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.
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").
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.
Let’s put aside that this is a 10 year old phone now and well and truly obsolete, you actually didn’t get the basic maintenance done. Batteries all fail and degrade with time, especially if abused and left in extreme heat.
The original SE had perhaps the most user replaceable battery in an iPhone. No parts serialization, aside from the touchid cable being a little finicky it is an easy and cheap battery swap. Also it was probably degraded for some time so you were getting CPU throttling to keep it from randomly shutting off.
I do not understand people like you. Do you buy a car and never change the oil or tires, then complain it breaks and buy a new one?
It is pretty much a requirement now to either greatly overpay for a battery replacement from Apple or get a service plan from them, or just limp along with worn out shit and hope it doesn’t blow the back off. Can’t DIY or goto a third party repair shop, the battery is paired to the device.
Finally, before we even get into the ‘trivially easy to replace’ end user design, it’s not going to fix the problem of the asshole that won’t pay $10 for a batt in their bulging $500-1200 idevice. I saw this all the time with laptops that did have easily replaceable packs, people just didn’t do it. They’d just live with 20min battery if they were lucky and run it into the ground.
To top it all off you then go onto weird virtue signaling about children breathing recycling fumes, how about you climb off your high horse and maintain your own equipment for a change? Maybe stop fighting against the people that DO want to be able to maintain their own equipment.
You're really grasping here. Is it possible that non-removable batteries offer a better tradeoff of capacity, size, weight, durability, water resistance, and safety?
> The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable:
Equally possible that removable batteries would generate more waste in the form of extra packaging since it is very rare to replace phone batteries. We also now have a defacto standard in the form of magsafe batteries.
I guess the burden of proof is on you here.
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).
Many member states want censorship. Many MEPs want censorship.
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.
Your MacBook isn't water proof either yet the battery is also permanently glued in. Why?
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!
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.
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.
The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, your phone must be in pristine condition because otherwise you will need to "repair" tons of stuff you don't need repaired/replaced.
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...
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.”
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?
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.
Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.
Next time you see one, look for the "no bin" symbol)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.
We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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;
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.