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EU mandates replaceable batteries by 2027 (2023)
- cyrusmg 8mo agoIt came up recently in local news. I wonder how they force that for earphones...
- atoav 8mo agoI am not sure if thst is really a problem. Batteries of hearing aids have been replaceable for a while now. There appears to be a few reason to become excempt from the rules, e.g. medical reasons (if it is in your body safety is more crucial than removability of the battery). So who knows what Apples lawyers will do with this.
- cyrusmg 8mo agoI never looked into hearing aids - would the interchangeability affect weight ?
- padjo 8mo agoI have a pair of fairbuds that have user replaceable batteries.
- oulipo2 8mo agoThe regulation is mostly meant for light electric vehicles for now
- dguest 8mo agoWhere do you get this from? From what I could see it applied to everything from cars to laptops.
- cromka 7mo agoFrom the press release itself: "To that end, starting from 2025, the Regulation will gradually introduce declaration requirements, performance classes and maximum limits on the carbon footprint of electric vehicles, light means of transport (such as e-bikes and scooters) and rechargeable industrial batteries."
- dguest 7mo agoThat's another aspect of the regulation but as far as I can tell (from skimming the actual mandate, or the other summaries I found of it) it's doing both. The release itself says > Starting in 2027, consumers will be able to remove and replace the portable batteries in their electronic products at any time of the life cycle. Interesting that it's also introducing limits on EV carbon footprints, but that's not to the exclusion of mandating replaceable phone batteries.
- throwa356262 8mo agoIf I read this correctly they are concerned about 2 things: harmful substances in batteries and cars with huge batteries that cannot be changed. Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.
- atoav 8mo agoAs someone who does electronic repairs I welcome this. There are too many devices where the battery is the first point of failure and it is glued in. The number of batteries I could only remove with hot air and heat due to the battery being glued in is too damn high. Heat for removal works but is always like defusing a inextinguishable bomb and takes much more time than it should. I also have rarely seen a design where the glue was really necessary for the design. Basically they could just have put the battery in without glue and it would have worked just as fine. Maybe companies really need that kind of regulation to so the common sense right thing. There are excemptions in cases where it is really technically needed as far as I can tell (medical, water-tightness for safety reasons, data integrity needed so battery can't be removed). I hope they are not too lax with those.
- blell 8mo agoGluing batteries solved the old issue where you would drop your phone and it would shut down.
- mschuster91 8mo agoAdding a tiny strip of glue to the battery so it doesn't slosh around in the case is not a problem. The problem is that you need heat to open up the device itself (all that is between the battery and the hot air gun is about 1mm of glass), followed by a bath in isopropanol and lots and lots of twaddling around with tweezers and spatulas to get the old glue residue removed from both the display and the case (risking damaging either in the process), followed by really annoying meticulous work to place a new glue sheet exactly onto the case (or display) to make sure it fits again. Oh and you always risk cracking the display while removing it.
- omnimus 8mo agoIt's not so much about them being glued in but that nowdays they seem to be glued behind display and al the rest of the phone while there is no access from the back.
- lozenge 8mo agoHow big an issue was that really? Pick it up and put it back together and it turns on again.
- shablulman 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- wolvoleo 8mo agoI hate that kind of thing though when it would come to smaller batteries. This battery passport prevents the user from replacing their car battery themselves easily. Which is entirely in contradiction to this legislation's objective for smaller devices which aims at making self-service easier. But it also links devices to their battery meaning one can not be recycled apart from the other! It's already causing problems for me there. I often repair small electronic devices, or I remove the battery and repurpose them. For example I use some old tablets and phones with the (often bloated) battery removed, and replaced by a DC-DC converter set to 4 volts or so. This way the device 'thinks' there's a battery. Because most devices with an originally integrated battery will not even power up on USB power if they think the battery is not present or deep discharged. And bloated batteries are unsafe to keep on a charger 24/7 so I remove them. However the local recycling point is getting increasingly difficult about accepting loose Li-Ion and Li-Po cells. I put them in individual ziplock bags and tape over the contacts but they seem to view them as industrial waste or something. They sent me to the central disposal unit far from the city center but even there they were very hesitant to accept them. And at one point they accused me of running a business because I had 5 different batteries to recycle (I had saved them up because they always give me such a hassle). I think businesses have to pay for recycling or something, I don't know and don't care because I don't run a business. This in effect stimulates 2 things: People just throwing them in the normal bin which is a waste and can cause fire. Or recycling the whole device instead which is a waste of resources if the original device can still be used. The battery passport links the device to its battery and only 'approved' facilities can break that link so I think this is a very bad idea for smaller devices when it comes to self-repair people like me. And I will fight that with a passion. For EVs etc I don't know how that works, I don't use cars nor care about them. But I think even there being able to work on a car at home would be a good thing no?
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- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo agoLets see how long it takes this time until someone shows up and calls the EU a nanny state.
- relistan 8mo agoIt’s not clear to me from this, but I hope that the “removability” component of this means the end of “disposable” vapes with a fixed lithium battery installed. I can’t even count the number of these I’ve seen littering the roadside. Ideally this raises the cost of that business model enough to also eliminate some vendors from that product category (“disposable” vapes), which is primarily aimed at/used by children anyway.
- mentalgear 8mo agoI agree, disposable vapes are an absolute perversion. I never thought we would come to a point where throw-away "technology" (e.g. microsystems, batteries) would be acceptable like a throw-away cigarette. Absolutely wicked, and again many politicians that have been captured by the vape industry to not act against it.
- pjc50 8mo agoI would argue that under WEEE disposable vapes were never legal, it's just that nobody cares and EU directives rely on self-enforcement. Next time you see one, look for the "no bin" symbol)
- lozenge 8mo agoThe UK banned disposable vapes, the suppliers now add a charging port and the ability to put in refills. The refills cost as much or more than the vapes so now people throw away the "reusable" vapes as if they were disposable.
- tonyedgecombe 8mo agoUnintentional consequences. I expect there will be some from this law as well.
- hermanzegerman 8mo agoYes, they will be banned to EU-wide
- 7777777phil 8mo agoThe replaceable battery yes.. but the buried lede imo is the material recovery targets. EU imports basically 100% of its lithium and cobalt (https://rmis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/rmp/Lithium https://rmis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/rmp/Lithium). Mandating high recycling rates for exactly those materials is industrial policy in an environmental costume. Same pattern as their payments regulation (https://philippdubach.com/posts/europes-24-trillion-payment-breakup-is-really-a-bet-on-infrastructure-arbitrage/ https://philippdubach.com/posts/europes-24-trillion-payment-...), frame sovereignty as consumer protection and nobody fights you on it. Clever, honestly.
- danaris 8mo agoI mean, it's not really a costume. This is a case where a shrewd industrial policy genuinely goes hand-in-hand with what's best for the environment. Win-win.
- peterfirefly 8mo ago> EU imports basically 100% of its lithium We don't have to. There's a large spodumene resource in Portugal. > and cobalt Finland alone could cover all of the European Union's need for cobalt even with zero recycling. https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/geoenergy2023-016 https://www.lyellcollection.org/doi/full/10.1144/geoenergy20... Not that I am against recycling of lithium and cobalt -- it's just that it isn't actually needed when we could fairly easily mine both if we wanted to. Lithium recycling is commercially viable as far as I know so there's no need for the EU to legislate anything. Cobalt recycling from bigger batteries probably is, other kinds of cobalt recycling probably isn't.
- mg 8mo agoI have been maintaining this chart of phones with replaceable batteries available in the USA for 10 years now: https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/removable_battery https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/removable_battery Man, is it empty these days. The chart used to be pretty full. Now it only has about 1% of all phones that are in the Product Chart database. As the other 99% have fixed batteries. I'm looking forward to see if the EU decision will push some companies to do this for their US versions too and revive the chart.
- cyberrock 8mo agoThe EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant [0]. The topic has been too obfuscated with hype pieces. Still, it would be nice to not have to break glass and melt glue to open up phones. [0] https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replaceable-a-closer-look-at-the-new-eu-guidelines/ https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
- audunw 8mo agoYeah, thank god. As long as it’s easy to remove and replacement batteries can easily be purchased by individuals, I want my phone and battery glued, thank you very much. I like apples approach to removable battery glue. Though it needs an extra tool. These days it should be easy to make a cheap USB-C PD powered thing that supplies a good DC voltage.
- hermanzegerman 8mo agoThe electricity-controlled glue in Apple's iPhone is made by Tesa, a German Glue company
- Someone 8mo ago> The EU directive doesn't even compel them to have those kinds of removable batteries in the EU, because being removable with commercially available tools is considered compliant This is a follow-up directive that goes further. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:32023R1542#art_11 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...: “Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those batteries are readily removable and replaceable by the end-user at any time during the lifetime of the product. That obligation shall only apply to entire batteries and not to individual cells or other parts included in such batteries. A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product. Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.”
- mentalgear 8mo agoThe EU is displaying exactly the kind of political leadership we need in this topic: pro-consumer, pro-environment, and firmly against planned obsolescence. Removable batteries were the industry standard in the early days of mobile phones, and it worked perfectly. We only lost that standard when Apple’s 'walled garden' mindset infected the rest of the industry. The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.
- atoav 8mo agoThis is the role we need governments to take. If you want your government to work like a corporation for some reason, why not go to a country where the govnment is weak and corporations bribe it instead? Would give you some good image how well that works. But I get it. This ideology has more to do with how much money these types can then extract from a government and if implemented fully you would have some sort of neo-feudalism where everybody needs to pay them to even exist. But that is not a real utopian vision of something that moves humanity forward (quite literally the opposite).
- mytailorisrich 8mo agoRe. mobile phones it is because it allows sleeker and thinner design, and IMHO it wasn't that common to replace batteries, anyway. But, really this is a non-issue because if you need a new battery for you phone, including iphone and samsung, just get it replaced. That's not super common to need it (again) but there is no issue having it done. I had it done before. So overall I am skeptical that it will make a difference or that people will keep devices like phones longer because of this new mandate. I also doubt that the EU Parliament has data on this because many of those new regulations seem very hand-wavy to me and usually presented as obvious.
- IshKebab 8mo agoAre they going to have an exception for waterproof phones? Seems like it would be challenging to implement replaceable batteries while maintaining waterproofing. Are there any waterproof phones on the market with removable batteries?
- hdgvhicv 8mo agoI Can change the battery on my waterproof watch just fine
- LtWorf 8mo agoBefore they found out they could sell more phones glueing batteries, my waterproof phone had a replaceable battery and a 3.5mm jack.
- VorpalWay 8mo agoWhy? You can use an o-ring around the seal and screws to press it together. Even simpler: a water bottle like you might bring to the gym or while hiking is water proof, without needing glue. It is a solved problem. But the solution adds tens of eurocents to the cost of the phone, so the manufacturers won't do it unless they are forced to.
- kryptiskt 8mo agoSony made a water-proof phone long before fixed batteries became fashionable.
- hermanzegerman 8mo agoSamsung too
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jl6 8mo agoiPhone batteries are already replaceable, albeit most people have to pay Apple to do it. Does this count as replaceable under this mandate, or is there an expectation that batteries must be replaceable by end-consumers on their own? Any requirements for what level of skill and tooling end-consumers are expected to have access to, such as specialized screwdrivers and re-waterproofing adhesives?
- oulipo2 8mo ago[flagged]
- dguest 8mo agocutting out quite a bit from section 11: A portable battery shall be ... removable by the end-user ... with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product. Any ... person that [markets] products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions ... in other words you need to either make it easy and safe with standard tooling or include the tools people need. Waterproof products are also specifically exempt. EDIT: the "waterproof" requirement might leave less room for abuse than you'd think. It only extends to appliances specifically designed to operate primarily in an environment that is regularly subject to splashing water, water streams or water immersion, and that are intended to be washable or rinseable; under this definition you could argue that an iPhone is not exempt, since it's not designed to operate primarily in water. How this is enforced seems to be mostly up to the various countries.
- oulipo2 8mo agoAt https://infinite-battery.com https://infinite-battery.com we built just that: a repairable and re-generable battery for e-bikes :) We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!
- sylware 8mo agoAnd noscript/basic (x)html for web sites? They broke them to force the usage of whatng cartel web engines (or they were incompetent and/or malicious). At least on critical sites. GAFAM and big tech do not like protocols and file formats simple and able to do good enough job that stable in time, because you would not need the software they control.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- PunchTornado 8mo agoAh this would be too good to be truth. I had my iphone for 6 years and finally had to ditch it this year because of the battery. otherwise the device was good, all i needed. felt so bad that I should discard it just for the battery.
- yason 8mo agoNext EU could mandate an attitude adjustment to the industry wishing to sell their products in the European Common Market. Batteries are part of a device. There are other parts that can be replaced by the owner or third parties if there are sufficient parts supplies, either first-part or third-party, and these parts aren't explicitly killed by the device's DRM even if they're sourced outside of the manufacturer's own "replacement assemblies" that cost half the phone eventhough it's just a $10 part that needs replacing. Further there is the software which is probably the most disposable of all. First of all, the keys to a device should come with the device. The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead. Further, manufacturers should be forced to either keep supporting the device's software or release all the necessary blobs and parts as legal abandonware so that others can hack and reverse-engineer it further, allowing legal reimplementation of the software in open source.
- varispeed 8mo ago> The device can default to booting software signed by the manufacturer but the user should always be able to use a physical key to unlock the device and install his own keys and certificates instead. This part is not going to happen, because security services need their backdoors intact. If you supply user with keys, they might flash the device with more secure operating system rendering any surveillance effort fruitless.
- MadxX79 8mo agoIf I worked in a European intelligence agency, and considering how the the official US security policy revolves around bringing about regime change in Europe in support of far right extremist parties, and how supportive the tech company leadership seems to be of those goals, I would probably think that locking that very real existential threat to their democracies out would be a worthwhile tradeoff.
- Saline9515 8mo agoEuropean governments and security services have their own surveillance and control agendas, most of them already use Palantir to enforce them. It's not like there are any "good" guys against "bad" ones.
- layer8 8mo agoNote that devices falling under the Ecodesign Regulation are exempt from this Battery Regulation, in particular smartphones and tablets, if they fulfill certain durability and repairability requirements (which are roughly already met today, at least by Apple). So we won’t be seeing more easily replaceable batteries in smartphones and tablets.
- p-e-w 8mo agoThe moment I saw the post title, I knew this couldn’t actually be true. Thanks for confirming that it isn’t.
- peterfirefly 8mo ago> in particular smartphones and tablets, if they fulfill certain durability and repairability requirements Which is exactly the way it should be.
- PaulKeeble 8mo agoI replaced a battery in my (quite aged now at 6 years) old mobile last month. The original one puffed up and damaged the case holding the mobile together, incidentally it tested as 100% good in capacity! Took about an hour to replace the battery with an aftermarket replacement, quite fiddly work involving pludgers and tiny screws, cost more than double the price of the battery just for the specialist tools to get into it. I miss the days of that first google phone where I could just pop the back and replace the battery, I used it quite a bit with a second battery. My modern phone lasts a bit longer so its less of a concern but batteries are a consumable we know they age out faster than the devices themselves and they ought to have been replacable.
- einpoklum 8mo ago> I miss the days of that first google device where I could just pop the back and replace the battery, 1. That's not a "Google device", you mean a smartphone. 2. For a large fraction of the smartphones available today (probably also Google Pixel's), you can still pop the back and replace the battery. The popping may be a bit more complicated, but it's doable. Naturally there's a tradeoff between convenient ergonomics for battery replacement and smaller dimensions of the phone case.
- znpy 8mo agoThis is so good. I have a perfectly working iPhone se 3rd gen that’s becoming unusable because the battery is work out after four years of daily use. I don’t want to change the whole phone, but I’m pretty much forced to and turn it into ewaste.
- gzread 8mo agoExternal battery and transparent duct tape?
- lapcat 8mo agoThere's nothing I hate more about new Apple MacBook Pros than the batteries that I can't replace myself. It's such an ordeal go get an aging battery replaced, and I tend to go through them within a few years, due to high usage. Nowadays Apple appears to be demanding that you mail the laptop to them, instead of allowing same-day replacement, which I've done in the past. I loved my 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro, when I could simply flip the laptop over, unlatch the latches, and replace the battery entirely within seconds. It's an total shame we lost that. You could even carry an extra battery with you in a bag when traveling, in case you didn't have access to a charger.
- dev1ycan 8mo agoYou cannot buy EVs or other electronics at the moment with batteries because the batteries have a limited lifetime, it's about time, integrated batteries should have never had been a thing.
- forinti 8mo agoMany moons ago I bought a TP-Link Neffos precisely because you could swap out the battery. The problem is that TP-Link never sold replacement batteries in my country. When I tried buying a couple from China, I got used ones that barely lasted a few months. If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.
- tempodox 8mo agoI’m curious how Apple will malicious-compliance its way out of this one. It will have to be no more iDevices for the EU, I guess.
- mcprwklzpq 8mo agoGood news. My phone would have to live another couple of years, and the next one i buy would stay with me for a decade. Just 10 years ago you could detach back of the smartphone with a nail, then switch the battery in a few seconds yourself. Smartphones even sometimes came with a second spare battery in the box! Old smartphones were much lighter, smaller and thinner then modern shovel sized bricks with fat batteries. Screens were smaller and so the batteries too. Phones are boring. They work fine already. I could use my current 3 year old phone another 6 years if it lived through the day without charging.
- constantcrying 8mo agoThe EU is one of the worst tech regulators in existence. The only reason they have not yet tried to ban 3D printing is because they are too tech illiterate to have heard of it. Phone batteries are already replaceable with standard tools. Instead of having waterproof phones, the EU wants to mandate back phones which die when you are caught in a shower. Reliable water proofing is only possible with gluing in seals, I really hope some lobbyist can actually show them what the consequence of their actions will be. I do not want to have to import a phone from the US to get a usable device. Saving the environment by creating mountains of dead phones, killed by water, is such an incredible EU move.