others) were building stuff with non-replaceable batteries before they were building stuff that was waterproof. Clearly they're not sealed off in order to make them waterproof, because they were sealed off back when they weren't waterproof too.
Yeah, we have ultrasonic fingerprint sensors underneath displays, infrared structured light cameras, periscope telescopic lenses, foldable displays, computational photography, ... The mobile 5G infrastructure uses beam forming arrays ffs! and they want to tell us they can't make the battery replaceable??? Bullshit
I had the battery go in my first gen iPhone SE. I had it replaced for £40 and the thing is quite handy as a spare handset although as you say it's underspeced as an everyday phone.
I don't know what's wrong. Maybe an app that runs too much when it shouldn't? I know that the Facebook app used to be a battery killer roughly a decade ago.
The battery on the Pixel 6a should be good enough to make the phone run a whole day with no problem. It's almost exactly the same size as the battery in my iPhone 16e that has excellent battery life.
My iPhone, when it was new, 3 and a half years ago, could handle two days, while I used it heavily, with hotspot on for hours at places where signal was terrible. GPS was almost always on. And I used it heavily because I was on the go a lot. Two years later it couldn’t handle 12 hours if I use hotspot the same way for half the time as before, because I travel less, and even for that I needed to optimize already some apps.
My watch could handle a day (about 22 hours) with occasional direct network access. Nowadays, that’s out of the question. I cannot use it for the night, only if I charge it twice per day. I bought the exact same time as the iPhone.
I bought a beefy laptop two years ago. I used it with some battery saving option, and never charged more than 80%. I could use it for about 4 hours on battery. At first. Then now, I already can use it an hour less than back then with the same usage.
All of these devices lie to me, that I lost less than 20% of battery health. Where in reality it’s somewhere between 25-50%, and when they wouldn’t pretend that maximum output is any way a good indicator of the real battery life, aka how long you can use a device.
And yeah, apps. If we pretend that I don’t have misbehaving apps all the time. The difference is, that when I bought these devices, I could ignore them completely.
Removable batteries were standard in the early days of mobile phones (and laptops) out of necessity: batteries in those days just weren’t very good. They didn’t last long, took hours to charge, and wore out relatively quickly. You’d carry a spare battery around and swap over when your first one ran out.
Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!
I remember early cell phones (not smart phones, mind you) having weeks of standby time, or something like 20 hours of talk time. These had replaceable batteries. I don't recall people carrying spare batteries being a thing..?
Some of my early phones had spare batteries. They most certainly did NOT have weeks of standby time or 20 hours of talk time. We are talking late 90's.
Later, as phones and batteries got better, the spare batteries became unnecessary. They still degraded fast enough that there was a market for replacement batteries and they could indeed easily be replaced. We are talking things like the Nokia 3310.
Even later, the need for user replaceable batteries pretty much disappeared.
Standby times were indeed great in those days because those phones weren’t doing very much when they were idle. (Weeks may be an exaggeration, though!)
You might also be misremembering talk times, unless you had a phone with an exceptionally large battery.
A typical device like the Nokia 3210 had 3-4 hours talk time, which is far less than modern smartphones.
Mandating removable batteries does not _force_ you to buy a second battery. It _enables_ you to. By proxy this enables you to fix a failing battery yourself, at home. Replacing a battery instead of the whole device would create less e-waste. Just an example.
Further to the above, my Nokia (32|33|51)10's battery lasted a hell of a lot longer than any iPhone I have owned.
> Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!
My current iPhone's battery capacity is already starting to decrease and it was never great to begin with (needed it for work). If it was replaceable, I'd do what I used to with Android phones years ago - get a spare, if the old one is really bad or turning into a pillow, then recycle that and keep using the replacement, otherwise could use both side by side and didn't even need a separate charging bank.
Lots of people will look in the direction of getting a new phone altogether, I might have to do that as well, turning the whole phone into e-waste, instead of giving it 5 more years of lifetime.
Not true, they may have not been as good but the phones also didn't need so much power. I never had to buy a new battery for all the nokias I owned all the way until Nokia the company died.
The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.
I have such mixed feelings about the EU right now. This battery initiative is definitely a good idea, but I am not onboard with their constant attempts at censorship.
The problem is the member states -- and the voters in the member states. The EU is only a coordination mechanism for those states. It's nothing like the federal layer of the US, or the federal layer of Germany for that matter.
Many member states want censorship. Many MEPs want censorship.
We punish people for saying the truth. In Germany we fined a man for calling a fat politician fat. Which she definitely is, morbidly so. Stuff like that.
A bigger issue than the fine (which Much didn't have to pay because he won in court) is that the police thought it was a swell idea to search his house.
The fine was wrong, too, and the amount (6000€!) was absurd.
She should have challenged him to a duel instead. That would have been a lot more fair than mobilizing the state to fight battles that should never have been fought AND it would have put the risk where it should have been, namely on her shoulders (and stomach and thighs) instead of on his.
The German police thought it was within its rights to demand that a foreign social media platform hand over identifying information on a user that apparently called her "well-rounded" in a less polite manner.
I don't think the German police should search citizen's houses or demand identifying information about people who say things that aren't nice (but true).
This is the role we need governments to take. If you want your government to work like a corporation for some reason, why not go to a country where the govnment is weak and corporations bribe it instead? Would give you some good image how well that works.
But I get it. This ideology has more to do with how much money these types can then extract from a government and if implemented fully you would have some sort of neo-feudalism where everybody needs to pay them to even exist. But that is not a real utopian vision of something that moves humanity forward (quite literally the opposite).
Re. mobile phones it is because it allows sleeker and thinner design, and IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
But, really this is a non-issue because if you need a new battery for you phone, including iphone and samsung, just get it replaced. That's not super common to need it (again) but there is no issue having it done. I had it done before.
So overall I am skeptical that it will make a difference or that people will keep devices like phones longer because of this new mandate. I also doubt that the EU Parliament has data on this because many of those new regulations seem very hand-wavy to me and usually presented as obvious.
If you can quickly swap out an old phone battery with one you can purchase in a store, it's as easy as doing groceries.
If on the other hand you need to hand off your phone to a third party for repairs, and require people to make a backup of important data, maybe factory reset just in case, get a replacement device for the time without it, tell people you'll be unavailable for a bit... It's a big enough hurdle for people to think "well, guess it's a good enough excuse to upgrade to a new model". I've heard the latter too many times in my surroundings purely due to battery life issues.
The point being made is that if batteries can be replaced without specialized tools and training, the chances of that being done could be higher, potentially leading to longer usage time and reduced e-waste.
Consider that modern Li-ion batteries are better than older Li-ion batteries (and much better than nickel-metal-hydrides). The need for user-replaceable batteries in modern phones is on par with (or realistically a lot lower) than the need for user-replaceable screens.
My point is that things are rarely obvious. As you say, it "could". It is not obvious that it will make a difference and it might also increase the materials needed on both phones and battery.
I think the EU and European countries have much bigger fish to fry, including with regards to the environment.
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Different phone users have very different usage patterns, in my experience.
I don't use my smartphone at home (I have a PC), at work (I have a PC, and a sense of professionalism), in between (can't use a phone while driving or cycling), while exercising or while socialising (it'd defeat the purpose). I'm basically checking public transit schedules, calling taxis, making payments, and occasionally taking a photo or sending a message.
My phone's still at 80% when I put it to charge while I sleep.
On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work? A delivery/uber driver? A teenager without a computer of their own, who uses their phone for games and social media? And maybe they're on a budget so they have an older device and/or a smaller battery?
These folks are cycling their battery twice a day. Buying portable power banks. Getting fast chargers, for an early evening battery top-up.
It's these people who need to replace their batteries.
> On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work?
That could be me. I am amazed at the battery life of my iPhone 16e. I have no need for daily battery swaps.
(Apple claims something like 21 hours of video streaming on a full charge -- that's on Apple's own streaming service but it is still many hours on Netflix and Youtube.)
The "fast charger" is a tiny 20W USB-C charger that I no longer remember if I bought separately or not. It's nice and fast.
Modern phones are really good at not using much power. Modern batteries are remarkably energy dense. They also degrade slower than older batteries, among other reasons because we have better (and cheaper and greener) additives now. Thank you, Dalhousie and Tesla!
This is legislation that would have made a lot of sense 10-15-20 years ago. It is symbolic now (and likely to be slightly worse for the environment).
Replaceable batteries mean that you can just buy two or more and just carry them around so you can charge them less often. Alternatively you can charge the battery at home while you are away with the phone and have no down time for charging. (Down time meaning you can't carry the phone around.)
Interestingly if people start to buy extra batteries as you suggest then this will completely defeat the stated purpose of having replaceable batteries!
That being said, now they buy external power banks...
No it won't.
It's about reducing eWaste from the devices itself. Throwing away a whole device just because the battery is bad is much worse than just throwing away a worn out battery.
My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
Also external powerbanks are pretty unpractical compared to a fresh new internal battery.
> My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
But would it be doing well with only a new battery? Chances are a regulation that only regulates batteries won’t do much for tech that still is improving at a fairly decent rate.
It's running now with Fedora Linux, but it's still doing everything with 32GB RAM, and it's 2TB SSD what I need. (Editing Documents, doing some light coding, Python, R and browsing the Internet)
I also still get 10hrs battery life out of it.
I've thought already about replacing it, but it doesn't make any sense for me.
Especially that new ThinkPads in the T-Series have worse battery Life than I get right know due to their batteries being smaller and not anymore hot swappable.
I can't believe you're arguing in good faith. Obviously just replacing the battery is better than replacing the whole device and all it's components just because the battery is bad.
The User above also said he bought two or three batteries, so he can swap them out when the battery is empty (I've also done this with my laptop) and distributing the charging cycles between the batteries, so they will all last longer.
If he wasn't a power user, he wouldn't drop money on two or three batteries in the beginning, and just buy a new one when the old goes bad.
The mistake in your argument is thinking that buying batteries results directly in e-waste. It first results in more working batteries being used over the lifetime of a device. Whether that results in more or less waste batteries in wallclock time depends on how that affects the time the device is used. If batteries are also standardized and thus device independent, the device becoming waste also doesn't mean the battery becoming waste automatically.
Buying an extra battery is very different from buying an entire new phone and in no way it would offset the environmental gain of not buying an entire new phone.
Please don't engage in argument for argument's sake.
Pre-Regulation you couldn't even buy a genuine spare part, and they even did part pairing with batteries. Bothering you with stupid Nags when you went with the 3rd party shop
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Well, it was the most common thing to do for me - after a couple of years, you notice the battery performs worse, so you order a new one and enjoy brand new performance. Now it's hard to do even for laptops, especially some brands.
It’s pretty difficult to do that. iPhones are known to potentially lose some of their water resistance after a battery swap, as it’s hard to guarantee the replaced waterproof seal is as good as the factory one.
The EU battery regulation has exemptions for IP67-rated devices which retain 83% of original battery capacity after 500 charge cycles, which most modern smartphones will qualify for.
But we also want devices that are thin and lightweight. Watertight battery compartments are super easy (barely an inconvenience) if you "just" make the device thicker and heavier.
It is doable and with all the amazing achievements this is the thing that is too hard to get working? Also all new foldables are not water proof (yet).
Your MacBook isn't water proof either yet the battery is also permanently glued in. Why?
MacBook batteries have not been permanently glued in for quite some time. Replacement requires some disassembly but is perfectly doable for most techies.
Man, is it empty these days. The chart used to be pretty full. Now it only has about 1% of all phones that are in the Product Chart database. As the other 99% have fixed batteries.
I'm looking forward to see if the EU decision will push some companies to do this for their US versions too and revive the chart.
The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant [0]. The topic has been too obfuscated with hype pieces. Still, it would be nice to not have to break glass and melt glue to open up phones.
> The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant
“Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those batteries are readily removable and replaceable by the end-user at any time during the lifetime of the product. That obligation shall only apply to entire batteries and not to individual cells or other parts included in such batteries.
A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.”
Yeah, thank god. As long as it’s easy to remove and replacement batteries can easily be purchased by individuals, I want my phone and battery glued, thank you very much.
I like apples approach to removable battery glue. Though it needs an extra tool. These days it should be easy to make a cheap USB-C PD powered thing that supplies a good DC voltage.
Next EU could mandate an attitude adjustment to the industry wishing to sell their products in the European Common Market.
Batteries are part of a device.
There are other parts that can be replaced by the owner or third parties if there are sufficient parts supplies, either first-part or third-party, and these parts aren't explicitly killed by the device's DRM even if they're sourced outside of the manufacturer's own "replacement assemblies" that cost half the phone eventhough it's just a $10 part that needs replacing.
Further there is the software which is probably the most disposable of all. First of all, the keys to a device should come with the device. The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead.
Further, manufacturers should be forced to either keep supporting the device's software or release all the necessary blobs and parts as legal abandonware so that others can hack and reverse-engineer it further, allowing legal reimplementation of the software in open source.
Is this level of device ownership actually desirable by EU powers? Replaceable batteries enable all consumers, device rooting only a very small subset.
I would fly to Europe to buy my next phone if it ever happens though.
Device rooting isn't only of interest to developers. It also allows anyone to bypass the arbitrary rules set by Apple/Google on what software you can run. That's of interest to the whole population, even those who only use the app stores because it increases competition with the app stores.
> The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead.
This part is not going to happen, because security services need their backdoors intact. If you supply user with keys, they might flash the device with more secure operating system rendering any surveillance effort fruitless.
If I worked in a European intelligence agency, and considering how the the official US security policy revolves around bringing about regime change in Europe in support of far right extremist parties, and how supportive the tech company leadership seems to be of those goals, I would probably think that locking that very real existential threat to their democracies out would be a worthwhile tradeoff.
European governments and security services have their own surveillance and control agendas, most of them already use Palantir to enforce them. It's not like there are any "good" guys against "bad" ones.
Note that devices falling under the Ecodesign Regulation are exempt from this Battery Regulation, in particular smartphones and tablets, if they fulfill certain durability and repairability requirements (which are roughly already met today, at least by Apple).
So we won’t be seeing more easily replaceable batteries in smartphones and tablets.
The "removability and replaceability" requirement for portable batteries is a massive win for device longevity, but the Battery Passport is arguably the most sophisticated part of this framework.
By creating a standardized digital record for larger batteries, it provides the transparency needed to finally make a secondary market for "second-life" storage (like using old EV batteries for home solar) viable at scale. It’s a great example of how regulatory standards can help solve the information asymmetry that usually prevents circular economies from functioning efficiently. It will be interesting to see how this shifts industrial design priorities over the next few years.
The horse is out of the barn. It's easy to remove AI tells in short text, and impossible to moderate. Half the stuff you read online is AI (it's always more than you think) and the fix is to log off and buy books.
I hate that kind of thing though when it would come to smaller batteries. This battery passport prevents the user from replacing their car battery themselves easily. Which is entirely in contradiction to this legislation's objective for smaller devices which aims at making self-service easier. But it also links devices to their battery meaning one can not be recycled apart from the other!
It's already causing problems for me there. I often repair small electronic devices, or I remove the battery and repurpose them. For example I use some old tablets and phones with the (often bloated) battery removed, and replaced by a DC-DC converter set to 4 volts or so. This way the device 'thinks' there's a battery. Because most devices with an originally integrated battery will not even power up on USB power if they think the battery is not present or deep discharged. And bloated batteries are unsafe to keep on a charger 24/7 so I remove them.
However the local recycling point is getting increasingly difficult about accepting loose Li-Ion and Li-Po cells. I put them in individual ziplock bags and tape over the contacts but they seem to view them as industrial waste or something. They sent me to the central disposal unit far from the city center but even there they were very hesitant to accept them. And at one point they accused me of running a business because I had 5 different batteries to recycle (I had saved them up because they always give me such a hassle). I think businesses have to pay for recycling or something, I don't know and don't care because I don't run a business.
This in effect stimulates 2 things: People just throwing them in the normal bin which is a waste and can cause fire. Or recycling the whole device instead which is a waste of resources if the original device can still be used.
The battery passport links the device to its battery and only 'approved' facilities can break that link so I think this is a very bad idea for smaller devices when it comes to self-repair people like me. And I will fight that with a passion.
For EVs etc I don't know how that works, I don't use cars nor care about them. But I think even there being able to work on a car at home would be a good thing no?
The whole point is that people don't throw away their original device.
Yours situation seems rather niche, and it sounds like you might be going out of 'business' while at the same time allowing 1000x times the number of people to want to do dummy-self-repairs (i.e. replace their batteries) even if it's with a bit more theater about who is licensed.
The total number of people means much more demand - even for what you cook-up manually as not-a-business.
Like I said I don't have a business. I don't even do repairs for other people (unless for friends for free). Being accused of being a business was really annoying, I'm just a tinkerer so I have a lot of stuff I play with yes. I'm a member of a makerspace so used electronics are really nice.
I'm just worried they will start tracking individual components of devices too like they do with car batteries now and cause a lot of hassle if you do something that doesn't fit the standard flow. When it comes to EVs I don't give a shit because I hate cars, but once I can't repurpose other electronics anymore as I see fit, it will be a problem. I view this as a sneaky way of introducing a subscription model to electronics, like you don't really own the stuff you buy anymore. Like that evil WEF slogan: "You will own nothing and you will be happy".
An electric car battery can give 400-800 volt. Enough to kill or cause serious burn damage, unless the time of exposure is really short. Over 500 Volt is classified in medicine as high voltage accident. Carelessly manipulating this batteries at home is not a smart idea.
And 400V is pretty standard in homes here too (though to be fair one individual phase is 240 but still..). If you have a heat pump or a sizeable electric stove you will already have 400V.
The replaceable battery yes.. but the buried lede imo is the material recovery targets. EU imports basically 100% of its lithium and cobalt (https://rmis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/rmp/Lithium). Mandating high recycling rates for exactly those materials is industrial policy in an environmental costume. Same pattern as their payments regulation (https://philippdubach.com/posts/europes-24-trillion-payment-...), frame sovereignty as consumer protection and nobody fights you on it. Clever, honestly.
Not that I am against recycling of lithium and cobalt -- it's just that it isn't actually needed when we could fairly easily mine both if we wanted to. Lithium recycling is commercially viable as far as I know so there's no need for the EU to legislate anything. Cobalt recycling from bigger batteries probably is, other kinds of cobalt recycling probably isn't.
I mean, it's not really a costume. This is a case where a shrewd industrial policy genuinely goes hand-in-hand with what's best for the environment. Win-win.
Good news. My phone would have to live another couple of years, and the next one i buy would stay with me for a decade.
Just 10 years ago you could detach back of the smartphone with a nail, then switch the battery in a few seconds yourself. Smartphones even sometimes came with a second spare battery in the box!
Old smartphones were much lighter, smaller and thinner then modern shovel sized bricks with fat batteries. Screens were smaller and so the batteries too.
Phones are boring. They work fine already. I could use my current 3 year old phone another 6 years if it lived through the day without charging.
I replaced a battery in my (quite aged now at 6 years) old mobile last month. The original one puffed up and damaged the case holding the mobile together, incidentally it tested as 100% good in capacity! Took about an hour to replace the battery with an aftermarket replacement, quite fiddly work involving pludgers and tiny screws, cost more than double the price of the battery just for the specialist tools to get into it.
I miss the days of that first google phone where I could just pop the back and replace the battery, I used it quite a bit with a second battery. My modern phone lasts a bit longer so its less of a concern but batteries are a consumable we know they age out faster than the devices themselves and they ought to have been replacable.
> I miss the days of that first google device where I could just pop the back and replace the battery,
1. That's not a "Google device", you mean a smartphone.
2. For a large fraction of the smartphones available today (probably also Google Pixel's), you can still pop the back and replace the battery. The popping may be a bit more complicated, but it's doable. Naturally there's a tradeoff between convenient ergonomics for battery replacement and smaller dimensions of the phone case.
Many moons ago I bought a TP-Link Neffos precisely because you could swap out the battery. The problem is that TP-Link never sold replacement batteries in my country. When I tried buying a couple from China, I got used ones that barely lasted a few months.
If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.
It’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.
I agree, disposable vapes are an absolute perversion. I never thought we would come to a point where throw-away "technology" (e.g. microsystems, batteries) would be acceptable like a throw-away cigarette. Absolutely wicked, and again many politicians that have been captured by the vape industry to not act against it.
The UK banned disposable vapes, the suppliers now add a charging port and the ability to put in refills. The refills cost as much or more than the vapes so now people throw away the "reusable" vapes as if they were disposable.
I am not sure if thst is really a problem. Batteries of hearing aids have been replaceable for a while now.
There appears to be a few reason to become excempt from the rules, e.g. medical reasons (if it is in your body safety is more crucial than removability of the battery). So who knows what Apples lawyers will do with this.
Ah this would be too good to be truth. I had my iphone for 6 years and finally had to ditch it this year because of the battery. otherwise the device was good, all i needed. felt so bad that I should discard it just for the battery.
There's nothing I hate more about new Apple MacBook Pros than the batteries that I can't replace myself. It's such an ordeal go get an aging battery replaced, and I tend to go through them within a few years, due to high usage. Nowadays Apple appears to be demanding that you mail the laptop to them, instead of allowing same-day replacement, which I've done in the past.
I loved my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro, when I could simply flip the laptop over, unlatch the latches, and replace the battery entirely within seconds. It's an total shame we lost that. You could even carry an extra battery with you in a bag when traveling, in case you didn't have access to a charger.
As someone who does electronic repairs I welcome this. There are too many devices where the battery is the first point of failure and it is glued in. The number of batteries I could only remove with hot air and heat due to the battery being glued in is too damn high.
Heat for removal works but is always like defusing a inextinguishable bomb and takes much more time than it should. I also have rarely seen a design where the glue was really necessary for the design. Basically they could just have put the battery in without glue and it would have worked just as fine.
Maybe companies really need that kind of regulation to so the common sense right thing.
There are excemptions in cases where it is really technically needed as far as I can tell (medical, water-tightness for safety reasons, data integrity needed so battery can't be removed). I hope they are not too lax with those.
It's not so much about them being glued in but that nowdays they seem to be glued behind display and al the rest of the phone while there is no access from the back.
Adding a tiny strip of glue to the battery so it doesn't slosh around in the case is not a problem.
The problem is that you need heat to open up the device itself (all that is between the battery and the hot air gun is about 1mm of glass), followed by a bath in isopropanol and lots and lots of twaddling around with tweezers and spatulas to get the old glue residue removed from both the display and the case (risking damaging either in the process), followed by really annoying meticulous work to place a new glue sheet exactly onto the case (or display) to make sure it fits again. Oh and you always risk cracking the display while removing it.
That is a solved issue and has mainly to do with a badly designed connector and has been resolved since the late 2000s. Glued in batteries don't use any other connector than batteries that are glued in. And if your case isn't designed like shit a drop should not open it.
Try it with a modern Fairphone for example. I had one for years and not a single time the back lid fell off or the battery disconnected. I had a couple of batteries die in phones tho. General point: If you argue with people who have more experience on an issue than you, bring the receipts and red-team your own statement before you make it. Everything else doesn't really shine a good light on you.
And noscript/basic (x)html for web sites? They broke them to force the usage of whatng cartel web engines (or they were incompetent and/or malicious).
At least on critical sites.
GAFAM and big tech do not like protocols and file formats simple and able to do good enough job that stable in time, because you would not need the software they control.
You cannot buy EVs or other electronics at the moment with batteries because the batteries have a limited lifetime, it's about time, integrated batteries should have never had been a thing.
The EU is one of the worst tech regulators in existence. The only reason they have not yet tried to ban 3D printing is because they are too tech illiterate to have heard of it.
Phone batteries are already replaceable with standard tools. Instead of having waterproof phones, the EU wants to mandate back phones which die when you are caught in a shower. Reliable water proofing is only possible with gluing in seals, I really hope some lobbyist can actually show them what the consequence of their actions will be. I do not want to have to import a phone from the US to get a usable device.
Saving the environment by creating mountains of dead phones, killed by water, is such an incredible EU move.
Are they going to have an exception for waterproof phones? Seems like it would be challenging to implement replaceable batteries while maintaining waterproofing. Are there any waterproof phones on the market with removable batteries?
Why? You can use an o-ring around the seal and screws to press it together. Even simpler: a water bottle like you might bring to the gym or while hiking is water proof, without needing glue. It is a solved problem. But the solution adds tens of eurocents to the cost of the phone, so the manufacturers won't do it unless they are forced to.
iPhone batteries are already replaceable, albeit most people have to pay Apple to do it. Does this count as replaceable under this mandate, or is there an expectation that batteries must be replaceable by end-consumers on their own? Any requirements for what level of skill and tooling end-consumers are expected to have access to, such as specialized screwdrivers and re-waterproofing adhesives?
A portable battery shall be ... removable by the end-user ... with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any ... person that [markets] products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions ...
in other words you need to either make it easy and safe with standard tooling or include the tools people need.
Waterproof products are also specifically exempt.
EDIT: the "waterproof" requirement might leave less room for abuse than you'd think. It only extends to
appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable;
under this definition you could argue that an iPhone is not exempt, since it's not designed to operate primarily in water. How this is enforced seems to be mostly up to the various countries.
That seems a bit less clear to me. It seems to hinge on whether the courts believe that an iPhone is specifically designed to operate primarily in a wet environment.
They also have to be intended primarily to be used in very wet environments and washable/rinseable. So unless someone found Atlantis they will have a relatively difficult time using that as an out.
The EU is displaying exactly the kind of political leadership we need in this topic: pro-consumer, pro-environment, and firmly against planned obsolescence. Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly. We only lost that standard when Apple’s 'walled garden' mindset infected the rest of the industry.
The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.
> Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly.
Phones back then were bad (so accommodating replaceable batteries was easy), and batteries degraded quickly (so it was a necessity).
Modern phones are smaller, need to be more water proof, stuffed to an unimaginable degree with components -- and modern batteries last a really long time.
I am not so sure it's a good idea to force them to become consumer replaceable again.
My iPhone SE (1st gen) ended up being pushed apart from the inside last year because the battery had swelled up. I could have had it replaced but the CPUs were a bit too weak for the modern world and the RAM too limited. A fresh new battery would not have upgraded the CPUs or the RAM.
Li-ion batteries have improved since 2016 so I expect the battery in my iPhone 16e to outlast the useful life of the CPUs and RAM in it.
> extract the remaining rare earths
More for the gold, I believe. There are youtubers who do it semi-professionally and are remarkably transparent about how they do it. It looks like the only really toxic fumes they contend with are a tiny bit of sulphuric acid vapour from their electrolytic baths.
I don't think we should ship the trash to Africa or poor parts of Asia. I don't see how replaceable batteries would have prevented my iPhone SE from becoming trash or have prevented my iPhone 16e from becoming trash in the future. Or preventing them from ending up in Africa/Asia, for that matter.
Edit: had accidentally written "back" in the first line when I meant "bad".
Edit 2: used the past tense by mistake ("expected the battery in my iPhone 16e").
>Modern phones are smaller, need to be more water proof, stuffed to an unimaginable degree with components -- and modern batteries last a really long time.
This argument always comes up when talking about replaceable smartphone batteries and headphone jacks. But Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.
I actually had a Galaxy S5 which I used as a GPS attached to my motorcycle's handlebars under heavy rain. It never skipped a beat. The only problem I had was that raindrops on the screen made it difficult to see the map. It was also thinner than the iPhone 7 which replaced it. Now I have an iPhone 14 pro which is even thicker than the 7.
I also had to replace the battery on that iPhone 7, which was an unbelievable PITA. Had to stand in line to talk to the service person even though I had an appointment, go away for a few hours, come back, stand in line again to pick up my phone. Fuck that. I'd much rather go to some store, buy a new battery, and replace it in less than one minute, on my terms.
So, yeah, pardon my French, but these tired arguments are just bullshit. There is prior art that proves them wrong.
> Samsung had waterproof phones before Apple, and they still had replaceable batteries and, gasp a headphone jack.
Also, Apple (and I assume others) were building stuff with non-replaceable batteries before they were building stuff that was waterproof. Clearly they're not sealed off in order to make them waterproof, because they were sealed off back when they weren't waterproof too.
Yeah, we have ultrasonic fingerprint sensors underneath displays, infrared structured light cameras, periscope telescopic lenses, foldable displays, computational photography, ... The mobile 5G infrastructure uses beam forming arrays ffs! and they want to tell us they can't make the battery replaceable??? Bullshit
I had the battery go in my first gen iPhone SE. I had it replaced for £40 and the thing is quite handy as a spare handset although as you say it's underspeced as an everyday phone.
Tell that to my Pixel 6a which hardly holds a charge over a day.
I don't know what's wrong. Maybe an app that runs too much when it shouldn't? I know that the Facebook app used to be a battery killer roughly a decade ago.
The battery on the Pixel 6a should be good enough to make the phone run a whole day with no problem. It's almost exactly the same size as the battery in my iPhone 16e that has excellent battery life.
My iPhone, when it was new, 3 and a half years ago, could handle two days, while I used it heavily, with hotspot on for hours at places where signal was terrible. GPS was almost always on. And I used it heavily because I was on the go a lot. Two years later it couldn’t handle 12 hours if I use hotspot the same way for half the time as before, because I travel less, and even for that I needed to optimize already some apps.
My watch could handle a day (about 22 hours) with occasional direct network access. Nowadays, that’s out of the question. I cannot use it for the night, only if I charge it twice per day. I bought the exact same time as the iPhone.
I bought a beefy laptop two years ago. I used it with some battery saving option, and never charged more than 80%. I could use it for about 4 hours on battery. At first. Then now, I already can use it an hour less than back then with the same usage.
All of these devices lie to me, that I lost less than 20% of battery health. Where in reality it’s somewhere between 25-50%, and when they wouldn’t pretend that maximum output is any way a good indicator of the real battery life, aka how long you can use a device.
And yeah, apps. If we pretend that I don’t have misbehaving apps all the time. The difference is, that when I bought these devices, I could ignore them completely.
Removable batteries were standard in the early days of mobile phones (and laptops) out of necessity: batteries in those days just weren’t very good. They didn’t last long, took hours to charge, and wore out relatively quickly. You’d carry a spare battery around and swap over when your first one ran out.
Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!
I remember early cell phones (not smart phones, mind you) having weeks of standby time, or something like 20 hours of talk time. These had replaceable batteries. I don't recall people carrying spare batteries being a thing..?
Some of my early phones had spare batteries. They most certainly did NOT have weeks of standby time or 20 hours of talk time. We are talking late 90's.
Later, as phones and batteries got better, the spare batteries became unnecessary. They still degraded fast enough that there was a market for replacement batteries and they could indeed easily be replaced. We are talking things like the Nokia 3310.
Even later, the need for user replaceable batteries pretty much disappeared.
These days, it is entirely gone.
Standby times were indeed great in those days because those phones weren’t doing very much when they were idle. (Weeks may be an exaggeration, though!)
You might also be misremembering talk times, unless you had a phone with an exceptionally large battery.
A typical device like the Nokia 3210 had 3-4 hours talk time, which is far less than modern smartphones.
You can in fact still buy those kinds of phones and they still have removable batteries.
Mandating removable batteries does not _force_ you to buy a second battery. It _enables_ you to. By proxy this enables you to fix a failing battery yourself, at home. Replacing a battery instead of the whole device would create less e-waste. Just an example.
Further to the above, my Nokia (32|33|51)10's battery lasted a hell of a lot longer than any iPhone I have owned.
> Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!
My current iPhone's battery capacity is already starting to decrease and it was never great to begin with (needed it for work). If it was replaceable, I'd do what I used to with Android phones years ago - get a spare, if the old one is really bad or turning into a pillow, then recycle that and keep using the replacement, otherwise could use both side by side and didn't even need a separate charging bank.
Lots of people will look in the direction of getting a new phone altogether, I might have to do that as well, turning the whole phone into e-waste, instead of giving it 5 more years of lifetime.
Not true, they may have not been as good but the phones also didn't need so much power. I never had to buy a new battery for all the nokias I owned all the way until Nokia the company died.
The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.
A battery being replaceable has little to do with longevity or energy density.
You're confusing swappable with replaceable.
It's not for when you run out of power its for when the battery stops holding a charge. Phones almost always last much longer than their batteries.
I have such mixed feelings about the EU right now. This battery initiative is definitely a good idea, but I am not onboard with their constant attempts at censorship.
The problem is the member states -- and the voters in the member states. The EU is only a coordination mechanism for those states. It's nothing like the federal layer of the US, or the federal layer of Germany for that matter.
Many member states want censorship. Many MEPs want censorship.
What do you mean exactly with censorship?
We punish people for saying the truth. In Germany we fined a man for calling a fat politician fat. Which she definitely is, morbidly so. Stuff like that.
Because insults can be fined. That is a German law though, not an EU thing.
A bigger issue than the fine (which Much didn't have to pay because he won in court) is that the police thought it was a swell idea to search his house.
The fine was wrong, too, and the amount (6000€!) was absurd.
https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/03/german-businessman-cleared...
She should have challenged him to a duel instead. That would have been a lot more fair than mobilizing the state to fight battles that should never have been fought AND it would have put the risk where it should have been, namely on her shoulders (and stomach and thighs) instead of on his.
Another insulcident happened in January 2024:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ricarda_Lang&oldi...
The German police thought it was within its rights to demand that a foreign social media platform hand over identifying information on a user that apparently called her "well-rounded" in a less polite manner.
I don't think the German police should search citizen's houses or demand identifying information about people who say things that aren't nice (but true).
This is the role we need governments to take. If you want your government to work like a corporation for some reason, why not go to a country where the govnment is weak and corporations bribe it instead? Would give you some good image how well that works.
But I get it. This ideology has more to do with how much money these types can then extract from a government and if implemented fully you would have some sort of neo-feudalism where everybody needs to pay them to even exist. But that is not a real utopian vision of something that moves humanity forward (quite literally the opposite).
Re. mobile phones it is because it allows sleeker and thinner design, and IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
But, really this is a non-issue because if you need a new battery for you phone, including iphone and samsung, just get it replaced. That's not super common to need it (again) but there is no issue having it done. I had it done before.
So overall I am skeptical that it will make a difference or that people will keep devices like phones longer because of this new mandate. I also doubt that the EU Parliament has data on this because many of those new regulations seem very hand-wavy to me and usually presented as obvious.
People choose the path of least resistance.
If you can quickly swap out an old phone battery with one you can purchase in a store, it's as easy as doing groceries.
If on the other hand you need to hand off your phone to a third party for repairs, and require people to make a backup of important data, maybe factory reset just in case, get a replacement device for the time without it, tell people you'll be unavailable for a bit... It's a big enough hurdle for people to think "well, guess it's a good enough excuse to upgrade to a new model". I've heard the latter too many times in my surroundings purely due to battery life issues.
The point being made is that if batteries can be replaced without specialized tools and training, the chances of that being done could be higher, potentially leading to longer usage time and reduced e-waste.
Consider that modern Li-ion batteries are better than older Li-ion batteries (and much better than nickel-metal-hydrides). The need for user-replaceable batteries in modern phones is on par with (or realistically a lot lower) than the need for user-replaceable screens.
Obviously. I understand the stated aim.
My point is that things are rarely obvious. As you say, it "could". It is not obvious that it will make a difference and it might also increase the materials needed on both phones and battery.
I think the EU and European countries have much bigger fish to fry, including with regards to the environment.
> I think the EU and European countries have much bigger fish to fry, including with regards to the environment.
Yes. And they should fry those too.
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Different phone users have very different usage patterns, in my experience.
I don't use my smartphone at home (I have a PC), at work (I have a PC, and a sense of professionalism), in between (can't use a phone while driving or cycling), while exercising or while socialising (it'd defeat the purpose). I'm basically checking public transit schedules, calling taxis, making payments, and occasionally taking a photo or sending a message.
My phone's still at 80% when I put it to charge while I sleep.
On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work? A delivery/uber driver? A teenager without a computer of their own, who uses their phone for games and social media? And maybe they're on a budget so they have an older device and/or a smaller battery?
These folks are cycling their battery twice a day. Buying portable power banks. Getting fast chargers, for an early evening battery top-up.
It's these people who need to replace their batteries.
> On the other hand, a person who spends a load of time on public transit, streaming netflix the whole time? A person who listens to music all day while they work?
That could be me. I am amazed at the battery life of my iPhone 16e. I have no need for daily battery swaps.
(Apple claims something like 21 hours of video streaming on a full charge -- that's on Apple's own streaming service but it is still many hours on Netflix and Youtube.)
The "fast charger" is a tiny 20W USB-C charger that I no longer remember if I bought separately or not. It's nice and fast.
Modern phones are really good at not using much power. Modern batteries are remarkably energy dense. They also degrade slower than older batteries, among other reasons because we have better (and cheaper and greener) additives now. Thank you, Dalhousie and Tesla!
This is legislation that would have made a lot of sense 10-15-20 years ago. It is symbolic now (and likely to be slightly worse for the environment).
Replaceable batteries mean that you can just buy two or more and just carry them around so you can charge them less often. Alternatively you can charge the battery at home while you are away with the phone and have no down time for charging. (Down time meaning you can't carry the phone around.)
> ”Replaceable batteries mean that you can just buy two or more and just carry them around so you can charge them less often.”
If you think this is what the EU battery regulation means, I’ve got some bad news for you.
Besides, as others pointed out, encouraging people to carry around multiple batteries for their devices would just lead to more e-waste, not less.
Also, carrying “naked” Li-ion batteries that are not installed in a device is prohibited on airlines - another reason why it shouldn’t be encouraged!
Interestingly if people start to buy extra batteries as you suggest then this will completely defeat the stated purpose of having replaceable batteries!
That being said, now they buy external power banks...
No it won't. It's about reducing eWaste from the devices itself. Throwing away a whole device just because the battery is bad is much worse than just throwing away a worn out battery.
My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
Also external powerbanks are pretty unpractical compared to a fresh new internal battery.
> My 9 year old ThinkPad T470 is doing well with his 3rd or 4rd battery (and a new SSD and more RAM).
But would it be doing well with only a new battery? Chances are a regulation that only regulates batteries won’t do much for tech that still is improving at a fairly decent rate.
It's running now with Fedora Linux, but it's still doing everything with 32GB RAM, and it's 2TB SSD what I need. (Editing Documents, doing some light coding, Python, R and browsing the Internet) I also still get 10hrs battery life out of it.
I've thought already about replacing it, but it doesn't make any sense for me. Especially that new ThinkPads in the T-Series have worse battery Life than I get right know due to their batteries being smaller and not anymore hot swappable.
This is indeed a policy aimed at reducing e-waste, including resources and harmful substances from batteries.
So allow to find that "yay I can buy more batteries!" is a highly ironic response.
And again, all the statements that it this "obviously" better than possibly buying a new phone seem to lack any references to actual data...
I can't believe you're arguing in good faith. Obviously just replacing the battery is better than replacing the whole device and all it's components just because the battery is bad.
The User above also said he bought two or three batteries, so he can swap them out when the battery is empty (I've also done this with my laptop) and distributing the charging cycles between the batteries, so they will all last longer.
If he wasn't a power user, he wouldn't drop money on two or three batteries in the beginning, and just buy a new one when the old goes bad.
The mistake in your argument is thinking that buying batteries results directly in e-waste. It first results in more working batteries being used over the lifetime of a device. Whether that results in more or less waste batteries in wallclock time depends on how that affects the time the device is used. If batteries are also standardized and thus device independent, the device becoming waste also doesn't mean the battery becoming waste automatically.
But yeah, I can see the irony in my comment.
Buying an extra battery is very different from buying an entire new phone and in no way it would offset the environmental gain of not buying an entire new phone.
Please don't engage in argument for argument's sake.
> But, really this is a non-issue because if you need a new battery for you phone, including iphone and samsung, just get it replaced.
There's a big difference between buying a new battery for swapping it yourself and having to pay someone else to do the same for you.
The Galaxy S5 was only 8.1mm including camera bump, removable battery and IP67 rating.
Oh yeah, because paying Apple 120$ for a 30$ part is totally the same Vs just doing it on your own with no tools.
Also, your phone must be in pristine condition because otherwise you will need to "repair" tons of stuff you don't need repaired/replaced.
You can just use a third party shop.
Pre-Regulation you couldn't even buy a genuine spare part, and they even did part pairing with batteries. Bothering you with stupid Nags when you went with the 3rd party shop
> IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway.
Well, it was the most common thing to do for me - after a couple of years, you notice the battery performs worse, so you order a new one and enjoy brand new performance. Now it's hard to do even for laptops, especially some brands.
How do you make a phone with replaceable battery to also be water resistant?
It’s pretty difficult to do that. iPhones are known to potentially lose some of their water resistance after a battery swap, as it’s hard to guarantee the replaced waterproof seal is as good as the factory one.
The EU battery regulation has exemptions for IP67-rated devices which retain 83% of original battery capacity after 500 charge cycles, which most modern smartphones will qualify for.
Just tight fitting casing with some rubbery edges, nothing special. Just look at smart phones from ~10 years ago.
But we also want devices that are thin and lightweight. Watertight battery compartments are super easy (barely an inconvenience) if you "just" make the device thicker and heavier.
Most diving computers have replaceable batteries. Same for waterproof quartz watches. Why do you think this is impossible for mobile phones?
It is doable and with all the amazing achievements this is the thing that is too hard to get working? Also all new foldables are not water proof (yet).
Your MacBook isn't water proof either yet the battery is also permanently glued in. Why?
MacBook batteries have not been permanently glued in for quite some time. Replacement requires some disassembly but is perfectly doable for most techies.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Late+2020+B...
You have remove screws and be careful not to damage anything. Easy for you and me but not for the layman.
Sorry but why do we have to accept mediocre as acceptable these days? My old laptop had hot-swapable batteries.
I have been maintaining this chart of phones with replaceable batteries available in the USA for 10 years now:
https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/removable_battery
Man, is it empty these days. The chart used to be pretty full. Now it only has about 1% of all phones that are in the Product Chart database. As the other 99% have fixed batteries.
I'm looking forward to see if the EU decision will push some companies to do this for their US versions too and revive the chart.
The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant [0]. The topic has been too obfuscated with hype pieces. Still, it would be nice to not have to break glass and melt glue to open up phones.
[0] https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
> The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant
This is a follow-up directive that goes further. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...:
“Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those batteries are readily removable and replaceable by the end-user at any time during the lifetime of the product. That obligation shall only apply to entire batteries and not to individual cells or other parts included in such batteries.
A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.”
Yeah, thank god. As long as it’s easy to remove and replacement batteries can easily be purchased by individuals, I want my phone and battery glued, thank you very much.
I like apples approach to removable battery glue. Though it needs an extra tool. These days it should be easy to make a cheap USB-C PD powered thing that supplies a good DC voltage.
The electricity-controlled glue in Apple's iPhone is made by Tesa, a German Glue company
I don't see any Fairphone on the page, they are not sold in the US?
I'm not sure. I have not seen them on any large retailer in the USA like Amazon, Walmart, Newegg, BestBuy etc.
Maybe if someone here is in the USA and has bought one, they can chime in and tell where they got it from?
Yes, they are. The Fairphone 6 is available in the US through their official partner Murena.
You should add this phone to your list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
Next EU could mandate an attitude adjustment to the industry wishing to sell their products in the European Common Market.
Batteries are part of a device.
There are other parts that can be replaced by the owner or third parties if there are sufficient parts supplies, either first-part or third-party, and these parts aren't explicitly killed by the device's DRM even if they're sourced outside of the manufacturer's own "replacement assemblies" that cost half the phone eventhough it's just a $10 part that needs replacing.
Further there is the software which is probably the most disposable of all. First of all, the keys to a device should come with the device. The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead.
Further, manufacturers should be forced to either keep supporting the device's software or release all the necessary blobs and parts as legal abandonware so that others can hack and reverse-engineer it further, allowing legal reimplementation of the software in open source.
Is this level of device ownership actually desirable by EU powers? Replaceable batteries enable all consumers, device rooting only a very small subset.
I would fly to Europe to buy my next phone if it ever happens though.
Device rooting isn't only of interest to developers. It also allows anyone to bypass the arbitrary rules set by Apple/Google on what software you can run. That's of interest to the whole population, even those who only use the app stores because it increases competition with the app stores.
Us hardware EU software is an excellent stop gap until full digital autonomy.
> The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead.
This part is not going to happen, because security services need their backdoors intact. If you supply user with keys, they might flash the device with more secure operating system rendering any surveillance effort fruitless.
If I worked in a European intelligence agency, and considering how the the official US security policy revolves around bringing about regime change in Europe in support of far right extremist parties, and how supportive the tech company leadership seems to be of those goals, I would probably think that locking that very real existential threat to their democracies out would be a worthwhile tradeoff.
European governments and security services have their own surveillance and control agendas, most of them already use Palantir to enforce them. It's not like there are any "good" guys against "bad" ones.
Note that devices falling under the Ecodesign Regulation are exempt from this Battery Regulation, in particular smartphones and tablets, if they fulfill certain durability and repairability requirements (which are roughly already met today, at least by Apple).
So we won’t be seeing more easily replaceable batteries in smartphones and tablets.
> in particular smartphones and tablets, if they fulfill certain durability and repairability requirements
Which is exactly the way it should be.
The moment I saw the post title, I knew this couldn’t actually be true. Thanks for confirming that it isn’t.
If I read this correctly they are concerned about 2 things: harmful substances in batteries and cars with huge batteries that cannot be changed.
Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.
The "removability and replaceability" requirement for portable batteries is a massive win for device longevity, but the Battery Passport is arguably the most sophisticated part of this framework.
By creating a standardized digital record for larger batteries, it provides the transparency needed to finally make a secondary market for "second-life" storage (like using old EV batteries for home solar) viable at scale. It’s a great example of how regulatory standards can help solve the information asymmetry that usually prevents circular economies from functioning efficiently. It will be interesting to see how this shifts industrial design priorities over the next few years.
Is this comment AI-generated? All recent comments from this account are two paragraphs-long, and are a vague retelling or the article.
The horse is out of the barn. It's easy to remove AI tells in short text, and impossible to moderate. Half the stuff you read online is AI (it's always more than you think) and the fix is to log off and buy books.
> Is this comment AI-generated?
Who cares? What matters is whether it is good. I’d rather read a good comment that’s computer generated than a bad one written by a human.
I care. Online forums are for humans to share ideas around. Not for bots to farm karma.
I hate constantly discussing this but this one is quite interesting.
"It's a great example of..." definitely set off my slop alarm.
On the other hand it isn't actually "a vague retelling of the article" it's picking out a particular element that the commenter wanted to highlight.
My take: "Is this AI-generated?" is often the inadvertent compliment paid to those who can write decent English by those who can't.
It is, and they've just posted another one.
I hate that kind of thing though when it would come to smaller batteries. This battery passport prevents the user from replacing their car battery themselves easily. Which is entirely in contradiction to this legislation's objective for smaller devices which aims at making self-service easier. But it also links devices to their battery meaning one can not be recycled apart from the other!
It's already causing problems for me there. I often repair small electronic devices, or I remove the battery and repurpose them. For example I use some old tablets and phones with the (often bloated) battery removed, and replaced by a DC-DC converter set to 4 volts or so. This way the device 'thinks' there's a battery. Because most devices with an originally integrated battery will not even power up on USB power if they think the battery is not present or deep discharged. And bloated batteries are unsafe to keep on a charger 24/7 so I remove them.
However the local recycling point is getting increasingly difficult about accepting loose Li-Ion and Li-Po cells. I put them in individual ziplock bags and tape over the contacts but they seem to view them as industrial waste or something. They sent me to the central disposal unit far from the city center but even there they were very hesitant to accept them. And at one point they accused me of running a business because I had 5 different batteries to recycle (I had saved them up because they always give me such a hassle). I think businesses have to pay for recycling or something, I don't know and don't care because I don't run a business.
This in effect stimulates 2 things: People just throwing them in the normal bin which is a waste and can cause fire. Or recycling the whole device instead which is a waste of resources if the original device can still be used.
The battery passport links the device to its battery and only 'approved' facilities can break that link so I think this is a very bad idea for smaller devices when it comes to self-repair people like me. And I will fight that with a passion.
For EVs etc I don't know how that works, I don't use cars nor care about them. But I think even there being able to work on a car at home would be a good thing no?
I have no clue what you're trying to say.
The whole point is that people don't throw away their original device.
Yours situation seems rather niche, and it sounds like you might be going out of 'business' while at the same time allowing 1000x times the number of people to want to do dummy-self-repairs (i.e. replace their batteries) even if it's with a bit more theater about who is licensed.
The total number of people means much more demand - even for what you cook-up manually as not-a-business.
Like I said I don't have a business. I don't even do repairs for other people (unless for friends for free). Being accused of being a business was really annoying, I'm just a tinkerer so I have a lot of stuff I play with yes. I'm a member of a makerspace so used electronics are really nice.
I'm just worried they will start tracking individual components of devices too like they do with car batteries now and cause a lot of hassle if you do something that doesn't fit the standard flow. When it comes to EVs I don't give a shit because I hate cars, but once I can't repurpose other electronics anymore as I see fit, it will be a problem. I view this as a sneaky way of introducing a subscription model to electronics, like you don't really own the stuff you buy anymore. Like that evil WEF slogan: "You will own nothing and you will be happy".
An electric car battery can give 400-800 volt. Enough to kill or cause serious burn damage, unless the time of exposure is really short. Over 500 Volt is classified in medicine as high voltage accident. Carelessly manipulating this batteries at home is not a smart idea.
Who says I'm careless?
And 400V is pretty standard in homes here too (though to be fair one individual phase is 240 but still..). If you have a heat pump or a sizeable electric stove you will already have 400V.
Lets see how long it takes this time until someone shows up and calls the EU a nanny state.
It's 5am in New York, not even the most dedicated anti EU Americans are up yet.
We need untravelled Americans with BMIs in the high 30s to log on to explain Europe to us. Until they've arrived, I don't know what to think.
... and luckily, no one cared enough yet to automate the astroturfing
I wish all states were as nanny as the EU. We would live in a way better world.
As soon as Australians and Canadians who have their governments captured by big interests and don't want to admit it wake up, no doubt
It's 9pm in Australia right now mate, and I have no idea what we're supposed to be doing? Not liking this? Why?
No it's not, it's 6pm!
The replaceable battery yes.. but the buried lede imo is the material recovery targets. EU imports basically 100% of its lithium and cobalt (https://rmis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/rmp/Lithium). Mandating high recycling rates for exactly those materials is industrial policy in an environmental costume. Same pattern as their payments regulation (https://philippdubach.com/posts/europes-24-trillion-payment-...), frame sovereignty as consumer protection and nobody fights you on it. Clever, honestly.
> EU imports basically 100% of its lithium
We don't have to. There's a large spodumene resource in Portugal.
> and cobalt
Finland alone could cover all of the European Union's need for cobalt even with zero recycling.
https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/geoenergy20...
Not that I am against recycling of lithium and cobalt -- it's just that it isn't actually needed when we could fairly easily mine both if we wanted to. Lithium recycling is commercially viable as far as I know so there's no need for the EU to legislate anything. Cobalt recycling from bigger batteries probably is, other kinds of cobalt recycling probably isn't.
I mean, it's not really a costume. This is a case where a shrewd industrial policy genuinely goes hand-in-hand with what's best for the environment. Win-win.
Good news. My phone would have to live another couple of years, and the next one i buy would stay with me for a decade.
Just 10 years ago you could detach back of the smartphone with a nail, then switch the battery in a few seconds yourself. Smartphones even sometimes came with a second spare battery in the box!
Old smartphones were much lighter, smaller and thinner then modern shovel sized bricks with fat batteries. Screens were smaller and so the batteries too.
Phones are boring. They work fine already. I could use my current 3 year old phone another 6 years if it lived through the day without charging.
I replaced a battery in my (quite aged now at 6 years) old mobile last month. The original one puffed up and damaged the case holding the mobile together, incidentally it tested as 100% good in capacity! Took about an hour to replace the battery with an aftermarket replacement, quite fiddly work involving pludgers and tiny screws, cost more than double the price of the battery just for the specialist tools to get into it.
I miss the days of that first google phone where I could just pop the back and replace the battery, I used it quite a bit with a second battery. My modern phone lasts a bit longer so its less of a concern but batteries are a consumable we know they age out faster than the devices themselves and they ought to have been replacable.
> I miss the days of that first google device where I could just pop the back and replace the battery,
1. That's not a "Google device", you mean a smartphone.
2. For a large fraction of the smartphones available today (probably also Google Pixel's), you can still pop the back and replace the battery. The popping may be a bit more complicated, but it's doable. Naturally there's a tradeoff between convenient ergonomics for battery replacement and smaller dimensions of the phone case.
Many moons ago I bought a TP-Link Neffos precisely because you could swap out the battery. The problem is that TP-Link never sold replacement batteries in my country. When I tried buying a couple from China, I got used ones that barely lasted a few months.
If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.
I’m curious how Apple will malicious-compliance its way out of this one. It will have to be no more iDevices for the EU, I guess.
It’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.
I agree, disposable vapes are an absolute perversion. I never thought we would come to a point where throw-away "technology" (e.g. microsystems, batteries) would be acceptable like a throw-away cigarette. Absolutely wicked, and again many politicians that have been captured by the vape industry to not act against it.
The UK banned disposable vapes, the suppliers now add a charging port and the ability to put in refills. The refills cost as much or more than the vapes so now people throw away the "reusable" vapes as if they were disposable.
Unintentional consequences. I expect there will be some from this law as well.
Yes, they will be banned to EU-wide
I would argue that under WEEE disposable vapes were never legal, it's just that nobody cares and EU directives rely on self-enforcement.
Next time you see one, look for the "no bin" symbol)
It came up recently in local news. I wonder how they force that for earphones...
I have a pair of fairbuds that have user replaceable batteries.
I am not sure if thst is really a problem. Batteries of hearing aids have been replaceable for a while now.
There appears to be a few reason to become excempt from the rules, e.g. medical reasons (if it is in your body safety is more crucial than removability of the battery). So who knows what Apples lawyers will do with this.
I never looked into hearing aids - would the interchangeability affect weight ?
The regulation is mostly meant for light electric vehicles for now
Where do you get this from? From what I could see it applied to everything from cars to laptops.
Ah this would be too good to be truth. I had my iphone for 6 years and finally had to ditch it this year because of the battery. otherwise the device was good, all i needed. felt so bad that I should discard it just for the battery.
There's nothing I hate more about new Apple MacBook Pros than the batteries that I can't replace myself. It's such an ordeal go get an aging battery replaced, and I tend to go through them within a few years, due to high usage. Nowadays Apple appears to be demanding that you mail the laptop to them, instead of allowing same-day replacement, which I've done in the past.
I loved my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro, when I could simply flip the laptop over, unlatch the latches, and replace the battery entirely within seconds. It's an total shame we lost that. You could even carry an extra battery with you in a bag when traveling, in case you didn't have access to a charger.
This is so good.
I have a perfectly working iPhone se 3rd gen that’s becoming unusable because the battery is work out after four years of daily use.
I don’t want to change the whole phone, but I’m pretty much forced to and turn it into ewaste.
External battery and transparent duct tape?
As someone who does electronic repairs I welcome this. There are too many devices where the battery is the first point of failure and it is glued in. The number of batteries I could only remove with hot air and heat due to the battery being glued in is too damn high.
Heat for removal works but is always like defusing a inextinguishable bomb and takes much more time than it should. I also have rarely seen a design where the glue was really necessary for the design. Basically they could just have put the battery in without glue and it would have worked just as fine.
Maybe companies really need that kind of regulation to so the common sense right thing.
There are excemptions in cases where it is really technically needed as far as I can tell (medical, water-tightness for safety reasons, data integrity needed so battery can't be removed). I hope they are not too lax with those.
Gluing batteries solved the old issue where you would drop your phone and it would shut down.
How big an issue was that really? Pick it up and put it back together and it turns on again.
It's not so much about them being glued in but that nowdays they seem to be glued behind display and al the rest of the phone while there is no access from the back.
Adding a tiny strip of glue to the battery so it doesn't slosh around in the case is not a problem.
The problem is that you need heat to open up the device itself (all that is between the battery and the hot air gun is about 1mm of glass), followed by a bath in isopropanol and lots and lots of twaddling around with tweezers and spatulas to get the old glue residue removed from both the display and the case (risking damaging either in the process), followed by really annoying meticulous work to place a new glue sheet exactly onto the case (or display) to make sure it fits again. Oh and you always risk cracking the display while removing it.
That is a solved issue and has mainly to do with a badly designed connector and has been resolved since the late 2000s. Glued in batteries don't use any other connector than batteries that are glued in. And if your case isn't designed like shit a drop should not open it.
Try it with a modern Fairphone for example. I had one for years and not a single time the back lid fell off or the battery disconnected. I had a couple of batteries die in phones tho. General point: If you argue with people who have more experience on an issue than you, bring the receipts and red-team your own statement before you make it. Everything else doesn't really shine a good light on you.
And noscript/basic (x)html for web sites? They broke them to force the usage of whatng cartel web engines (or they were incompetent and/or malicious).
At least on critical sites.
GAFAM and big tech do not like protocols and file formats simple and able to do good enough job that stable in time, because you would not need the software they control.
You cannot buy EVs or other electronics at the moment with batteries because the batteries have a limited lifetime, it's about time, integrated batteries should have never had been a thing.
At https://infinite-battery.com we built just that: a repairable and re-generable battery for e-bikes :)
We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!
The EU is one of the worst tech regulators in existence. The only reason they have not yet tried to ban 3D printing is because they are too tech illiterate to have heard of it.
Phone batteries are already replaceable with standard tools. Instead of having waterproof phones, the EU wants to mandate back phones which die when you are caught in a shower. Reliable water proofing is only possible with gluing in seals, I really hope some lobbyist can actually show them what the consequence of their actions will be. I do not want to have to import a phone from the US to get a usable device.
Saving the environment by creating mountains of dead phones, killed by water, is such an incredible EU move.
Are they going to have an exception for waterproof phones? Seems like it would be challenging to implement replaceable batteries while maintaining waterproofing. Are there any waterproof phones on the market with removable batteries?
Why? You can use an o-ring around the seal and screws to press it together. Even simpler: a water bottle like you might bring to the gym or while hiking is water proof, without needing glue. It is a solved problem. But the solution adds tens of eurocents to the cost of the phone, so the manufacturers won't do it unless they are forced to.
I Can change the battery on my waterproof watch just fine
Sony made a water-proof phone long before fixed batteries became fashionable.
Samsung too
Before they found out they could sell more phones glueing batteries, my waterproof phone had a replaceable battery and a 3.5mm jack.
iPhone batteries are already replaceable, albeit most people have to pay Apple to do it. Does this count as replaceable under this mandate, or is there an expectation that batteries must be replaceable by end-consumers on their own? Any requirements for what level of skill and tooling end-consumers are expected to have access to, such as specialized screwdrivers and re-waterproofing adhesives?
cutting out quite a bit from section 11:
in other words you need to either make it easy and safe with standard tooling or include the tools people need.Waterproof products are also specifically exempt.
EDIT: the "waterproof" requirement might leave less room for abuse than you'd think. It only extends to
under this definition you could argue that an iPhone is not exempt, since it's not designed to operate primarily in water. How this is enforced seems to be mostly up to the various countries.Thanks. So this is not going to lead to user-replaceable batteries on iPhones.
That seems a bit less clear to me. It seems to hinge on whether the courts believe that an iPhone is specifically designed to operate primarily in a wet environment.
Just iPhones sold in the UK then perhaps.
The UK is not in the EU.
>Waterproof products
Suddenly, all phones will be waterproof.
They also have to be intended primarily to be used in very wet environments and washable/rinseable. So unless someone found Atlantis they will have a relatively difficult time using that as an out.