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 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 is definitely an exaggeration, though!)
You might 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.
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.
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.
> 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 expected 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".
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.
Why is it punishable by law in Denmark to state that sub-Saharan African countries have average IQs around 70 and that it is hard to create functional democracies in countries with average IQs below 90?
The first substatement is backed by decades of empirical evidence. The second has much newer backing but the curves actually show the cut off value to be around 95 so saying 90 is a much weaker statement than there is evidence for.
Why has it recently become illegal to burn Qurans in Denmark? Considering the immoral and dangerous contents of that book, it would make a lot more sense to ban Muslim worship instead.
(None of this comes from the EU. It is a specific member state that criminalizes certain speech acts on its territory out of its own volition -- and as a result of violence from Muslims.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not what they mean, they mean being able to re-generate a battery by replacing their cells, exactly what we're building at https://infinite-battery.com for ebikes
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.
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!
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.
You might 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.
The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.
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.
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 expected 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".
Many member states want censorship. Many MEPs want censorship.
The first substatement is backed by decades of empirical evidence. The second has much newer backing but the curves actually show the cut off value to be around 95 so saying 90 is a much weaker statement than there is evidence for.
Why has it recently become illegal to burn Qurans in Denmark? Considering the immoral and dangerous contents of that book, it would make a lot more sense to ban Muslim worship instead.
(None of this comes from the EU. It is a specific member state that criminalizes certain speech acts on its territory out of its own volition -- and as a result of violence from Muslims.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. And they should fry those too.
Also, your phone must be in pristine condition because otherwise you will need to "repair" tons of stuff you don't need repaired/replaced.
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!
That being said, now they buy external power banks...
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.
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...
But yeah, I can see the irony in my comment.
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.
Please don't engage in argument for argument's sake.
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.
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.
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).
Your MacBook isn't water proof either yet the battery is also permanently glued in. Why?
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.
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.
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.
I would fly to Europe to buy my next phone if it ever happens though.
So we won’t be seeing more easily replaceable batteries in smartphones and tablets.
Which is exactly the way it should be.
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.
[0] https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
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.
Maybe if someone here is in the USA and has bought one, they can chime in and tell where they got it from?
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.
Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.
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.
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.
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.
Next time you see one, look for the "no bin" symbol)
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 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.
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.
We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.Suddenly, all phones will be waterproof.