I think this is probably the first and only good thing the EU has done in something like 5 years - since GDPR (which unfortunately has resulted in me being unable to access many local American sites because they don't want to comply with GDPR, so I always get a message saying "we value our European visitors").
I do recall that there were many liquid-proof devices that had replacable batteries back in the day. It seems obvious to me that these money-grubbing corporations just want you to pay through the nose for replacement of the batteries. Same reason they have eliminated the microSD slots. Pay us 300 euros for 512 GB extra instead of 40 euros for a microSD card, damnit!
GDPR was shit from the very beginning. They cloaked in grand language about privacy, but it has been ignorable from the get go. The whole point was to justify another huge bureaucracy in a continent already plagued by huge wasteful bureaucracies. Over-regulation is how Brussels controls and punishes the countries with smaller economies which cannot handle the ever increasing demands this stupid Merchant-republic puts on their yearly budget with this that the other committee for this moronic, that stupid the other idiotic form of government interference.
I had a phone that was water resistant and had a replaceable battery and regular headphone jack a decade ago and it worked just fine (and still charges and turns on today, it's just underpowered for today's software). Permanently sealed batteries are just there to make your phone disposable.
Don't celebrate yet. The good old UK is already brewing a narrative that will get the EU's attention.
So, there have been a number of news stories about how replacement batteries in devices, predominately but not exclusively e-scooters, have set on fire and caused house fires. There are now calls for all lithium-ion batteries, including for phones, to be banned from sale to the public and to ban the right to repair and modify the device you paid for and own because - say it with me - "it's for your own safety". Ultimately putting control of your device completely in the hands of the manufacturer. I hope Louis Rossmann is paying attention to what is being brewed across the pond because if it succeeds here, it will be attempted elsewhere including in the EU and the US.
Which to be honest matters more anyway. The slightly higher starting capacity of lipo gets quickly eaten up but their severe capacity loss within the first year of use. Id rather have 800mah for five solid years of daily recharging than 1000 at day one, 700 after a year, and 650 after two.
In case anyone thinks this is hyperbole, for years EU had a rule banning oddly shaped fruits from being sold iirc. Like if it was a pear but wasn't shaped like a traditional pear,it was banned.
This will be another "paved with good intentions" clusterfuck.
They don't just talk about phones but all appliances. Look around your home. ANYTHING with a non-removable battery will get more expensive and bulkier.
And you bet they shoehorned a ton of eco crap and bureaucratic busywork in those 129 pages.
Off the top of my hat what I have around the house: smartphone, ear buds + charging station, handheld vacuum, flashlight, electric toothbrush, electric bike pump, electric lighter.
And whatever else people might have that's portable and battery powered: soldering iron, screwdriver, multimeter, cheapo oscilloscope, kitchen mixer, oral irrigator, radios, bluetooth speakers, tablets, smart watches, vape devices, electric shaver, portable fans, etc.
Off the top of my hat what I have around the house: smartphone, ear buds + charging station, handheld vacuum, flashlight, electric toothbrush, electric bike pump, electric lighter.
Ah, I do have some of those, but I never thought it would be applicable to that. I've never had the problem of earbuds or electric toothbrushes becoming unusable due to battery atrophy.
The mandate should be to have either a replaceable battery OR the company has to replace the battery at cost.
Then the company can choose whether they want it bulkier and cheap, or they can seal it in with layers of waterproof glue and each time customers replace a battery the company bears the cost of how difficult they made it.
ever wonder why you can fully charge your phone, turn it off, and then when you turn it back on in a week the battery is dead? yeah, your phone isn't off. it's constantly turning back on itself, silently, to receive instructions for wiretapping, GPS pings, etc, from law enforcement. this isn't even new. it was outed in a series of court cases against mobsters around 2001-2003.
the only way to protect yourself is to take the battery out or leave your phone behind. but if you leave your phone somewhere, then someone else can clone it. it's entirely to protect politicians from being tracked, wiretapped, or having their phones cloned.
In my experience, the motherboards or peripherals in most smartphones start to fail before the batteries due to programmed obsolescence. I've never had to replace a phone because the battery stopped working: always because something else went wrong.
It's not that the battery stops working entirely, but that you have to charge it twice in one day. My smartphone from 6 months ago is already having a weaker battery than it started out with.
Yeah, 5 years is rather extraordinary. Maybe you have better things to do than stare at a screen all day, which makes you extraordinary in this day and age.
If you are careful about the way you charge, a battery can last easily 2x "expected" lifetime. In the case of a phone, 2 years is where you're supposed to notice the battery capacity loss, but it should be fully functional. I do nothing whatsoever, and that's right where I'm at 2 years in.
I've had the distinct impression that my battery starts lasting less time after major updates. In the past, after I had a phone for a couple years, I tried changing to a new battery, and it lasted just as long as my previous one.
As far as I can tell, the issue isn't the battery. It's the OS being programmed to consume more.
I think it's the same thing they tried with chargers, companies make slight minor changes to make it that if a part breaks you need to buy a replacement from them at an extortionate cost.
When really there is no functional basis for the changes. So probably the few valid arguments the EU ever makes.
I've never had to change a phone because of batteries (at least not a smartphone) so.....shrug.
It won't have any effect on me either way, I can see it being useful for people who spend time away from a place where they can charge often so swapping out the batteries for new ones that haven't decayed into needing to be charged at all times would be useful.
On the other hand new restrictions means that businesses might just opt out from the market and having to change design to accommodate government interference usually results in higher costs which means either less profit per sale or higher prices which results in less overall profit for the region and more incentive to not sell there.
So back to having no idea of it will be a good or bad thing but it will probably at the very least be a good excuse to increase prices
I would rather they mandate that replacement motherboards be available from the manufacturer OR that they fucking mandate that cell-phones be easily rootable or sold with user root priviliges from the very get go.
I bought it, it's my phone, why am I not the root user with final jurisdiction over what operating system, and which applications are loaded on it?
Pointless. Your phone specs would sooner become obsolete before the battery becomes an issue. Hope the Euros like their chunkier "EU-approved" phones, though.
Unless the people you know are still using the iPhone 1 from 2007, I doubt the battery is worn out enough to warrant changing it. Google and Apple stop supporting their phones 5 years after release, which you should be looking into an upgrade anyway.
I think this is probably the first and only good thing the EU has done in something like 5 years - since GDPR (which unfortunately has resulted in me being unable to access many local American sites because they don't want to comply with GDPR, so I always get a message saying "we value our European visitors").
I do recall that there were many liquid-proof devices that had replacable batteries back in the day. It seems obvious to me that these money-grubbing corporations just want you to pay through the nose for replacement of the batteries. Same reason they have eliminated the microSD slots. Pay us 300 euros for 512 GB extra instead of 40 euros for a microSD card, damnit!
GDPR was a total shitfest and did nothing but create bureaucratic nightmares for everyone from hobby clubs to volunteer groups to small businesses.
Big corporations have ways around it and governments ignore it, if it even applies to them.
Worse even, it was their foot in the door to start demanding that they get to supersede all other nation's laws and control the whole damn internet.
GDPR was shit from the very beginning. They cloaked in grand language about privacy, but it has been ignorable from the get go. The whole point was to justify another huge bureaucracy in a continent already plagued by huge wasteful bureaucracies. Over-regulation is how Brussels controls and punishes the countries with smaller economies which cannot handle the ever increasing demands this stupid Merchant-republic puts on their yearly budget with this that the other committee for this moronic, that stupid the other idiotic form of government interference.
I had a phone that was water resistant and had a replaceable battery and regular headphone jack a decade ago and it worked just fine (and still charges and turns on today, it's just underpowered for today's software). Permanently sealed batteries are just there to make your phone disposable.
Yup. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
It's the EU. There's always something up. I don't see what it is right now, but I bet we'll find out in time.
Don't celebrate yet. The good old UK is already brewing a narrative that will get the EU's attention.
So, there have been a number of news stories about how replacement batteries in devices, predominately but not exclusively e-scooters, have set on fire and caused house fires. There are now calls for all lithium-ion batteries, including for phones, to be banned from sale to the public and to ban the right to repair and modify the device you paid for and own because - say it with me - "it's for your own safety". Ultimately putting control of your device completely in the hands of the manufacturer. I hope Louis Rossmann is paying attention to what is being brewed across the pond because if it succeeds here, it will be attempted elsewhere including in the EU and the US.
Just switch battery chemistry. LiFePo has lower energy density, but higher charge/discharge cycles. It doesn't catch fire with high discharge rates.
Alternatively mandate that all LiPo cells have internal discharge regulation circuits. They are very effective.
Which to be honest matters more anyway. The slightly higher starting capacity of lipo gets quickly eaten up but their severe capacity loss within the first year of use. Id rather have 800mah for five solid years of daily recharging than 1000 at day one, 700 after a year, and 650 after two.
That happens with shitty batteries. We had a few of those fires as well in Singapore thanks to escooters from china.
And who can forget the note 7???s exploding batteries
In case anyone thinks this is hyperbole, for years EU had a rule banning oddly shaped fruits from being sold iirc. Like if it was a pear but wasn't shaped like a traditional pear,it was banned.
Bad.
This will be another "paved with good intentions" clusterfuck.
They don't just talk about phones but all appliances. Look around your home. ANYTHING with a non-removable battery will get more expensive and bulkier.
And you bet they shoehorned a ton of eco crap and bureaucratic busywork in those 129 pages.
I can believe this is the road to hell, but I can't believe the EU had 'good intentions'.
Maybe I'm a poor pauper, but I can't think of anything with a non-removable battery.
Off the top of my hat what I have around the house: smartphone, ear buds + charging station, handheld vacuum, flashlight, electric toothbrush, electric bike pump, electric lighter.
And whatever else people might have that's portable and battery powered: soldering iron, screwdriver, multimeter, cheapo oscilloscope, kitchen mixer, oral irrigator, radios, bluetooth speakers, tablets, smart watches, vape devices, electric shaver, portable fans, etc.
Ah, I do have some of those, but I never thought it would be applicable to that. I've never had the problem of earbuds or electric toothbrushes becoming unusable due to battery atrophy.
That's basically the EU motto: "Sounds good if you don't think about it."
However the more you think about it, the worse it gets.
That's funny, because the EU sounds bad to me even when I don't think about it.
The mandate should be to have either a replaceable battery OR the company has to replace the battery at cost.
Then the company can choose whether they want it bulkier and cheap, or they can seal it in with layers of waterproof glue and each time customers replace a battery the company bears the cost of how difficult they made it.
I'm sure there's some extra stuff snuck into the bill but the advertised goal is good.
it's not because of consumer rights.
it's because of surveillance.
ever wonder why you can fully charge your phone, turn it off, and then when you turn it back on in a week the battery is dead? yeah, your phone isn't off. it's constantly turning back on itself, silently, to receive instructions for wiretapping, GPS pings, etc, from law enforcement. this isn't even new. it was outed in a series of court cases against mobsters around 2001-2003.
the only way to protect yourself is to take the battery out or leave your phone behind. but if you leave your phone somewhere, then someone else can clone it. it's entirely to protect politicians from being tracked, wiretapped, or having their phones cloned.
If you've been following the research it's hard to even know how you could isolate your phone to prevent it from spying.
Like they've used cameras to watch micro vibrations in plants to reconstruct sound. They've broken encryption by watching a power led.
With all these new super sensitive gyros, barometer, and so on it's quite possible you lock it in a lead box and it's still spying on you.
In my experience, the motherboards or peripherals in most smartphones start to fail before the batteries due to programmed obsolescence. I've never had to replace a phone because the battery stopped working: always because something else went wrong.
It's not that the battery stops working entirely, but that you have to charge it twice in one day. My smartphone from 6 months ago is already having a weaker battery than it started out with.
I don't have that problem, and I've had the same phone for 5 years. Perhaps I just lucked out.
Yeah, 5 years is rather extraordinary. Maybe you have better things to do than stare at a screen all day, which makes you extraordinary in this day and age.
Aw, thanks!
If you are careful about the way you charge, a battery can last easily 2x "expected" lifetime. In the case of a phone, 2 years is where you're supposed to notice the battery capacity loss, but it should be fully functional. I do nothing whatsoever, and that's right where I'm at 2 years in.
I've had the distinct impression that my battery starts lasting less time after major updates. In the past, after I had a phone for a couple years, I tried changing to a new battery, and it lasted just as long as my previous one.
As far as I can tell, the issue isn't the battery. It's the OS being programmed to consume more.
I think it's the same thing they tried with chargers, companies make slight minor changes to make it that if a part breaks you need to buy a replacement from them at an extortionate cost.
When really there is no functional basis for the changes. So probably the few valid arguments the EU ever makes.
I've never had to change a phone because of batteries (at least not a smartphone) so.....shrug.
It won't have any effect on me either way, I can see it being useful for people who spend time away from a place where they can charge often so swapping out the batteries for new ones that haven't decayed into needing to be charged at all times would be useful.
On the other hand new restrictions means that businesses might just opt out from the market and having to change design to accommodate government interference usually results in higher costs which means either less profit per sale or higher prices which results in less overall profit for the region and more incentive to not sell there.
So back to having no idea of it will be a good or bad thing but it will probably at the very least be a good excuse to increase prices
Good.
Objectively.
There is no reason to restrict access to the battery on any device except to make the device harder to maintain.
I would rather they mandate that replacement motherboards be available from the manufacturer OR that they fucking mandate that cell-phones be easily rootable or sold with user root priviliges from the very get go.
I bought it, it's my phone, why am I not the root user with final jurisdiction over what operating system, and which applications are loaded on it?
Pointless. Your phone specs would sooner become obsolete before the battery becomes an issue. Hope the Euros like their chunkier "EU-approved" phones, though.
That may be true for people who waste a lot of money being on the cutting edge of everything, but most people I know use very old phones.
I stick with my phone until it cannot hold a charge anymore.
I get why replaceable batteries are a good thing, but you don't need to get the latest one every single time one comes out.
Unless the people you know are still using the iPhone 1 from 2007, I doubt the battery is worn out enough to warrant changing it. Google and Apple stop supporting their phones 5 years after release, which you should be looking into an upgrade anyway.