Finally! Now to also force phonemakers to universally provide bootloader unlocks so we can put our own ROMs on our devices once the software support ends.
Hooray! Younger generations will finally be able to experience the joy of dropping their phone and having to pick up three to four different pieces! /s
(I’m all for this change, by the way)
Do y’all remember the days when you dropped your phone and it exploded into 3 or 4 pieces? 🤣 Those were the good days.
Three. Battery, cover and the rest. Weirdly, no damage to the plastic display. How? I guess it was the
weatherbezelAnd when you scratched up the back you bought a new one for $12. No $200 glass or machined aluminum cases that we put $35 covers on just to protect them from every day use.
Well, it was plastic. Pretty hard to crack plastic like glass
About bloody time! Devices these days are so far technically advanced, no need to upgrade every 2 years. I can hold onto a phone for easily 3-5 years. Especially with hot swap batteries!
I can’t wait to hear the Apple marketing word for this feature. They’ll add some gimmick like the battery is held in with magnets and say “We call it MagPack and we think you’re going to love it.”
Although this is obviously a step in the right direction it needs to be followed up with security updates, no point increasing the life of the hardware without doing the same for the software.
Making it illegal to lock bootloaders would make each device community-maintainable.
I hope you mean, always make it possible to unlock the bootloader offline (to not be dependent on them). There are good security reasons to have it locked by default.
Yes. No more of that unlock code nonsense. Even Fairphone has an online bootloader unlocking process. I hate it.
Fairphone 3 user here. My main reason to choose this phone a few years ago was because the battery could easily be replaced. Too many phones are perfectly functional but the battery is half dead. Another boon of non-glued batteries : You can carry two (or more) batteries to easily switch when the first one is KO. Meaning no need for portable charger and useless cables in your pocket. Phone at 10% ? Just change it, bam 100% in a second. Easy as that.
I’ll probably not be the target of such regulations because I wouldn’t choose an anti-consumer phone brand anyway, but at least it’s going in the right direction.
This is awesome. Thank god for EU legislation that directly benefits me as an American consumer. Now I can microwave lithium ion batteries in peace!
If this goes through, I think it would be really good news. Battery failure is one of the leading things that force people to replace their smartphones, and having them be replaceable would go a long way towards making smartphones last longer.
But they are replaceable in that sense. You can take it back the the manufacturer or to one of those independent phone stores and they’ll swap out a battery for you.
I don’t think a user swappable battery is actually a feature most users need. Not when smartphones get over a day out of a charge, you can charge at home, work or in a car, and external batteries exist.
That’s where I have to disagree. Perhaps in your country you have lots of OEM repair stores but where I live we have none. Only 3rd party guys who are totally independent.
I had a LG V30 in mint condition but the battery was done. No one has that battery and no one is interested in getting it because LG sold so few devices here. You can’t even find cases for most phones, only Samsung phones or iPhone’s.
So I had to get a new phone.
This is very common in most of the world, especially the Developing countries.
What phone are you using? Both apple and Samsung have made their devices borderline impossible to swap the battery out. They will then charge you an arm and a leg for sometime that used to be an easy swap.
And now they just have to force manufacturers to either at least security patch devices for, let’s say 10 years, or force them to open source everything the community needs to continue supporting this device. It never happened to me that the battery died before support ended.
Just had that issue with my Pixel 3a XL. No more security updates. Had to replace it with a Pixel 6a but I liked the 3a XL more. It there was any community support for the 3a XL, I would rather sell my 6a again.
As an Apple user, I definitely have batteries die before the product stops being useful. The company provides feature updates for old phones for several years, and when that runs out they continue to provide security patches for several more years.
A new iPhone battery is only $47 (if you do the repair yourself, and if you send your old battery back to Apple for a recycling credit), but it’s a pretty complex and arduous process with a fair chance of damaging your phone while attempting it. You also have to pay a deposit, over a thousand dollars, to rent the tools off Apple. Ouch.
You can take it to an Apple store, but that takes even longer than doing the repair yourself. And it costs more (though you don’t have to pay the outrageous deposit for the tools).
This legislation would force Apple to make it a simple process with no tools. Yes please.
I actually love all these regulations on smartphones (mainly by the EU), like the recent USB-C standard. That one in particular makes it so much easier to share chargers around the house!
USB-type C to become EU’s common charger by end of 2024
I mean… Sure, but we’ve had USB-C as de facto standard for many years now. When was the last time you saw a micro USB phone?
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Couldn’t agree more, two years ago I was gifted a small wireless speaker which works fine and everything but I sometimes even forget to charge it because its cable is a 15cm short USB-A to Micro-USB one which somehow is the only Micro-USB cable I have left at home as I didn’t have any other device with that port in years and I had thrown away a few cables when I last moved. Now whenever I am looking for a new electronic device USB-C is one of the first things I check and it’s a deal breaker for me.
As a USA citizen, thanks EU for making our cellphone companies not be dick’s.
This is actually pretty crazy. Wonder how much it’ll affect the overall design of modern smartphones. Will we witness the return of flagships with plastic back covers?
I couldn’t care less if the back cover is plastic, it’s just going inside a case anyway.
Yeesh I hope not.
I hope everything just becomes brushed aluminum ffs. I hate all these glass back phones
Phones only have glass backs to let wireless charging work so I don’t see aluminium making a come back any time soon.
I hate wireless charging too, though. It’s inherently less efficient than wired, and you have less range of motion while charging. With a wire, I can still use my phone while it’s plugged in. Wireless charging needs to go away imo.
Fingers crossed that this will be implemented well, im tired of having sleek electronics be irrelevant in 2 years when the silicon could go for 5 or six
The silicon could go on for decades if both the modem and processor were fully documented hardware that the community can access and support in the Linux kernel.
I can run a secure and current form of Linux on 30+ year old hardware if I want to, because the hardware documentation was expected by everyone at the time even if some end users were oblivious to what this meant. The whole reason google pushes Android is because they provide a base Linux kernel that hardware manufacturers can easily slip their proprietary junk into without requiring them to add the kind of open source code needed for mainline kernel support by the community. This is the mechanism that depreciates your device. It is totally artificial and an end user exploitation by design.
It’s usually not silicon on the PCB that fails, but the other electronic components (usually the capacitors) that fails first, and since they are surface mounted devices it’s really difficult to solder them by hand.
There are no electrolytics in phones, and most newer phones don’t even have tantalums. So long as there are no flexing stresses induced, which is nearly impossible with the way phones are constructed now, the all MLC capacitors construction has the potential to outlast any PC motherboard or laptop by a large margin.
The most critical issue is board connectors and moisture ingress. The USB-C connector or any other high pin density micro sized connector with a tiny pin pitch, and large electrical potential will fail from charge cycling and a resistance forming between pins. USB-C is particularly bad because reversing the connector doubles the number of pins on the board in a ridiculous amount of space. Just using a standard USB-C connector when ordering a prototype to be fabed at any common board house will double the price. The USB-C pin pitch is too tight for the most common fab process resolution.
The pin pitch only matters for high power application to prevent arcing, and that can also be resolved through the most modern USB-PD standard (See: USB-PD Extended Power Range, which can support up to 240w), and the electrical adjustment you have to make are all on the device side.
I don’t know about the resistance forming between the pins, for low cycle applications the cheapest gold flash plating would easily last 10K plug cycles, and accounting for corrosion from hand sweat/oil/hand lotion, many companies favor going for thicker hard gold or platinum plating nowadays. (Rhodium is the absolute best, but it’s just too expensive now to do at scale because they are used in catalytic converters for electric cars). USB-C lasts for many more cycles than the Micro-USB standards before it (You can read the 4 axis and wrenching test standards for mechanical testing on the USB spec) so I’m not sure what you are talking about here.
Lab tests rarely reflect the real world. I’ve seen several issues with Pixels that had an issue with PD failing due to moisture, corrosion, and a bridge developing at the connector.
Actually, no, the lab tests are standard with all products of all large companies, and they are usually conducted in extreme conditions, like 100% moisture at 80-90C oven for 48 hours and highly concentrated salt spray kind of extreme.
You bring up the example of Google Pixel, yeah, because it’s Google, they are software people who think they can just cheap out on hardware and save a couple of cents by making it up in software. Look at the Nexus 5X and 6P, both devices had an absurd amount of quality control issues compared to the other products made by the manufacturers, and the only factor in common between them is Google.
Things change with time. The Pixel is now the most secure phone available due to its hardware encryption key verification system. It is the only phone that can run a verifiably secure bootloader and ROM on top of the same untrusted hardware situation found in all modern proprietary devices. Running a Pixel on Graphene OS is the most free and honestly liberating experience that has been available since the invention of capacitive touch technology made these handheld computers popular. The hardware build is on par with any similar device of the same price point, made in the same facilities as most devices.
How is this a win? My non-Android device is at 89% health after 5 years. I’m not going to replace the battery, I’m going to replace the device.
I’d prefer that we get paid $20 to recycle an old phone so that they actually get recycled.
Because not everyone has the same anecdotal experience as you?
Opposite boat. My perfectly good device gets replaced after about 4 years because it struggles to hold a charge. I don’t give a shit about iterative phone specs, and I say that as a tech enthusiast.
I do miss being able to swap out a phone battery and this will certainly be a step in the right direction in terms ewaste and device longevity.
One thing that I wonder about is waterproofing or water resistance. Some phones are basically waterproof in shallow water. How achievable is this with a device with a trivial way to remove the battery?
The Galaxy S5 sport had a battery door and water resistance. They just used gaskets.
People make this argument and barely anyone really uses the waterprooding features of a phone
You know, I really like my Essential Ph-1. It was a lovely little phone. I had the little 360 camera accessory that snapped on magentically and everything. It was so cool! Then, 1.5 seconds, dropped into water from which I grabbed it instantly, and it was done. No warranty coverage for dropping it in water, and zero waterproofing, and toasted phone. So, yes, more of us “use” waterproofing on our phones than you would think. The thing is that it didn’t need to be this way. There were waterproof phones back before everything was glued glass slabs all the time. Galaxy S5 Sport as mentioned by @HubbleST@lemm.ee above (and other “sport” edition phones). We have a lot of hygrophobic coatings and tech we didn’t have in the day of the Galaxy S5 series. We can do better now, if manufacturers are forced to.
