I am really fed up with all the "nobody keeps a phone long enough to make battery replacements useful" arguments around here.
Out of the 10+ phones in our family over the last 5-10 years, one was water damage and one was failure of the internal flash memory. Every other phone was replaced because the battery died. Every single one.
Official replacement was no longer available and DIY was either impossible (lack of parts) or eventually ended up damaging the device beyond economical repairability.
Regular people that don't have thousands of dollars in disposable income (and nothing useful to spend it on) haven't cared about phone specs for years. Hell, I love tech and could buy a new phone every year and even I haven't cared about phone specs since the original Google Pixel.
If you brick your phone every year because that's just who you are, no judging.
If you want a new phone every year and can afford one, its your money. Just remember that you are fortunate enough to be able to do so. And someone will surely buy your used phone and likely (try to) replace the battery in it.
Overall, it's like claiming that nobody drives cars that are 10+ years old because they needed a new clutch. Or that a 50 year old house needs to be torn down because fixing the roof economically is clearly beyond our engineering prowess. Are there people that swap cars every 5 years? Absolutely. But that does not mean those cars go to a scrapyard.
I will not comment on the technical aspects of this proposal, since the actual outcome might very well need to be settled in the court still. But dismissing the general point of legislature which demands better longevity for devices that basically everybody needs to partake in modern society is rather shortsighted.
My phones have been destroyed not by ageing batteries but by bloating software. You need to update software for security reasons, but those updates also take up more space and run slower (because developers work only as hard as is necessary to make apps run acceptably on their phones, which are typically new models). Space bloat, more than time bloat, has been the biggest issue.
Open bootloaders and drivers (after a certain number of years at least?) would help with that. Make available enough to let open source developers help themselves. Even if Google stops supporting Android on my hardware, or Apple stops supporting iOS, there should at least be a stripped down Linux?
I'm not sure how useful even that would be though, because that surely won't be able to run the latest apps used by society.
Sigh. Maybe everything is just an arms race. Phones won't stop going obsolete until it is physically impossible to make faster phones.
Since space bloat has been a bigger problem than time bloat, I could maybe have gotten more life out of my phones if the OS had supported the installation of apps to the SD card. Maybe that could be a cheap partial fix.
I find that to be much more of a problem with Android phones than iOS. I had to scrap two Samsung Galaxy phones after less than three years of use because they became so slow as to be unusable.
I am currently using a five-year-old iPhone Xs, and it seems to be just as fast as ever. The only issue I have with the device is decreasing battery life. If the battery was replaceable, I could easily use it for another 2–3 years at least.
If you look at the charge cycles on a typical iphone battery, it is some where around 500-600. If you look at common usage, most people use the phone enough to have to charge it once a day.
That only gives you maybe 1.5 to 2 years of time before the battery is gone.
While we are on the topic on replacing things, it would be nice if we could change out the internal flash memory. I would keep my iphone for 5 to 7 years if I could change out both the battery and flash memory.
>most people use the phone enough to have to charge it once a day. That only gives you maybe 1.5 to 2 years of time before the battery is gone.
A cycle is equivalent to a full discharge/charge. Using the phone to x% battery is roughly equivalent to x% of a cycle (it’s not a perfectly 1:1 relationship, but close enough).
Most people do not use a phone to 0% battery every single day. That’s equivalent to ~8 hours of screentime on a modern phone.
The average person uses their phone for about 3 hours a day [0]. Assuming that the vast majority of people's usage is within an hour of the average, 2-4 hours of daily phone usage would translate to 25-50% of a cycle, or 1000-2000 days of a usable battery, assuming a 500 cycle battery lifespan. (In reality it would be somewhat less, since as the battery degrades over time those 2-4 hours of usage would constitute more than 25-50% of a cycle.)
This is... sort of correct. Yes, most people don't use their phone 8 hours a day.
But this is a pretty cursory reading of those stats. If you actually dig into them, the majority of countries being surveyed are using their phones for more than 4 hours a day. The average person in the US uses their phone for 3 hours and 30 minutes.
A couple of takeaways:
- heavy smartphone usage inversely correlates with the wealth of the nation being talked about (this kind of intuitively makes sense, because countries like the Philippines are probably more likely to have people using their phone as their primary computer). Being able to use your phone a small amount of time each day has a small component of privilege to it, it probably means you have access to other computers.
- Even in the US, these are averages. There are people in the US who use their phones as their primary computer. There are people who travel a lot, or for whatever reason, end up using their phone more, and their batteries are very much going to be the first part of their phone that fails. The average usage in the US being 3.5 hours does not mean that the vast majority of people's usage is within an hour of the usage.
- Like you yourself said: "in reality it would be somewhat less, since as the battery degrades over time those 2-4 hours of usage would constitute more than 25-50% of a cycle." If we assume that heavy smartphone users in the US are using their phone for at least 4-4.5 hours a day (a very easy assumption if not conservative, since the average is already 3 and half hours) you're still going to be in a position where after about 2 years you're no longer going to get a full 8 hours out of a charge. Once you get to a point where a phone can't last a full 8 hour day on a single charge, you might start thinking about buying a new phone even if that's not your typical usage, because the first couple of times you forget to plug in your phone you'll stop trusting it to hold a charge.
GP is definitely wrong about how heavily people use their smartphones, but I suspect you're underestimating how heavily smartphones do get used and how big of an issue battery degrading is. I'd love to find more solid stats basically just asking people why they upgrade, but my experience matches GP's (minus the exact numbers). Battery lifespan and the cost of battery replacement is a huge component in smartphone churn. People buy new smartphones because their batteries die.
They absolutely should include replaceable flash memory. Flash is both cheap, plentiful and a consumable, it wears out. It has the same qualities as battery replacement. Hell, why not combine them.
Most people would buy a new phone anyway, but these devices get obsoleted and turned into garbage, forcing people to both generate ewaste and buy things they don't really need.
Between eMMC and SD Express, there are at least two existing great options. I am not asking for doors, all this stuff can be internal by removing the back.
The issue when people discuss this, they get into weeds talking about how this or that mechanism isn't feasible, which is entirely orthogonal. You dictate the outcome, let engineers solve the problem.
I don't have any scientific data for this, but my anecdotal experience is that the actual damage comes from the way the phones are used, not necessarily the absolute charge count. Here me out...
- A phone that is used a lot in the car as GPS is often charged/discharged continuously, often for hours.
- Furthermore, this often happens in very hot or cold conditions which are bad for battery charging.
- A lot of people seem to live with the perpetual 5% of battery, or generally don't care about properly charging the device. This is also terrible for longevity.
- There are other reasons why you may want to constantly charge/discharge your phone (e.g. you are making Android apps, or it's the phone where people call your place of business, etc.).
So, just to make myself clear: I completely agree that on average, batteries should last for a long time. But in practice, people often have irregular activities which appear negligible on average ("it's just a few charge cycles"), but end up damaging the battery more than regular prolonged use. But again: I'd very much like more hard data on this :)
Churn on budget smartphones is even worse than on premium phones and battery life is even more likely to be an issue on those budget phones. It's good for the budget market as well if batteries are replaceable.
It would be great if people could buy an old secondhand iPhone and replace the batteries themselves for $30-40 bucks instead of buying a $60-70 garbage phone with who-knows-what spyware and out-of-date software every 1-2 years. That companies are able to put out this kind of garbage and people are buying them is (if anything) evidence that the secondhand/repair market on smartphones isn't nearly as strong as it should be.
Out of the 10+ phones in our family over the last 5-10 years, one was water damage and one was failure of the internal flash memory. Every other phone was replaced because the battery died. Every single one.
Official replacement was no longer available and DIY was either impossible (lack of parts) or eventually ended up damaging the device beyond economical repairability.
Regular people that don't have thousands of dollars in disposable income (and nothing useful to spend it on) haven't cared about phone specs for years. Hell, I love tech and could buy a new phone every year and even I haven't cared about phone specs since the original Google Pixel.
If you brick your phone every year because that's just who you are, no judging.
If you want a new phone every year and can afford one, its your money. Just remember that you are fortunate enough to be able to do so. And someone will surely buy your used phone and likely (try to) replace the battery in it.
Overall, it's like claiming that nobody drives cars that are 10+ years old because they needed a new clutch. Or that a 50 year old house needs to be torn down because fixing the roof economically is clearly beyond our engineering prowess. Are there people that swap cars every 5 years? Absolutely. But that does not mean those cars go to a scrapyard.
I will not comment on the technical aspects of this proposal, since the actual outcome might very well need to be settled in the court still. But dismissing the general point of legislature which demands better longevity for devices that basically everybody needs to partake in modern society is rather shortsighted.