Unfortunately it is from 2022, meaning no OS upgrades.
I think the next mandatory laws EU should pass is that manufacturers should either allow people to upgrade/replace the OS by themselves or provide mandatory upgrades for the next decade (i don't care how the manufacturers handle it, that's up to them, but the easiest way out of such a law is to allow people upgrade/replace the OS by themselves).
The regulation already mandates an OS upgrade period, but the period depends on how long the manufacturer keeps selling the model: software updates must be provided for five years from the day when the manufacturer stops selling the product. From Annex II B, section 1.2:
> (6) Operating system updates:
> (a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;
Why only one decade? I’m still running a 2012 Mac mini. Apple stopped updating Mac OS some time ago, but there are plenty of alternatives that can run on the bare metal. Hardware makers should be required to provide support for the life of the device (defined by customers still using the device), or provide a reasonable way to install 3rd party OS.
At least on Android, when my Samsung Galaxy Note (I loved that phone - replaceable battery, pressure sensitive stylus, IR blaster, OLED, audio jack, water resistant - they went downhill from there IMO) finally end of lifed, I just used the official Samsung tool to upload a community image on it. The process wasn't horrendously difficult. I don't know if people would do it, but it was a clear set of steps that even a tech novice could accomplish if following carefully.
Indeed! The law needs to include firmware in some way. I'm not smart enough to come up with how exactly it should be dealt with, but it does need to be dealt with.
Currently Qualcomm decides when your phone stops getting updates, pretty much regardless to who actually made your phone.
Shoutout to fairphone who actually updated the firmware themselves, surely a loss leading project, but a very respectable dedication to end users.
Shoutout to fairphone who actually updated the firmware themselves, surely a loss leading project, but a very respectable dedication to end users.
I am not sure how much of a shout-out they deserve. For example, Fairphone 4 is still supported until this year. They ship with firmware from 2023 and with a kernel patch release from 2024. Every one of their phones is full of holes because their software lags so much.
Even on their most recent model, they are frequently more than a half year behind firmware updates, ship 1-2 year old kernels, and are late with major Android releases (meaning you miss out on security patches not classified high/critical).
Good examples of software longevity are iPhone, Google Pixel, GrapheneOS, and to a lesser extend Samsung flagships.
When i wrote that comment i checked gsmarena and it looked to me that it cannot get the latest Android, meaning that even if it gets some minor version upgrade, it wont be long before that stops.
Samsung committed to 5 years of OS upgrades on that one, so it’s theoretically getting one more upgrade next year at best. (Or maybe 2, if they release one this year). It’s nearly end of life for a software perspective.
So, they have an XCover 7 now - with similar specs.
Also, they committed to a rather long support cycle for the xcover6 (5 years I think?) - I have one and it is still going strong. I've replaced the battery twice - not because I desperately needed to, but... why not. They are cheap, and I use the older ones still as backup battery packs since they are fast to swap in.
Yeah they are really meant for businesses. Frontline workers, factory floors.
This is what we use them for and they do stand up to the abuse. Of course people treat them very badly as it's not something they paid for. Really long support too.
They're not good in terms of specs for the price but that is not what these phones are about.
Yeah, the specs were... decent... nothing standout. Really I was going over the list of things I had lost after the Galaxy Note got rid of all their features and decided the replaceable battery was the one I cared about the most. The ruggedness was just a nice plus.
Phones should be like PCs - they give you the hardware, and you figure out what to install on it. Unfortunately Linux imo is partially to blame here - if they decided to do a stable driver ABI (don't hate me, this was the norm outside Linux and open source OSes), you could easily separate the OS and drivers and update the m separately.
The missing link here is ACPI, unlike on PC, the hardware doesn't describe what it has to the OS, making the task much harder.
The lack of standardization of handled devices is also another factor, they might look similar or even identical but they often are different per region and have some hardware revisions.
Android does have a separate driver partition nowadays but that doesn't help too much.
Who is "they"? Linux isn't a person or an organization. The people (and organizations) contributing to Linux are all doing it for their own motivations to solve their own problems. You are asking them to make their lives harder, for free, in service of fixing an issue that they don't care about.
Linus Torvalds for one, but generally people in charge of the kernel have a principle of API/ABI compatibility outside the kernel, but no promise for API ABI stability for anything inside, including drivers.
And all of the commenters complaining they would never buy this phone is great proof that the removable battery movement is DOA.
These phones exist. Companies have been producing them intermittently. When they do, few people buy them and there are always complaints that it's too big, too ugly, not fast enough, or something else.
The vocal minority demanding this feature but refusing to buy phones with the feature believe they can have their cake and eat it too. They want phones with all the benefits of built-in batteries and none of the downsides of removable batteries.
Well, I want a phone that's about one tier below flagship and has certain features. I don't think that's unreasonable.
For comparison: The feature I look for the most is a microsd slot. The last time that option existed that was in the quality range I want, I bought it. For anyone buying a phone right now, samsung has dropped microsd support from multiple more tiers, google and apple have never offered it, motorola and some others have the physical hardware but won't properly update the phone...
That's a feature that has been demonstrated to have no meaningful downsides, and manufacturers won't put it in to good models. I'm not convinced batteries are very different. People's refusal to make huge unnecessary compromises doesn't prove any features are DOA. I can guarantee that the above phone using LCD instead of OLED isn't a compromise for the battery's sake.
The biggest downside of removable batteries is that it's not an option on good phones. There might be some solid physics-based reasons, unlike with microsd, but I'm skeptical.
What you think is reasonable is completely irrelevant. What the marketing, business development, and C-suite groups decide is the best course, will be done.
I can want three cupholders, not two, on my next car, and I want it to be a Toyota EV in purple. Not too much to ask - but Toyota has no reason to make it for me. Not even if 100 of us on Toyota superfan sites want it.
For the record, I want removable batteries and the ability to change my phone's OS. But if there's not sufficient market pressure, it ain't gonna happen - without legal force. And that won't happen if the businesses have too much lobbying power (USA), or it's specifically against government interests (3-letter orgs wanting backdoors).
> What you think is reasonable is completely irrelevant.
Sure!
My point is that the ability to "vote with your wallet" is not really there in many cases, and lack of purchases for some niche and low end phone with a feature is not strong evidence that the feature is unwanted.
> But if there's not sufficient market pressure, it ain't gonna happen - without legal force.
And it takes too much market pressure to make certain changes even when the tradeoffs are minimal, so I welcome the legal force in a lot of cases.
I always felt the issue with removable batteries was they had a smaller capacity and would run out of life faster - so the need to be able to replace a battery if you wanted your phone to last more than a few years was important.
Now, with much higher capacity batteries that work better and are more efficient at handling all the demanding displays, high end gpu's and now AI tasks running the background? There's really no need to have removable batteries any more.
Sure, you're going to get a few lemons here and there, but for the most part, batteries these days have no problem lasting the 4-5 years that you need them. You still see three or four year old iphones on ebay with 80-85% battery being sold like hot cakes.
What are you basing this on? If you would approach a random person on the street and try to pitch them this idea of bringing back swappable batteries, I think that most people would like the idea. Although this is not a "dataset" per se, I have not talked to a single person IRL that disagreed with this, which includes a mechanical engineer that worked in phone manufacturing
> And all of the commenters complaining they would never buy this phone is great proof that the removable battery movement is DOA.
I had to reflect on that statement for a bit. I've always bought a new phone when there are battery problems or something else. BUT, that's because I can easily afford it.
There are plenty of people in this world who just can't go out and buy a new phone because one part wore out.
Or, to put it differently: I'd really like to replace the battery in my spare phone that I bring into my hot tub.
> There are plenty of people in this world who just can't go out and buy a new phone because one part wore out
Why is this strawman all over this thread? Battery replacement services are well known and honestly affordable. Apple will even do a first-rate job of replacing an iPhone battery for a fraction of the price of a new phone.
This topic is so strange on Hacker News because everyone is either actually unaware of how cheap/easy it is to get battery replacements, or they're feigning that you have to throw away the entire phone to try to make a point.
I don't think you understand just what it's like to be poor. Every penny counts, and something that you can do yourself without specialized tools is a life saver.
I don't think you understand just what it's like to be rich. Every minute counts, and ordering a replacement part that shows up on your doorstep instead of needing to go somewhere to have someone do something (or coordinate a repairman) is a life saver. Likewise, money saved on an easy repair is spent elsewhere.
These aren't strawmans; you're using fancy words to justify your lack of empathy.
I feel like the fact that the phone-with-removal-battery option already exists and is not popular in the market should be a signal to EU politicians about how much the public actually values this capability.
I don't think the mobile phone market produces variety, somehow its market forces make it strive for uniformity. All phones are basically of the same from factor (with the two foldable ones being niches), roughly the same size, same battery, same connectors, one of two OS, etc.
That's fine, but even among Android users, nobody buys these removable battery phones. It's possible there's a disproportionate reservoir of iPhone&removable battery-only consumers, but it would surprise me if the desire for a reusable battery were strongly correlated with being locked into the Apple ecosystem. If anything, I would expect the propensity to desire removable batteries is more strongly correlated with Android use.
There are a plethora of reasons to prefer one phone to another and while removable battery phones exist if that's a strict criteria for you the market of available devices is extremely limited. Consumers don't have a real choice here.
I would expect that one of the main reasons that people prefer non-removable battery phones are the engineering tradeoffs inherent in making a phone with a removable battery. They will have strictly less choice on this axis when they no longer have the option to buy a non-removal battery phone.
The comment is not meant to give you something to buy, it's just proof that it can technically be done, they just don't want to do it for modern flagships.
At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
> At what cost though?! And no, I am not talking about money. Any device (and any product really) is a set of tradeoffs.
My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
The engineering of making things waterproof is in the realm of "A bit more annoying but easily doable if anyone's interested in doing it", not "Doable at the cost of everything else".
> My $200 Moto G3 in 2016 had a removable back cover (admittedly not battery). It was also waterproof (and had a headphone jack.)
It also did diddly squat in the market place and the company producing it ran out of business.
Again, a product is a set of tradeoffs. Those tradeoff include functionality, cost, logistics to build, even marketing and sales. Maximizing a feature to serve a loud minority (headphone jack!) but thus ignoring other features will simply make a product fail in the market place in time...
> I hate when a technocrat at a multi-billion dollar company makes those decisions
Really?! So instead of the person hired and paid specifically to select and decide what the product should cost, look and work like, the person whose very pay depends on how well she chooses those product features for you - instead you'd rather have a faceless nameless bureaucrat who never pays the cost of his wrong decisions, who instead gets more power and money the more he panders to the vocal minorities that push populist agendas completely detached from the market place.
> not giving a fuck about any other criteria
That is simply not true, such a company would go out of business fast. As I said before, any product is a set of tradeoffs. Cost (and profit) is just one of the factors. Ignoring the others does not make successful products.
> profit
I love it when a company I buy from is successful. That means it's gonna be around to create more stuff for me to enjoy. It also means the awesome people working there get paid and are successful themselves. Finally, it means that its investors will back up more of this kind of companies that create useful products and services. Profit is great!
>I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
It's because of those "bureaucrats", that car manufacturers were forced to implement catalytic converters and ECUs for emissions controls, and why the air in your city isn't a smog cloud like in the 70s.
I hate it when people assume the environmental and societal problems caused the unregulated free market, are gonna be fixed by the same unregulated free market which only optimizes for profit.
> I like it when different producers select a different subset of priorities for their offer. Competition at work. One of the reasons we witnessed such an awesome evolution in the smartphone market.
>
> I hate it when a bureaucrat dictates a set of demands with absolutely zero regard to the cost or the tradeoffs involved in product decisions and market competition.
I generally agree with that sentiment, except we don't have a vibrant market of many options with many different trade offs. Finding headphone jack, solid reparability, user swappable battery, easily replaceable USB port, and all the other things that one might want is basically impossible. The vast majority of phones are highly unrepairable, have no headphone jack, have everything soldered to a tiny number of internal boards, and are full of anti repair dark patterns.
Better than average phone sold today. The only problem might be lack of android upgrades otherwise it is straight upgrade for most people. This is reason why replaceable battery is important. If you leave IT bubble people happily use ancient phones and do not need upgrades if battery is ok and there is space to save new photos.
It is also a rugged phone. So if you want to make a fair comparison with an iPhone, you have to put the iPhone in a case, resulting in a similar weight and thickness.
The distinction, though, is that you get to make that choice as the consumer. You can carry the phone with no case, or you can put a very rugged case on it, or something in between.
Yeah the first thing everyone does with their new iPhones is put them in a case - at that point thinness doesn't matter, Id argue Apple counts on it, as their phones are awkward to hold otherwise.
Replaceable covers used to serve the same purpose.
Indeed. I've had my XCover 6 for 3½ years now. I've dropped it many times, on hard surfaces (like outdoor concrete/brick). I've undoubtedly been fortunate. the plastic has gouges in it. there's (small) scratches on the screen (some from my keys), but the screen is not cracked. When it is dropped the back and battery pop off, which I think helps dissipate the forces. BTW, for anyone trying to extend their phone life, I strongly recommend those magnetic USB connectors. Reduces wear and tear on the USB port, and is also kinda convenient for quick disconnect.
> I strongly recommend those magnetic USB connectors
Note that these connectors are in violation of USB standard and potentially harmful as they expose the pins in an unintended way. For instance, notice that all the connection on the USB port are not all the same length, it is a form of protection, to make sure the power lines are well connected before the data lines make contact. With magnetic USB connectors, you lose that feature, in addition to potential issues with ESD, short circuits, etc...
I have a friend who swears by them and never had a problem, but still, that's good to know.
Oh yeah so it's utter trash and not worthy of our attention. Imagine carrying a whole 58 grams more, during a whole day, impossible for the average tech worker's atrophied muscles
The point is that people have different preferences, so the EU should not force people to buy phones with removable batteries. People who want such features can buy those phones, and people who want smaller, thinner phones can buy ones with integrated batteries.
At most the EU should tax externalities like electronic waste, though that would be a rounding error compared to the cost of the phone itself.
Phones with removable batteries are rare because only a small fraction of people want phones with removable batteries. Phone manufacturers also dislike removable batteries because customers buy cheap 3rd party batteries and complain when these batteries perform poorly or malfunction, sometimes by exploding. And then the headline is, “Phone made by company X explodes.” not, “Cheap battery explodes.” Removable batteries also introduce new failure modes like contacts degrading, causing phones to power off unexpectedly when jostled or flexed in certain ways. That increases the risk of a recall and bad PR.
I and millions of others want a phone that is smaller than the current offerings. Heck, my 13 mini is too big for my tastes. But I don’t think that means the government should force phone manufacturers to make smaller phones. So too for features like removable batteries, physical keyboards, or headphone jacks.
What do you mean by "rare"? You just click "order". It's not like you have to go on the quest for the lost arc or anything like that. They are uncommon in the sense that people don't actually get them, but that's not because of a lack of availability. People do not want them.
> The point is that people have different preferences, so the EU should not force people to buy phones with removable batteries.
There are many food additives with very useful properties, but health effects. There are many perfumes too where the original formulation had a particular compound layer found to be carcinogenic.
Regardless of whether an individual prefers to use such compounds at their own risk or not, large companies will use whatever is the cheapest ingredient for their product.
In some cases, that's better for the consumer - who, often, has almost zero choice.
(And if you think you truly have choice as a consumer, I challenge you to use a phone that isn't running either Apple or Google's code.)
I not sure how much we’re disagreeing here. Applying my argument of taxing externalities to certain food additives would result in taxes so high that it would effectively be a ban.
The externalities of integrated batteries are that people probably replace their phones sooner than otherwise, resulting in more electronic waste. But phones are only a tiny fraction of e-waste. Most e-waste is from household appliances, displays, & HVAC equipment. Phones are less 10%. I mean, how could it be otherwise? Phones are small and people use them for years before upgrading.
I’m not sure what the Android/iOS duopoly has to do with removable batteries. Mandating removable batteries would not change the operating systems available. And while there isn’t much choice in which OS you can run on a phone, there is enough choice that you can buy phones with removable batteries. If anything, this is an argument against mandating removable batteries, as governments are not mandating/subsidizing another phone OS despite far less choice in that area.
Lastly, I don’t see how banning people from having phones with integrated batteries gives them more choice. Most people (such as myself) don’t really care about removable batteries, and would rather have a phone that is smaller, cheaper, and/or more resistant to the elements. The way to give people the most choice is to tax externalities commensurate to the harm they cause, and let the market figure out what people actually value.
This has been repeated so so many times... How can you be sure that throwaway glued-together phones are thinner and lighter than repairable phones.. If there is any source of this information, it's vendors who have interest in phones being non-repairable so they can ship more units...
How about vendors get on their asses and design thinner and lighter phones that are not e-waste from the moment they leave the factory?
I bet you when forced to make the right decision they can go even thinner and lighter than the current flagships...
For that matter, I put a chonky case on my phone anyway... would rather have a sturdier phone that doesn't need an additional case that has the features I'd like, including an easily replaced/swapped battery.
Beyond this, hell, make the "internal" battery solid-state with minimal capacity and have an external power pack from the get-go as part of case designs. Get the size of battery you want... if you want a big booty phone with battery for days, you can get it.
That assumes that the market itself is actually "free" and consistent and that there are no bad actors in the mix, and upstarts are allowed to freely start and compete. Given the regulations in the space that is emphatically not so.
Incumbents will remove and enshitify a number of features in order to maximize returns... Your new clothes dryer has a 10 year mechanical warranty.. but the control board isn't covered, will die in 12-24 months and won't be produced again. Oh and there's some clunky DRM in the mix on top. Guess you get to buy a new dryer, but this time you'll go with $OtherShittyBrandThatDoesTheSameThing.
Aren’t newer washers/dryers full of electronics because of laws mandating higher efficiency? My parents have an old Maytag washer that uses around 30 gallons per load while my washer uses less than 8. I know Speed Queen makes dumb laundry machines, but at least one of their models was banned for residential sale by the Department of Energy. They ended up figuring out a workaround by gimping the default cleaning mode and encouraging users to not use that mode.[1]
But I don’t see how mandating removable batteries helps this situation with phones. I don’t replace my phone when the battery degrades, as it’s pretty cheap & painless to replace the battery after a few years. I upgrade when my phone stops getting security updates, or when a new phone comes along with some feature I want.
Earth's resources are finite, both in terms of raw materials and ability to absorb pollution. Stewardship of our resources entails the regulation of the things we create with those resources such that our collective consumption is conserved. Such oversight is both prudent, and as history and global outcomes teach, quite necessary.
I don't disagree with your statement, but an increase in design durability also does those things. A phone that you can drop and it doesn't break creates less pollution than a phone that you can drop and replace the screen.
E-waste is a minuscule rounding error compared to all the other forms of environmental destruction modern industrial civilization causes. European countries are massive polluters and net carbon producers (though not quite as bad as the US); e-waste shouldn't even be on their radar since it is a distraction from almost infinitely more important environmental concerns. People complaining about this don't actually care about e-waste, they just talk about it because it's convenient for their argument.
My low-cost plastic Casio watch based on a very old design is waterproof and battery can be swapped out by undoing 4 philips screws, no glue. Its buttons can also be operated under water while staying waterproof.
I normally much prefer screws over glue but Apple has at least been using repair-friendly glue like the electrically debonding adhesive in use for iPhone 16e/17e.
Making these devices repairable is not just about taking it apart, it's also about getting it back together. If I need to electrically debond the adhesive, then I'd also need to new strips of this special adhesive to hold the new battery in place. All of this is after needing a heat gun to weaken the adhesive just to get into it, which I assume also needs to be reapplied on reassembly to retain the same level of water and dust resistance.
It's not just a matter of buying a battery and using some tools the average person has on hand. A whole kit of specialty tools and parts needs to be ordered to facilitate the repair. Apple's own repair kit is the most extreme form of this, where they ship 70lbs of tools, which would be comical if it wasn't so sad.
Yes. Dont assume that everybody is technically minded such as yourself.
I know plenty of people that would never even consider jump starting thei car. However are also quite happy with poppping open a battery cover and doing a simple swap like any other battery powered device.
You don't have to be "technically minded" to figure this out. It's not spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, it's a picture with an arrow that says "Clip red wire here". Simply driving a car is a thousand times more complicated, and we expect most everybody to be capable of that.
There's also a difference between not wanting to do something, and not being capable of it.
It is probably a good idea to review some instructions before jump starting a car because even though it is simple, if you do it wrong (connect the battery terminal last) you can blow up your battery from the ignition of hydrogen gas.
Well yeah any glue is worse than screws: this I agree with you. But attaching a 9V battery to the glue is about the same difficulty as aligning the screwdriver with the screw and applying torque with a screwdriver.
There's little metal tabs you can alligator-clip a 9-volt battery onto, which will release the adhesive. Way better than the stupid pull tabs you had to pull and roll in a very particular way in order to not tear them and render the battery unsafe to remove.
I actually never did. I think you're only supposed to replace it on those scuba-style watches with screw-on casebacks that shred the gasket when fully tightened to ensure a tight seal.
But on those watches with 4 screws on the case, the gasket seemed fine to me to keep reusing.
I think a lot of sealing rings / gaskets are meant to be single use. I had to swap the heater on my hot tub a while back and the store told me to change the o-rings on the inlet and outlet as it was unlikely the prior ones would re-seal after being loosened.
It seems like the same can be true for the glue used on the iPhone.
> Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions and resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Liquid damage is not covered under warranty, but you might have rights under consumer law.[0]
If a gasket has a predictable life, there could be a warning after that period that the water resistance may be compromised and to replace the gasket if this is a concern for how the user use's the phone. With glue, it seems less certain and Apple goes so far as to say even dropping your phone can compromise the seal enough to risk liquid damage.
Meanwhile, a G-Shock was designed to have a battery life of 10 years, have a water resistance of 10 bar, and survive a fall of 10 meters. Dropping the watch doesn't nullify the water resistance claims, the goal was to be able to do all of those things at once.
I have had blackview "rugged" phones before - the only reason I had to give up on them was that they never update the OS and I couldn't get Lineage OS on them.
These things _do_not_break_. Once I rashly dropped mine on a concrete floor to show off to a friend. I regretted it immediately, thinking oh no, I didn't have to take it that far... it turned out it was completely fine. I washed it with soap when I got mud over it. It also weighed a ton in my pocket.
At first it looks like a normal torx head, but then you realize it has 5 lobes instead of 6. Apple used these on early iPhone models when you actually could open them with this proprietary screwdriver.
I get it for watches, but I've never understood the mass-market need for a waterproof phone, outside of a few niche hobbies. Are people showering and swimming with their phones or something? Or dropping them in their toilets? The wettest my phone has ever been in 8 years is in my pocket while it's raining.
People in humid climates and cold climates were regularly having their phones get denied warranty service because the water ingress stickers turned red due to condensation, without ever exposing their phone to water immersion. This was understandably upsetting for a lot of people who just wanted their phone to be fixed under warranty.
Thus, companies put in a big effort to seal their phones against dust and water, which ought to have dramatically reduced these service issues and led to a better customer experience overall!
There is waterproof specification levels. I haven't met one consumer product which doesn't let moisture in. I live in a hot country (not over 40ºC mind you)
If I not being precise, keeping your phone in your jeans deep tight pocket when you are sweating or raining will cause you problems. It might seem too many coincidences for you, but it is common enough that some of us avoid keeping the phone in the pocket.
In a cold climate it’s the opposite problem. You need to keep the phone warm when you’re outside, otherwise it becomes extremely cold, and then becomes a condensation magnet when you come back inside!
Kayaking, fishing, river floating, surfing, diving, snorkeling, etc. "No one I know takes their phone snorkeling" <- that's because they're not presently waterproof, but I imagine a lot of people would like to take a high quality camera under water.
I like to wash my phone under the tap, not getting paranoid of having it in a table close to the pool while drinking a few beers with my wife and friends, it is a really nice to have feature if you live in a warmer climate.
Tens of millions of people have outdoor hobbies that puts them in direct or incidental contact with water. Hundreds of millions live in places where rain happens. Billions live in situations where a spill of drinking water (or water based liquids) are a real risk for thier phones.
I don't want to take extra care and caution just to have a life and a fone. Theoretically this thing makes my life easier and I want it to act like it damnit.
It is not that long ago that smartphones would die from moisture exposure if you left them in the bathroom while taking a shower. I had a girlfriend around 2001 who spent all her savings on a shiny new Nokia 8250, got drunk and barfed on her jacket. The phone was in the pocket, and the moisture from the wet jacket completely killed it, she cried about it for weeks. I also remember my mother dropping her iPhone 6 in the harbor while getting off a boat, it got picked up but was dead. Last year I was out hiking in the rain, and my aging (5+ years old) iPhone 11 got water inside it and started dying soon after (I'd been sailing/swimming with the phone and had exposed it to salt water, apparently that will wear down the seals if you do it enough.)
In other words, I absolutely see the need for waterproof phones, even for ordinary people doing ordinary things, and am never going to buy one that isn't.
I think it's mostly marketing. When all phones are identical glass rectangles, the only meaningful way to distinguish your product is by being the biggest, thinnest, highest IP-rating.
Most of these metrics are entirely orthogonal to what any real person wants from a phone, but that's an irrelevant detail to marketing types
It really depends on the model, manufacturer, & luck. I’ve never had a phone lose its water resistance. The phone I use today (a 13 mini) is almost five years old and I clean it by running it under the faucet.
I'd return it if a brand new device that advertised IP67 died almost immediately under a normal sink water flow. Clearly it wasn't built to spec and one can't trust the rest of their manufacturing.
But I mean that's just similarly true of Samsung products. I avoid them like the plague. I haven't had a good Samsung device in almost 20 years, and used to be a Samsung fan
They said 2 years after purchase. So that's where the debate is. How long should we hold manufacturers accountable for in regards to waterproofing? 1 year, 2 years, forever?
I had a Pixel 6a last year bought not too long after it came out. I left it on a patio table. I was hosing things off and there was a significant amount of over spray on to the table. The screen died over the course of a couple of hours due to water ingreess.
I definitely don't mean to call into question Pixel device robustness overall into question. I'm just trying to point out even well glued phones eventually develop weaknesses to their seams. And this was a device I routinely washed iin the sink to clean, it really caught me off guard when it failed.
I'm kinda surprised with esim, wireless charging and Bluetooth noones just made a phone with a solid layer of glass completely surrounding it for 100% waterproofing
A lack of physical port makes troubleshooting more difficult. Apple didn’t remove the diagnostic port from their watches until the series 7. Also I think certain governments require that phones have a USB-C port.
Timex has been making iron-man watches held together with Philips-head screws that can withstand 100 meters of water pressure since the mid-1980s. Waterproofing is no excuse for this nonsense.
Watch cases are relatively huge for what needs to be inside them. You can see the difference between an entire smartphone and a simple time keeping device, right?
They also don’t have the long aspect ratio of phones (bending moment).
This doesn’t compare to phones at all. It’s like trying to compare your TI-83 calculator to a MacBook Pro
Now go look up why they stopped riveting ships in the 40's and went to welding, there are no modern riveted ships. Even with the rivets they were forged not pressed, nothing like a screw.
Cheap aluminum boats are still riveted, welding preferred for obvious reasons. I have an old riveted aluminum John boat and is leaks through the rivets and seams...
I once had a cheap Timex watch die from water ingress after running a track workout during a torrential downpour. At the time I joked that it only failed because we ran farther than the 100m rating
I think the USB & speaker are the weak links for water ingress. Also, a removable battery would (probably?) significantly weaken the phone. So, if you dropped it, it'd be more likely to sustain real damage.
I don't see them as very big weak points. USB doesn't have enough voltage to do jack in water even if you don't detect the water and turn it off. And the speaker can be made entirely out of waterproof materials, there are literally waterproof floating pool speakers you can buy for dirt cheap. The weak link is the main oring/glue as always.
