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Making sense of the EU’s fight for user-replaceable smartphone batteries
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Technology
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It feels like this fight is 5-7 years late. I am glad the EU actually tries to regulate on behalf of the consumer vs what the US has been doing lately(almost nothing), but the EU does it in a ham-handed way half the time.
I don't necessarily want a user replaceable battery on my phone. I prefer it not be chonky and I prefer it to be water and dust proof. All of those features impact me sooo much more than being able to change the battery.
Also batteries have come so far this past decade it almost seems like a non issue.
Adding replaceable batteries does nothing to affect this. An o-ring with a clamping mechanism will make it just as water and dust resistant as before. Your phone's charging port is more susceptible to water and dust than a replaceable battery will ever be
I've actually have the opposite experience. I didn't mind integrated batteries a decade ago, because the hardware improved at such a fast pace that it became obsolete before the battery gave up.
But now the hardware improvements are not so fast and a decent phone will be usable for many years, at which point the battery (at least for me) is the first point of failure.
I would much rather take battery replacement over some water and dust protection as ip54 should be enough for daily use (fairphone 4 for instance does have ip54). The only time I've needed more protection is when I needed to take family photos in a pool
That's a really solid point. I guess it depends on the phone. The low end Android market probably isn't holding up as well as the high end or iphones.
My pixels seem to last as long as it takes for me to pay them off before they just black screen and brick themselves. I had 3 pixel threes, since two replaces under warranty and the last one died a few weeks outside.
Meanwhile my wifes iphone was just fine. She only changed because her dad got the latest and greatest and handed down this last-year model to her. So I could see batteries being an issue over time.