[bko]

The fact that pretty much no phones have a replaceable battery says something. And it doesn't mean that all manufacturers are somehow colluding with each. The market is very competitive and pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit. If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. But everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it. And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.

If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

[bigfishrunning]

Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.

[wallst07]

I have a few IOS devices, you know what prevents me from using them?

It's not the battery, its the lack of OS updates. I can't install new certificates, or get access to app stores. They're useless.

In fact, the lack of a replacement battery has never prevented me from keeping something working, only software or physical damage.

[eru]

Battery tech has gotten a lot better every year over the last hundred years.

[brewdad]

I think OP meant the phone was going to be replaced in three years tops, so no one cared much about battery longevity. Nowadays, the battery can be the constraint for practical phone life, since few consumers can replace one themselves and by the time they pay someone else to do it, may as well trade it in and let Verizon subsidize a new one.

Having an easily swappable battery returns some power to the user.

[eru]

Phones with swappable batteries are already legal to buy.

[ben_w]

It was legal to buy a car that had a seatbelt before the seatbelt became mandatory.

Or phones with USB-C.

I suspect this will be a good thing to force, but I don't know for sure.

[eru]

> It was legal to buy a car that had a seatbelt before the seatbelt became mandatory.

Yes, making seatbelts mandatory was also a weird decision.

[watwut]

Their still go down after two-three years. Needing to charge twice a day is literal reason why I ever change the phone - otherwise I could use 10 years old one.

[nick486]

You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Very few people do that. I don't. Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

[bigfishrunning]

Every time a small device like a cell phone or watch or camera or etc gets opened and worked on, they never come back the same. Waterproof seals get broken, parts get misaligned, heat doesn't sink properly, etc. You can extend the life of these devices with repairs sometimes, but they tend to limp along.

[choo-t]

> You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.

Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy. Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.

[deaux]

I do it.

> a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway

You don't, this is nothing but an excuse for

> b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.

[nick486]

Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.

I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.

So this change, while welcome, is a bit late.

[kakacik]

I have 4+ years old S22 Ultra and there is absolutely nothing slowed down. I didn't install any crap semi-random apps just for the lolz, its basically static set of features with maybe 2 new apps per year added as it keeps doing more and more like ebanking or work auth. It doesn't even have Snapdragon processor, just their own Exynos and its simply fine.

It keeps getting all updates and will keep for few more years.

Camera results massively improved cca 2 years ago with some update so that they are cca on same level as current ones. Plus I still has 10x physical zoom which trumps all current models, iphone pro max including since we still can't bypass physical limits of optics.

Really, 0 reasons to update and battery capacity is the only upcoming issue - still fine now but I feel the decrease a bit. If I could swap it easily myself without paying some phone shop to do it, that's a massive advantage.

[TeMPOraL]

There's flash degradation that's unfortunately a factor, too. If not for that and thermal problems (which I learned were common in this model), I'd probably be still using my S22.

(OTOH, I upgraded to a foldable, and don't want to ever use a regular candybar phone ever again.)

[preisschild]

I have been using the Pixel series for years and after a year of use the battery capacity is noticeable worse for me.

I'd just like to pay 100-300EUR to replace the battery with a brand new one but the device should still be IP68 water-"proof".

[frm88]

Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it.

https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-sy...

[Nasrudith]

I support changeable batteries as a 'no duh' feature. But when I checked out Fairphone previously (several years ago when I was phone shopping) and personally found it as 'neat concept, but a shame it seems to have been born obsolete' and lacked some of the hardware features I was looking for.

If it works for you, great though.

[cataphract]

I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.

[trinsic2]

Also Products aren't being designed for individuals anymore. There being designed to maximize for ad revenue, we're the product.

If there is any incentive to make a product better is to make it more accessible to their first party customers.

[dzhiurgis]

I think it’s far more likely to introduce additional dead batteries into existing waste. Probably drop in an ocean given how much batteries are already dumped.

[bko]

Slow down innovation is certainly one way to have people keep their phones longer and cut e-waste. Imagine if they allowed air conditioners...

[cataphract]

Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc.

There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.

[eru]

Yes, they definitely slowed down innovation and decreased consumer surplus compared to the counterfactual of just taxing the behaviour you don't like (like taxing fuel or emissions).

[thrownthatway]

They tax the fuel as well, don’t you worry.

[eru]

Sure, but they could have taxed it more and not have any official fuel efficiency standards.

(And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)

[dzhiurgis]

And then when EVs become viable they went - naaaah look at those efficient diesels!!

[thrownthatway]

To a degree.

You can’t have infinitely improving standards for an infinite time, otherwise you end up with bullshit like Dieselgate, and ecotechnocrats forcing everyone to drive around in mobile inextinguishable incendiary devices.

[thfuran]

ICE cars catch fire at a far higher rate than BEVs.

[otherme123]

I noticed this first hand: past year I was driving near home and a ICE car was burning in the shoulder of the road, with the firefighters working on it. It didn't reach even local news, in the following days I couldn't find anybody who have heard about it. A few months later an electric car catched fire around 100km away from my house, and the day after everyone was talking about it at workplace and how dangerous they are.

I don't know why it happens. Maybe a case of "if a dog bites a man, it's not important. If a man bites a dog, it gets newspaper cover". Maybe it is that an ICE car burning is extinguished in minutes, and then towed away, while an electric car burning is basically a two hours firework show.

[thrownthatway]

All ICE cars, or only those as old as the BEV fleet?

At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?

Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?

[Levitz]

...You think air conditioners are forbidden in Europe...?

[tsss]

Yes. Here in Hamburg you have to pay some useless consultant to come to your house and check that there's no other way to decrease the temperature before you are allowed to install one.

You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.

[heavyset_go]

> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.

There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.

[jpfromlondon]

>Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C

Short term thinking, if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape, it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.

[lxgr]

> it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.

You know what, I'm absolutely fine with that.

I still remember when every single manufacturer had their own shitty 10-30 pin connector that effectively did the exact same thing: Transfer some current, analog audio, and some USB data. It was absolutely not worth the mutual incompatibility (you'd actually have to always carry your own charger and could not borrow one).

If some amazing new technology comes around that needs more than 240W charging or 80 Gbit/s data transfer to smartphones and can't be retrofitted into the USB-C form factor, let's take the time to change the law.

> if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape

You seem to be misremembering how it actually played out: We didn't end up with the EU stranded on some standard, quite the opposite: The EU effectively forced Apple (the last non-negligible non-USB-C holdout) to switch to USB-C globally.

[ben_w]

(1) The EU fundamentally didn't care which standard so long as there was one; they only forced this because Apple dragged their feet with their own proprietary thing that wasn't a significant advantage. The other end of Apple's Lightning port being a USB port does not suggest it added anything except deliberate incompatibility.

(2) what would "significantly better" even look like? USB-C can do 120 watts, enough to fill a 20 Wh battery in 10 minutes, except the batteries themselves aren't ready to charge that fast.

(3) if someone somehow manages to make a significant advance, nothing prevents them from having two ports. Or indeed lobbying for a law change on the basis of a tangible thing they can demonstrate rather than a hypothetical that still hasn't happened in all the time since these discussions began.

[okanat]

(4) Or just as the law states, you can update the regulation accordingly. There are avenues of update just in the law. The connector should be just modern enough. At the same time I do believe thermodynamics itself will be the limit and 120 W is more than enough for any phone.

[ssl-3]

The same Europeans that were miles ahead with their GSM standard?

We can compare that to the US. Here, we stayed stuck with power-thirsty analog phones for many years before bouncing through a litany of mutually-incompatible digital non-standards...and finally landed on the ~same actual-standards that Europe adopted.

I think they'll be OK. (I think the rest of us will be OK, too.)

[BenFranklin100]

With that attitude, we’d still be using D-sub connectors.

[tossaway0]

I assume OP thinks more like me: the EU will move to the next standard in a reasonable amount of time after it's available.

I'll be the first to complain if the new standard isn't adopted in due time, but as a strong example I'm still very content with how the GSM legislation standard has played out.

[BenFranklin100]

You miss my point. The ‘new standard’ will be settled on by various committees each composed of different people with different priorities including maintaining the status quo. It will take years to potentially decades to settle on any technologically superior alternatives.

Design by committee is how Europe works. It’s also a reason Europe moves slower and is less innovative than America.

[okanat]

Europe is not less innovative. Many advanced machinery that makes everything else originate and get perfected in Europe.

EU is way more efficient in making citizen-friendly laws too.

The USA just likes to splurge unnecessary amount of money and call that "innovation" where there isn't any. They can do that because they have lots of money and infinite debt limit due to US Dollar's special status. This also makes everything else expensive for other players in the world. Remove the special status and see how the worlds change.

[account42]

D-sub connectors are still pretty common in embedded applications.

[eru]

What does any deity have to do with it? Btw, has anyone done a post mortem analysis of that mandate? I wonder if it delivered what it promised. I doubt it:

All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable.

The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet.

The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.

[clownpenis_fart]

Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.

How much cool aid do you have to drink to genuinely believe the corporate argument that using proprietary connectors is "innovative"?

[eru]

> Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.

Eh, no? USB-C was already pretty much the standard before, and you could plug in lightning cable with a cheap adapter cable.

[thrownthatway]

Not even that.

Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.

And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.

Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.

Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.

[sham1]

> Not even that. > > Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break. > > And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.

Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.

OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.

> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. > > Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.

Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.

And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.

[eru]

> Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.

They didn't need to ban all other connectors..

[sham1]

Well good thing is that they didn't. The only thing you need is to provide a USB-C port for charging. Nothing stops a manufacturer adding additional ports for charging, data sharing etc.

So Apple could give people the ability to use their oh-so-superior Lightning cable while also being able to use USB-C for charging. If nothing else, it means that there are no longer any "does anyone have an iPhone charger" discussions at parties because people can just charge all their phones with USB-C.

[ssl-3]

Apple switched to USB C years before legal standardization took place.

(actually, which single-vendor connector are we mourning, here? I forget.)

[fl4regun]

I don't understand your issue with USB C. Mini and micro USB connectors routinely got loose and fell out of multiple devices I owned, USB C is everywhere now and I have not encountered such issues.

[account42]

The only issue I had with USB C has been lint collecting at the bottom of the port that would then prevent the cable from plugging in far enough for a good connection. Far easier to clean that than replacing the connector though.

[thrownthatway]

The Lighnting connector and its port are superior in every way.

[eru]

Physically, maybe. (I don't know.) Legally and economically, I don't think Samsung can just use lightning without having to pay Apple.

[ChoGGi]

That's the one where the springs are on the device instead of the cable yea?

[fl4regun]

how so? I genuinely don't understand, as someone who has a phone with the lightning connector and other devices with USB C

[eru]

I don't mind USB-C. Most of my devices have USB-C charging, and it works well.

I mind bureaucrats locking that in.

> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.

Haha, what? I like to complain about this piece of legislation, but it's not that important. And it's not like Russia has better policy. Oh, just the opposite. (Like waging wars they can't win, or running crazy high corruption.)

[thrownthatway]

Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph.

I really appreciate it, keep up with the good work.

Bloody Clippers.

You always got to watch out for the Clippers, they’ll take whatever you say or write and clip it out of context and make it mean something completely different to what you really said.

The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.

[Toutouxc]

There’s nothing important in the last paragraph.

[eru]

> Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph.

Eh, you know that people can just scroll up?

> The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.

Are you willing to bet on this?

[someperson]

It means that everybody copies Apple.

Just like 3.5mm headphone jacks and MicroSD card expandable storage.

They're hard to find even on lower end devices any more, despite more ports being a premium/pro feature in other market segments.

[aikinai]

That doesn't change anything the parent said. If not copying Apple created a better product that people want to buy, someone would be doing it.

[ACow_Adonis]

Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?

[watwut]

> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.

I do not think they are colluding, but they are definitely chasing the same trends and users preferences don't seem to play that much role, unless it is one of the few essentials things. Effectively, users do not have much choice except in few areas. All phones being the same is not just because "everyone likes their phones to be unpractically huge or slow" .

[Oxodao]

The trade-off is basically having a thicker phone. Nobody except apple thus all manufacturers 6 month later want paper-thin phones. Never the actual consumers.

[Oxodao]

customer*

[account42]

No, the consumer is no longer the customer these days. The customer are the advertisement companies.

[friendzis]

1. It's easier to design and build Ingress Protection without user-accessible compartments.

2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery.

3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone.

4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack.

5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.

[account42]

All it says is that thinner phones look better on advertisements. Let's not pretend that product decisions are the rational best result for the market even if they are industry-standard.

[Rury]

Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.

[windward]

Why do you want us to think you don't know what a negative externality is? Do you usually find that you benefit from people thinking you're unworldly?

[everdrive]

Manufacturers are chasing tends. What is superior about the stupid notch at the top of the iPhone and some competitors -- and what is superior about getting phones thinner and wider? They're too big to put in a pocket, you're not even netting anything with all that extra space. etc. The point is that phones are not getting "better" in any material way except maybe for picture quality from the cameras.

[petra]

>> pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit.

Isn't worth the benefit for who? the manufacturers? sure.

Let's say a single manufacturer decides to offer some phones with a changeable battery, invests in their marketing, and they start becoming very popular. What happens next? Every manufacturer does the same, nobody earn a premium, total sales volume gets cut in half.

[traderj0e]

Yes for batteries, but I do think there are anticompetitive reasons for phones mostly not having headphone jacks anymore. It's not exactly collusion, it's more vertical integration.

[unsungNovelty]

> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!

Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.

Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.

[Ar-Curunir]

Ah yes, “market knows best”.

Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.

[chimprich]

> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.

It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.

> but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it

The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.

> And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.

Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.

Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.

> why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?

Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.