It will be a pretty major redesign of the chasis and body to accommodate a removable battery and the cover, so I think it would make little economical sense to maintain two designs for every phone sold here.
I’m wondering how ‘user replaceable’ is defined. Will we get backs that just pop off, or do they just need to be easier to replace? (No glue or proprietary tools required)
They do, but they’re incredibly prone to breaking when you pull and sometimes they’re just hard as shit to grip so you have to use a screwdriver to twist and pull.
I don’t think I need to explain why that’s so dangerous.
As someone who has changed hundreds of iphone batteries, the adhesive sucks. At least they changed to a different adhesive around iphone 8 because alcohol does wonders on it. I don’t even attempt to pull the tabs on those anymore.
May I ask how you do that? Do you just…douse the battery in alcohol? There isn’t much of a gap between the adhesive and the battery in my experience, so it just sits inside the chasis and rolls around. I haven’t had any luck with that but I’m probably doing it wrong.
I drizzle some in the corner and then use a sturdy tool to gently pry up on the battery to allow the alcohol to get deeper under. Since the adhesive patches are small to fit around the wireless charging coil, it doesn’t take much. Once you get one side of the battery loose the other will easily come with it, especially if the alcohol got to them.
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.
That link is dead for me. I wonder what constitutes “removable”. I’d honestly be fine if it still required a spludger, but it required them to make it easily accessable and not loaded down with glue once you’re in. And make OEM batteries available for sale.
i would be fine if it needed some tool to stay water tight or whatever atleast make it easily exchangeable doesnt need to be the old removeable plastic backs.
Phones are getting more expensive so people are holding on to them longer, so it’s a nice quality of life improvement to remove the barriers to battery replacement so less people have to go down to a phone repair store to get it changed. The more of a hassle battery replacement is seen the more likely people are to just upgrade and create e-waste.
The problem here is that in order for most people to be able to replace the battery themselves safely they need to be really idiot proof.
We’d need to return to back covers with latches or big screws and batteries in cases and contacts. This shit is bulky, heavy and hardly waterproof.
New iPhones use lipo pouch with a ZIF connector straight to the motherboard with a “pull to release” adhesive strip hidden under a panel with a single use sticky seal and two small screws. There is no black magic in replacing the battery yourself and the solution is small, lightweight and waterproof.
However most people wouldn’t even know which way to turn the screws to loosen them and probably wouldn’t be bothered by throwing the phone away and getting the one with a better camera AI and more emojis.
@riodoro1@NightOwl I dunno, if you compare capacities of say, iPhone 14 Pro (12.38Wh) to Fairphone 4 (15.03Wh) and then the product dimensions of the two. There’s not a huge amount in it. Adding the 14 Pro Max (16.68Wh) for additional comparisons.
The Fairphone is 2.6mm thicker than the iPhones. (Yes the screen bezels are chonk too lol) But the fairphone is also making allowance to make every single component swappable, and has an IPS display (switching to OLED would save 1+ millimeter)
The hard part with iPhones isn’t the battery side of the equation here, it’s Magsafe (which is great imo) While regular QI charging is fairly lowkey, I could see the extra tech required inside the phone for that being prohibitive in terms of spatial management.
Though it wasn’t ever cheap enough for my allowance 🤣 probably for the best, my first android smartphone came a couple years later in the Vodafone Smart 4 Turbo. (snapdragon 410 version)
my first smartphone was an lg optimus s. that thing saw more toilet time than my butt. i lost track of how many times i dropped it in the toilet. it went in a lake a few times, also. it was a beast
[edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can’t have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].
The difference is that most of the people isn’t expected to own a mechanical watch, but having a smartphone is pretty much expected. You cannot treat a basic commodity as if it were a luxury item.
Would it have been appropriate when everyone had mechanical watches? Nope. Not then either.
How about another analogy, most people own cars (at least in North America), how about the government putting laws in place that car manufacturers change their designs so that everyone’s mother is able to swap an engine by opening up the hood and unplugging one plug, lifting the old one out and putting the new one in?
It’s probably even technically possible, but what business does the government have in making that decision on everyone’s behalf.
How is this an Android vs Apple thing? Most of the major manufacturers are making devices with the battery sealed in; they’ll all have to innovate ways of making them removable.
Yeah, I wish there was some advancements made when it came to trying to create swappable battery devices that retain water proofing. That area has just stalled since expensive disposable tech is more lucrative. Average person should just get a new one like you said as long as the process is still more difficult than changing a light bulb.
Yeah, I wish there was some advancements made when it came to trying to create swappable battery devices that retain water proofing.
If nothing else, regulations like the one described in here will do just that. So far the tech giants haven’t had any incentive to design sleek, waterproof devices with replaceable batteries. But you’ve gotta believe that if they’re required to have replaceable batteries, they’re not going to say “OK, back to chonky non-waterproof devices for us!”. They’re going to spend some of their R&D budgets to innovate ways that makes it more realistic to do all three.
The original Moto Defy got it right the first time with ip67 rated, removable battery, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. The next major improvement came with the xperia z(or z3) and they got waterproof charge ports and headphone jacks (no port plug required) but ditched the removable battery. Every other phone since seems to have stripped away some useful feature since. The new defy 2 is going to have satelite messaging but is huge and no removabpe battery or headphone jack iirc.
Manufacturing, storing, shipping and supporting two different models of basically the same phone is probably more expensive than just deploying the one model with the removable battery everywhere.
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.
Wow ; thats pretty amazing - now I have even more respect for them thinking ahead and going after the USB-C ports first… this could force manufacturers to give us a better product - I’ll be watching this.
Good, it’s a small victory but one step closer to a society that doesn’t create waste just to buy the next new shiny toy. Products should be build to last, be easily repairable and create as little waste as possible (which isn’t possible in a system that demands unlimited growth over anything else). If we want to have a somewhat ok climate in the future, just focusing on electric vehicles (which are doing the whole subscription to access your hardware fully, not easily repairable bs as well) isn’t gonna cut it.
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Wonder if phone manufacturers will fragment their offerings to satisfy EU requirements or if we’ll all end up with removable batteries.
It will be a pretty major redesign of the chasis and body to accommodate a removable battery and the cover, so I think it would make little economical sense to maintain two designs for every phone sold here.
I’m wondering how ‘user replaceable’ is defined. Will we get backs that just pop off, or do they just need to be easier to replace? (No glue or proprietary tools required)
@ClassyDave @Roman0 Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen.
Also it could create a black market for exported/imported European phones.
LET’S GOOOOO
I hope this passes, but I wonder how it will get watered down, where the loopholes are.
Honestly, with Apple making it incredibly fucking hard to take out their batteries with excessive amounts of glue, I’m okay with this.
Do they not have the tabs you can pull out anymore?
They do, but they’re incredibly prone to breaking when you pull and sometimes they’re just hard as shit to grip so you have to use a screwdriver to twist and pull.
I don’t think I need to explain why that’s so dangerous.
As someone who has changed hundreds of iphone batteries, the adhesive sucks. At least they changed to a different adhesive around iphone 8 because alcohol does wonders on it. I don’t even attempt to pull the tabs on those anymore.
May I ask how you do that? Do you just…douse the battery in alcohol? There isn’t much of a gap between the adhesive and the battery in my experience, so it just sits inside the chasis and rolls around. I haven’t had any luck with that but I’m probably doing it wrong.
I drizzle some in the corner and then use a sturdy tool to gently pry up on the battery to allow the alcohol to get deeper under. Since the adhesive patches are small to fit around the wireless charging coil, it doesn’t take much. Once you get one side of the battery loose the other will easily come with it, especially if the alcohol got to them.
Amen! Now let’s see how Apple gets around that one too. :)
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.
It might lead to thicker phones, but battery and/or SW obsolescence are the main reasons I have been swapping phone in the last 10 years.
Back in the day when I had a Samsung S4, I bought this massive brick of a battery/new back plate and I LOVED it. Absolutely worth being a bit thick.
That link is dead for me. I wonder what constitutes “removable”. I’d honestly be fine if it still required a spludger, but it required them to make it easily accessable and not loaded down with glue once you’re in. And make OEM batteries available for sale.
i would be fine if it needed some tool to stay water tight or whatever atleast make it easily exchangeable doesnt need to be the old removeable plastic backs.
Phones are getting more expensive so people are holding on to them longer, so it’s a nice quality of life improvement to remove the barriers to battery replacement so less people have to go down to a phone repair store to get it changed. The more of a hassle battery replacement is seen the more likely people are to just upgrade and create e-waste.
The problem here is that in order for most people to be able to replace the battery themselves safely they need to be really idiot proof. We’d need to return to back covers with latches or big screws and batteries in cases and contacts. This shit is bulky, heavy and hardly waterproof.
New iPhones use lipo pouch with a ZIF connector straight to the motherboard with a “pull to release” adhesive strip hidden under a panel with a single use sticky seal and two small screws. There is no black magic in replacing the battery yourself and the solution is small, lightweight and waterproof. However most people wouldn’t even know which way to turn the screws to loosen them and probably wouldn’t be bothered by throwing the phone away and getting the one with a better camera AI and more emojis.
@riodoro1 @NightOwl I dunno, if you compare capacities of say, iPhone 14 Pro (12.38Wh) to Fairphone 4 (15.03Wh) and then the product dimensions of the two. There’s not a huge amount in it. Adding the 14 Pro Max (16.68Wh) for additional comparisons.
The Fairphone is 2.6mm thicker than the iPhones. (Yes the screen bezels are chonk too lol) But the fairphone is also making allowance to make every single component swappable, and has an IPS display (switching to OLED would save 1+ millimeter)
@riodoro1 @NightOwl
The hard part with iPhones isn’t the battery side of the equation here, it’s Magsafe (which is great imo) While regular QI charging is fairly lowkey, I could see the extra tech required inside the phone for that being prohibitive in terms of spatial management.
Nah, the og motorola defy had removable battery, ip67 rating, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. It was a tiny phone and it was brilliant.
@Know_not_Scotty_does @riodoro1 for some reason when I was 16 I really wanted the Defy Mini (XT320)
Though it wasn’t ever cheap enough for my allowance 🤣 probably for the best, my first android smartphone came a couple years later in the Vodafone Smart 4 Turbo. (snapdragon 410 version)
my first smartphone was an lg optimus s. that thing saw more toilet time than my butt. i lost track of how many times i dropped it in the toilet. it went in a lake a few times, also. it was a beast
[edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can’t have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].
The difference is that most of the people isn’t expected to own a mechanical watch, but having a smartphone is pretty much expected. You cannot treat a basic commodity as if it were a luxury item.
Would it have been appropriate when everyone had mechanical watches? Nope. Not then either.
How about another analogy, most people own cars (at least in North America), how about the government putting laws in place that car manufacturers change their designs so that everyone’s mother is able to swap an engine by opening up the hood and unplugging one plug, lifting the old one out and putting the new one in?
It’s probably even technically possible, but what business does the government have in making that decision on everyone’s behalf.
People disagreeing with you isn’t what an echo chamber is.
How is this an Android vs Apple thing? Most of the major manufacturers are making devices with the battery sealed in; they’ll all have to innovate ways of making them removable.
Yeah, I wish there was some advancements made when it came to trying to create swappable battery devices that retain water proofing. That area has just stalled since expensive disposable tech is more lucrative. Average person should just get a new one like you said as long as the process is still more difficult than changing a light bulb.
If nothing else, regulations like the one described in here will do just that. So far the tech giants haven’t had any incentive to design sleek, waterproof devices with replaceable batteries. But you’ve gotta believe that if they’re required to have replaceable batteries, they’re not going to say “OK, back to chonky non-waterproof devices for us!”. They’re going to spend some of their R&D budgets to innovate ways that makes it more realistic to do all three.
The original Moto Defy got it right the first time with ip67 rated, removable battery, expandable storage, and a headphone jack. The next major improvement came with the xperia z(or z3) and they got waterproof charge ports and headphone jacks (no port plug required) but ditched the removable battery. Every other phone since seems to have stripped away some useful feature since. The new defy 2 is going to have satelite messaging but is huge and no removabpe battery or headphone jack iirc.
This is awesome! I hope the EU Compliant phones come overseas too!
Probably kinda likely, I think?
Manufacturing, storing, shipping and supporting two different models of basically the same phone is probably more expensive than just deploying the one model with the removable battery everywhere.
that is how the eu can regulate the world
thank you EU!
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
Add to that requirements for longer software support. At least for security patches.
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.
Nice, good to know! And you were awesome in the Suicide Squad series
Thank you! Go see “Barbie” in theater too!
Wow ; thats pretty amazing - now I have even more respect for them thinking ahead and going after the USB-C ports first… this could force manufacturers to give us a better product - I’ll be watching this.
W move for the EU. Very glad they’re mandating stuff that should have been common place to begin with (ex. USB C on iPhones).
Good, it’s a small victory but one step closer to a society that doesn’t create waste just to buy the next new shiny toy. Products should be build to last, be easily repairable and create as little waste as possible (which isn’t possible in a system that demands unlimited growth over anything else). If we want to have a somewhat ok climate in the future, just focusing on electric vehicles (which are doing the whole subscription to access your hardware fully, not easily repairable bs as well) isn’t gonna cut it.