Hooray! Younger generations will finally be able to experience the joy of dropping their phone and having to pick up three to four different pieces! /s
(I’m all for this change, by the way)
I do miss being able to swap out a phone battery and this will certainly be a step in the right direction in terms ewaste and device longevity.
One thing that I wonder about is waterproofing or water resistance. Some phones are basically waterproof in shallow water. How achievable is this with a device with a trivial way to remove the battery?
They can just seal the rest of the components exposing just a connection for the battery. There were water resistant phones before, the major reason they decided to make the battery unremovable was to make people buy new phones. Nobody wants to charge their phones multiple times a day.
People make this argument and barely anyone really uses the waterprooding features of a phone
You know, I really like my Essential Ph-1. It was a lovely little phone. I had the little 360 camera accessory that snapped on magentically and everything. It was so cool! Then, 1.5 seconds, dropped into water from which I grabbed it instantly, and it was done. No warranty coverage for dropping it in water, and zero waterproofing, and toasted phone. So, yes, more of us “use” waterproofing on our phones than you would think. The thing is that it didn’t need to be this way. There were waterproof phones back before everything was glued glass slabs all the time. Galaxy S5 Sport as mentioned by @HubbleST@lemm.ee above (and other “sport” edition phones). We have a lot of hygrophobic coatings and tech we didn’t have in the day of the Galaxy S5 series. We can do better now, if manufacturers are forced to.
Although this is obviously a step in the right direction it needs to be followed up with security updates, no point increasing the life of the hardware without doing the same for the software.
Making it illegal to lock bootloaders would make each device community-maintainable.
This is actually pretty crazy. Wonder how much it’ll affect the overall design of modern smartphones. Will we witness the return of flagships with plastic back covers?
I couldn’t care less if the back cover is plastic, it’s just going inside a case anyway.
Yeesh I hope not.
I hope everything just becomes brushed aluminum ffs. I hate all these glass back phones
Phones only have glass backs to let wireless charging work so I don’t see aluminium making a come back any time soon.
I hate wireless charging too, though. It’s inherently less efficient than wired, and you have less range of motion while charging. With a wire, I can still use my phone while it’s plugged in. Wireless charging needs to go away imo.
And now they just have to force manufacturers to either at least security patch devices for, let’s say 10 years, or force them to open source everything the community needs to continue supporting this device. It never happened to me that the battery died before support ended.
Just had that issue with my Pixel 3a XL. No more security updates. Had to replace it with a Pixel 6a but I liked the 3a XL more. It there was any community support for the 3a XL, I would rather sell my 6a again.
As an Apple user, I definitely have batteries die before the product stops being useful. The company provides feature updates for old phones for several years, and when that runs out they continue to provide security patches for several more years.
A new iPhone battery is only $47 (if you do the repair yourself, and if you send your old battery back to Apple for a recycling credit), but it’s a pretty complex and arduous process with a fair chance of damaging your phone while attempting it. You also have to pay a deposit, over a thousand dollars, to rent the tools off Apple. Ouch.
You can take it to an Apple store, but that takes even longer than doing the repair yourself. And it costs more (though you don’t have to pay the outrageous deposit for the tools).
This legislation would force Apple to make it a simple process with no tools. Yes please.
Do y’all remember the days when you dropped your phone and it exploded into 3 or 4 pieces? 🤣 Those were the good days.
Three. Battery, cover and the rest. Weirdly, no damage to the plastic display. How? I guess it was the
weatherbezelAnd when you scratched up the back you bought a new one for $12. No $200 glass or machined aluminum cases that we put $35 covers on just to protect them from every day use.
Well, it was plastic. Pretty hard to crack plastic like glass
I can’t wait to hear the Apple marketing word for this feature. They’ll add some gimmick like the battery is held in with magnets and say “We call it MagPack and we think you’re going to love it.”
How is this a win? My non-Android device is at 89% health after 5 years. I’m not going to replace the battery, I’m going to replace the device.
I’d prefer that we get paid $20 to recycle an old phone so that they actually get recycled.
Opposite boat. My perfectly good device gets replaced after about 4 years because it struggles to hold a charge. I don’t give a shit about iterative phone specs, and I say that as a tech enthusiast.
Because not everyone has the same anecdotal experience as you?
About bloody time! Devices these days are so far technically advanced, no need to upgrade every 2 years. I can hold onto a phone for easily 3-5 years. Especially with hot swap batteries!
Doesn’t this mean no waterproof then? Idk… I’m all down for right to repair but I’d rather choose struggling to remove glued battery from my phone maybe once every 2-3 years than to lose waterproof…
I’ve never understood the whole waterproof thing. I’ve never been in an instance where my phone was in any danger of getting wet. I get float trips and stuff but that seems like an uncommon case and even then there are ways to waterproof a phone temporarily.
I don’t think a phone needs to be 100% waterproof to 50 metres, but some amount of water-resistance is just good product design. Companies should not be encouraging people to dunk their phones in water, I think IP ratings sadly encourage this as well as some of the advertising around their water resistance claims.
But having some amount of water resistance built into electronics helps reduce e-waste because accidents do happen. For more serious water activities people should be buying waterproof bags for their electronics.
You don’t use your phone on the bathroom or the kitchen? It never rains where you live? You never keep your phone in your pocket next to a sweaty leg?
I want a phone that can survive minor issues. I don’t want a phone that will die because it slipped into the sink while washing my hands or something like that. A degree of being waterproof does that.
No it doesn’t. you have have IP68 and a removable battery. What’s not as easy it making them paper-thin as the battery needs to have structural integrity of its own.
Motorola Defy was waterproof with removable battery. A small switch locked the cover in place with a rubber gasket. This was over 10 years ago.
My old Galaxy S5 was water resistant (IP67, 30min/1 metre submerged)
The rear cover had a gasket to prevent water entering the motherboard, micro sd, battery, sim etc.
Fairphone 3 user here. My main reason to choose this phone a few years ago was because the battery could easily be replaced. Too many phones are perfectly functional but the battery is half dead. Another boon of non-glued batteries : You can carry two (or more) batteries to easily switch when the first one is KO. Meaning no need for portable charger and useless cables in your pocket. Phone at 10% ? Just change it, bam 100% in a second. Easy as that.
I’ll probably not be the target of such regulations because I wouldn’t choose an anti-consumer phone brand anyway, but at least it’s going in the right direction.
LET’S GOOOOO
Phones were designed with non-removable batteries for a reason. It’s not just to screw w/ the customer and make them pay someone to replace their phone battery. It’s to aid in water resistance and to help with a smaller form factor. This will lead to nothing good. And I’m sure it will carry over to other countries as well as I’m sure a lot of phone manufacturers won’t want to make special models JUST for the EU.
Just another example of the EU imposing nonsense regulations that will screw over the rest of the world, like their stupid cookie popup nonsense.
if you see a cookie popup, it’s because the website operator decided to use third-party tracking cookies on their site; they could have easily spared their users the banner by using privacy-friendly analytics, or no analytics instead. blaming the EU for inconveniencing users with these warnings is doing free PR for the worst parts of the advertising industry.
First, that’s not true. Tons of websites use non-essential cookies for various functions that have nothing to do with tracking, all of which would be covered under the GDPR and require a cookie popups.
Expecting website operators to run we sites without any analytics and advertising is an absurd expectation. They have to bring in revenue somehow. That’s what privacy and ad blocking extensions are for.
Yeah, no, sorry. The EU fucked up the internet for the entire world.
Tons of websites use non-essential cookies for various functions that have nothing to do with tracking, all of which would be covered under the GDPR and require a cookie popups.
I have never run into any website using “functions that have nothing to do with tracking” which require cookies. Could you give an example?
Expecting website operators to run we sites without any analytics and advertising is an absurd expectation. They have to bring in revenue somehow.
I’ve personally used two analytics systems that don’t require cookies, Plausible and Matomo.
Here’s a banner advertising service that doesn’t use cookies.
Even Google is dropping cookies.
I’m anti-advertising (I think there are better ways for websites to make money) but it’s totally untrue that cookies are the only way to implement advertising.
That’s what privacy and ad blocking extensions are for.
Which aren’t available on all devices or operating systems, and require more technical knowledge (and more time) than most people have.
The EU is far from perfect, but its cookie rules are a great example of regulation working as intended, and making the default better for everyone – just like this rule on removable batteries.
While I disagree with CocktailPlasma in his anti-EU rhetoric, I wanted to note that cookies can be / are used for basic functionality on a website.
To keep you logged in is often done with a session cookie, for example. There are different ways, but mostly some kind of data piece needs to be set on the browser side.
“Remember me” functionality doesn’t require a cookie banner:
The commonly seen method of using a checkbox and a simple information note such as “remember me (uses cookies)” next to the submit form would be an appropriate means of gaining consent
Finally! Now to also force phonemakers to universally provide bootloader unlocks so we can put our own ROMs on our devices once the software support ends.
