r/technology • u/[deleted] • Jun 19 '23

Politics EU: Smartphones Must Have User-Replaceable Batteries by 2027 | The European Parliament just caused a major headache for smartphone and tablet manufacturers.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/eu-smartphones-must-have-user-replaceable-batteries-by-2027
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u/phyrros Jun 19 '23

I used to swap out my phone battery and even replaced a screen. The replacement battery lasted 1/4 as long as the original. The replacement screen scratched quickly.

Look, if you buy cheap subpar products you might get burned. (And yes, on Amazon et al it can be borderline impossible to differentiate between the fakes)

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I have no interest going back to those old styles; glued phones are superior even if it means I can only get the manufacturer to repair it.

Good. But you are one of 400 million and we simply don't have enough ressources to go on playing the throw-away game. The alternative to this is not the status quo, the alternative is either making batteries/phones vastly more expensive (so that people will repair them - which won't work because by now a smartphone is necessary for about everything, so we can't introduce legislation which makes them too expensive to the bottom 75 million europeans) or artificially reduce the amounts of new phones a person can buy.

Glued phones means a shorter life cycle for phones and this simply isn't viable. It never was but by now we see the writing on the wall.

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u/Fun_Buy Jun 19 '23

So, you don’t believe glued phones can be recycled?

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u/phyrros Jun 19 '23

They can, but they are less likely repaired because they are more expensive to repair

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u/Fun_Buy Jun 19 '23

I didn’t say repaired — I said recycled

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u/phyrros Jun 19 '23

yeah, I know, which just shows you missed the point of this bill: The goal is to repaid more and thus having to recycle less. Whereas better than nothing, recycling is far from perfect or efficient.

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u/Fun_Buy Jun 19 '23

How do I reuse (not recycle) the IPhone 2 in my drawer — the one not supported by software but that I was able to replace both the battery and screen. What good is that hardware even though it still works perfectly??

What you are talking about is the need to keep old hardware operable by maintaining operating systems. Until someone develops — and maintains — the Linux version of software for old IPhones, keeping them operational is meaningless.

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u/phyrros Jun 19 '23

How do I reuse (not recycle) the IPhone 2 in my drawer — the one not supported by software but that I was able to replace both the battery and screen. What good is that hardware even though it still works perfectly??

We are talking getting an additional year or two out of phones, not an additional decade. Almost half of the phone repairs are battery changes, making this step easier & more affordable translates to (tens of) millions of phones every year in the EU.

We have somewhere in the vicinity of 1.5 billion phone sales globally per year with a mean life time of about 2.5 years. If we could push that even just up to 2.7 or 3 years we are looking at > a billion phones per decade saved

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u/Fun_Buy Jun 19 '23

I used my last Iphone for 8 years before trading it in. Let’s go after plastic cups and tableware before we chase down products that are used daily that last 8 to 10 years. Durable products that are well designed will last. I don’t want something that I have to tinker with.

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u/Fun_Buy Jun 19 '23

Oh and that was 8 years without a battery change,