Replaceable phone batteries

[Helen]

Since I'm nothing, if not an scientist (so I'm nothing ), I have experimented with my old Samsung - it charges almost as quickly as my newer one (but then it didn't have as many functions), it stays charged almost as long, despite its age, it's slightly thicker than the newer one, but it's extremely easy to open the back panel, and take out the very slim, metal (no idea what kind) encased battery, and put it back/replace it. It seems eminently sensible to make this possible.

 

[jeremyp]

I disagree, I can't see anything in the rules that would require it to be encased in plastic, it has to be user replaceable without special tools or the tools must be provided, not packaged to snap in/snap out. There's no reason that the battery itself needs to be any different.

It needs to be robust enough for a normal person to handle it without puncturing it. This includes final disposal. If you make it easy for just anybody to remove it, it has to be able to survive them tossing it in the trash.

Edit: you also will have to provide some protection for the electronics inside the phone so that when Joe Public replaces his battery and puts his sticky fingers all over the internals he doesn't damage anything.

 

[Mongrel]

I actually prefer the current iteration of the smartphone. Regulating them out of existence would mean that I, a customer, could not choose the better product.

What makes you so special?
I never got a choice when they switched to non-user replaceable batteries or the shift to slim-tech

 

[Mongrel]

Edit: you also will have to provide some protection for the electronics inside the phone so that when Joe Public replaces his battery and puts his sticky fingers all over the internals he doesn't damage anything.

All of the phones I had a separate battery compartment, when you opened up the only electronics you could access were the sim cage and the contact points for the battery

 

[Darat]

It needs to be robust enough for a normal person to handle it without puncturing it. This includes final disposal. If you make it easy for just anybody to remove it, it has to be able to survive them tossing it in the trash.

Edit: you also will have to provide some protection for the electronics inside the phone so that when Joe Public replaces his battery and puts his sticky fingers all over the internals he doesn't damage anything.

They all are all currently like that. The issue in repairability was things like soldering them directly to the phone's circuitry, encasing them in hard to impossible to get off glue and resins, specialist tools needed to remove them and so on. This is what a typical battery looks like in your phone and how they have looked like since they went non-swappable:

 

[Darat]

And this is the battery that was in an iPhone 3:




Not a very healthy battery....

 

[Jack by the hedge]

My last non-smartphone phone* had a battery that lasted over a week (and could be swapped in seconds if I had ever needed to). Best phone I ever had. Later ones could do vastly more, but being a phone was a much diminished part of what they were for.

*Nokia 6303. I think we used to call them "feature phones". It had a half-size low resolution screen but could manage stuff like email (back when emails were usually plain text.)

 

[Jack by the hedge]

And this is the battery that was in an iPhone 3:

View attachment 70842


Not a very healthy battery....

On the bright side, it looks like it would helpfully push the case open for you when it was knackered and wanted to be changed. A friend had a 1st gen Apple watch which did that. I gather they were a bit notorious for it.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

It needs to be robust enough for a normal person to handle it without puncturing it. This includes final disposal. If you make it easy for just anybody to remove it, it has to be able to survive them tossing it in the trash.

Edit: you also will have to provide some protection for the electronics inside the phone so that when Joe Public replaces his battery and puts his sticky fingers all over the internals he doesn't damage anything.

Not true, standard phone batteries (and other uncased batteries) are already for sale to the public, can already be disposed of, and batteries in most places are supposed to be disposed of desperately to normal trash anyway. I change the batteries in my watches, nothing to stop me getting my 'grubby little fingers' over the workings there, or changing the memory or HDD in a laptop, or PC components. As I understand it this is about features designed to stop people of reasonable competence replacing parts that might sensibly considered user replaceable, primarily it's about deliberately impeding serviceability with things like glued cases, cases that clip together with no non destructive way to release the clips or using specialised fasteners that the general public won't have tools for (such as when Apple switched to pentalobe screw heads).

 

[P.J. Denyer]

What makes you so special?
I never got a choice when they switched to non-user replaceable batteries or the shift to slim-tech

That and it's a false dichotomy.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

All of the phones I had a separate battery compartment, when you opened up the only electronics you could access were the sim cage and the contact points for the battery

Yet again, this is about replacing failing batteries, not swapping out flat batteries, it's about repairability not going back to old technology we've moved on from.

 

[Mongrel]

Yet again, this is about replacing failing batteries, not swapping out flat batteries, it's about repairability not going back to old technology we've moved on from.

Just pointing out that the old phones managed to keep your fingers away from the 'delicate electronics' if you needed to replace the battery, for whatever reason, it's a solved problem

 

[P.J. Denyer]

Just pointing out that the old phones managed to keep your fingers away from the 'delicate electronics' if you needed to replace the battery, for whatever reason, it's a solved problem

Obviously manufacturers could do that, but this legislation doesn't force them to.

 

[ahhell]

And this is the battery that was in an iPhone 3:

View attachment 70842


Not a very healthy battery....

That' happened to a work lap top I had once. it slowly expanded over time I stayed quite thinking i'd dropped it or something. IT sent out an email to the effect of "If your lap top looks like this, get rid of the battery as soon as possible it might catch fire like your coworkers." Half the company had to get rid of their batteries and replace the laptops. I kept mine and used it as a desktop for years. Looked into replacement batteries but could only find aftermarket replacements from companies I wasn't so sure of.

 

[theprestige]

What makes you so special?
I never got a choice when they switched to non-user replaceable batteries or the shift to slim-tech

LOL. I was replying to the argument that the law was for people who wanted choice. I pointed out that the law did not actually empower choice.

 

[theprestige]

That and it's a false dichotomy.

It absolutely is a true dichotomy, in context.

 

[ahhell]

Couple of thoughts. I'm fine with the EU doing this, its up to them. I'd like to see some way of measuring the impacts written in to laws like this. Sometimes they have counterintuitive impacts. The one that comes to mind is banning plastic grocery bags increased consumption of purpose produced plastic garbage bags. There is a non-zero though probably not very high chance that this could increase e-waste if consumers ditch batteries more quickly than they would have ditched phones with similar battery performance declines.

This is more of a general desire on my part to see most laws have metrics for success written in with conditions for sunsetting or keeping based on that.

Sure, this doesn't increase consumer choice but that's not the goal and frankly, as a consumer, this isn't exactly an important choice.

Is it a good law? The goal is reducing e waste which is in my opinion more important than my choice to have a replaceable battery or not. So, its a good law if it reduces e-waste in some significant way. If saves one phone from the land fill a year, I'd say scrap it though. If it saves a million, probably a good idea. Where I'd draw that line, no idea.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

LOL. I was replying to the argument that the law was for people who wanted choice. I pointed out that the law did not actually empower choice.

People who choose to replace a dud battery in their phone can do it. People who choose to pay someone else to do it, or pay for a new phone, can do that instead. It's just a right to repair thing, surely.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

A quick search suggests that between its first and second owners a smartphone tends to last about 6 years, and the common reasons for discarding them are the battery is failing or because they stop receiving updates. So it seems reasonable to think a fair proportion of smartphones will have economic life left in them if replacing their battery is cheaper and easier.

With my optimist hat on, if it's approaching half of phones eventually scrapped because a battery swap is too expensive to be worthwhile, then making that cheaper and easier might save perhaps half of those, for the lifetime of a new battery. Maybe 2-3 years.

So you might stretch the average phone's life from about 6 years to about 6 and a half. That's not peanuts.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

It absolutely is a true dichotomy, in context.

No one is going to force you to buy a 1990's phone. This just means phone companies can't design their products to prevent them being repairable. The similar laws to prevent car manufacturers preventing owners/non-dealer mechanics replacing parts have been introduced we haven't gone back to carburetors and crank handle starting. If you don't want to change the battery, you won't even notice the ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ difference, but people who do want to extend the life of their device, or have someone else do the work, can't be deliberately impeded from doing so and reasonable accommodation for this should be made.