[cmos]

What if we regulate batteries even more? i.e. what if, in some magical perfect world, the world get's together and agrees on batteries for phones like how we agree on AA,AAA,D,C batteries? Even more though.. a standard connector, a standard comms bus, a variety of sizes, and they were designed for reuse as efficiently as possible.

Now we can scale up volume, swap them out, be free to purchase from a different manufacturer, and have scaled up recycling services.

[PunchyHamster]

Phones would be hard because manufacturers want to fill every square mm of it, but we can start with power tools batteries...

[rootusrootus]

Power tools have lots of empty space in the battery case already, and most just use 18650s. We could mandate making the cells directly reachable.

Phones are definitely a more difficult use case.

[throwawaymobule]

Some manufacturers in the industry are already standardising on one or two designs since a few years ago.

[MrDrMcCoy]

I'd settle for requiring the battery specs to be fully available, and that they can't be made difficult to manufacture without good reason.

Ideally, there should be some set of standard protocols/connectors/voltages/sizes, but the manufacturer should only be held to "downward-compliance" with at least one of them, so they can have flexibility in design but still leave a suboptimal standard option available to users as a fallback.

[Postosuchus]

That's an excellent idea! It will work out absolutely great - much like Communism.

Meaning, when you forcefully standardize and regulate how phones are built, you might expect that companies will not compete on making better phones (since they are not very much differentiated) but on who produces the cheapest phone.

[esperent]

You're thinking of socialism, which is what the EU is doing here (socialism-lite, anyway, as championed by the Social Democrats) and yes, it does work. Free healthcare, free education, and we're working towards decent privacy laws and regulations on big companies. It's far from perfect of course, but comparing it to how pure capitalism is going in the US it's clearly the better system.

[ur-whale]

> but comparing it to how pure capitalism is going in the US it's clearly the better system

Funny, I observe the exact same things you observe and come the exact opposite conclusion: Europe is currently dying a slow and painful death and will likely be entirely irrelevant in less than 10 years (not that they matter much anymore today already).

Some better system that is!