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No doubt those batteries will be proprietary, with a chip in it so you can only use new batteries supplied by your phone producer. Better start working on a law against that too.



It should have been implemented years ago against printer industry


Maybe some smartphones will now say you're "in need of a new battery" quicker now :-)


It had not occurred to me and this is terrifying


Also replacement batteries for old phones will probably cost nearly as much as new phones and will have a huge profit margin for phone manufacturers.


why? it will be fine.

mildly overpriced batteries of varying reliability will be ubiquitous. you will be able to get rid of that warning message with a stop at a gas station, or perhaps…

a low monthly fee.

perhaps rather like toothbrush head, you could get a new one periodically. on subscription. just throw the old one in the trash, and it will magically disappear to somewhere else.


if you've been paying attention, batteries already report percentage and serial number over too few connectors. There wasn't, or weren't successful lawsuits stopping innovation when printers died, what's to stop innovation again LLMs?


Question: Is this defeatism, is it faith based (laws are bad,period), or are you expecting to be profiteering from planned obsolescence yourself in the future?


I think that's just cynicism. Which is just another name for realism. It's not that the law about mandating replaceble battery is bad. But manufacturers will predictably squeeze every single cent they can. You can expect batteries to be chipped and cost nearly as much as new phones. So the fact that this law was past will be a huge additional profit for manufacturers unless there are some other laws about batteries.


I have replaced my iPhone X's battery after 4 years for %12 of its sale price. I had to wait longer than expected because my phone was a first generation device of its model number (Apple does silent internal revisions of the same model over time), so they had to upgrade a power managenent firmware normally not covered by iOS updates. Also, they have changed my speaker free of charge because apparently it was defective or broken in a way I didn't know.

After three years, my phone is out of support, with battery health at 90%. Considering my phone is out of support starting this year, this is neither expensive, nor planned obsolescence.

I'll save and buy another iPhone (the latest and greatest) in a couple of years, and will use that one for a decade, too.

How this is gouging the customer?

I support replaceable batteries, that will be great, but current practice is not to make batteries so expensive that people prefer newer phones, on the contrary.


If everyone has to comply, at some point the manufacturers will have to compete on reparability and parts prices.


Unless there is a small enough number of them that they can coordinate and all follow the same strategy.


Yeah, you read my mind :)


They're not wrong, you see similar patterns all the time. It's a step in a good direction but the manufacturers should be required to provide those batteries for sufficient time too or make them easily compatible with third party ones. Ideally there would be standardized formats for every brand to limit inflation of parts number. (that manufacturers love to do, making one serial incompatible with another moving unnecessary bits as a middle finger to repairers)

Being removable does not resolve everything. For example, it's very common for laptop removables, especially from a certain ex-IBM division company, to have a self-destructive fuse in case the voltage drops as you replace the cells (making it all the more difficult and unsafe) because there's no original ones sold anywhere, and your alternatives are shady housefires from China that have the lowest quality ones in them no matter how much you pay, and it's very annoying.


And this is why the regulation does oblige manufacturers to supply replacement batteries for at least 5 years after the product that uses them was last sold.

That doesn't completely solve the problem, but it's not a glaring loophole any more.


I think not, because batteries need to have their voltage controlled along their lifetime so they don't degrade and maybe burst, and that must be done at a low level.

It's a compromise between safety, performance and durability. Replaceable batteries might be more difficult to use and have their performance reduced for safety.

Although it doesn't warrant planned obsolescence, of course, but those security/performance things might be another excuse to reduce consumer choices.


Third-party/counterfeit batteries are near universally Shit with a capital S, they won't need any lock-ins to get my money for new or spare genuine batteries.


I beg to differ. I have two LG V20s and I've tried multiple batteries over the years and they all worked fine. The battery by third party vendors actually got better over time. OEM had 3200mah while you can get a 4200mah since 2020.


Are you sure? That did not happen for mobile phone chargers.


While you're not bound to a specific charger, most modern phones(outside of Apple phones) can only reach maximum charging speeds if you (indirectly) pay money to Qualcomm. That will probably change going forward with the new rules on standardized charging.


This isn't really true anymore, USB-C PD (which is technically just USB PD but there's no standard for using it on anything but USB-C) is displacing QC for most applications. It is however something where most chargers and devices will likely try to support it for the forseeable future, though, in the name of compatibility (nowadays you can get chips from TI and the like which will basically try all the standards that they can, to find the fastest charging rate). Also, AFAIK there's no licensing fee required to be compatible with QC.


As long as it just charges as fast as the standard usb-c norm, it’s ok.

Charging is essential and had to be standardized. Fast charging is a bonus.


USB-C doesn't have a standard charging norm. It's just a connector.


https://www.usb.org/usb-charger-pd says "The USB Power Delivery (USB PD) Specification enables the maximum functionality of USB by providing more flexible power delivery along with data over a single cable."

The interesting bits of the spec use extra pins from Type-C, so for the most part it's Type-C's charging norm.


...and even aside of USB PD, USB-C The Connector does have a standard way to signalize maximum charging current (0.5/0.9A, 1.5A or 3A at 5V) without using PD.


PD predates USB-C. It works over any USB cable, with appropriate limits for old cables not originally designed for it.


for a while it happenned though for charging cables - iphones used to give you popup telling you are not using original lightning cable.


So sure I would put my money on it :)


Well we're in luck, because the regulation does touch on this.

Batteries must be "available as spare parts of the equipment that they power for a minimum of five years after placing the last unit of the equipment model on the market, with a reasonable and non-discriminatory price for independent professionals and end-users"

And there's a ban on software-locking too: "Software shall not be used to impede the replacement of a portable battery or LMT battery, or of their key components, with another compatible battery or key components."




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