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.
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.
