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The fact that pretty much no phones have a replaceable battery says something. And it doesn't mean that all manufacturers are somehow colluding with each. The m

• Ar-Curunir 6mo ago
  Ah yes, “market knows best”. Perhaps consider that what companies are optimizing for isn’t what is best for consumers, or humanity, or the earth.
• cataphract 6mo ago
  I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.
  • bko 6mo ago
    Slow down innovation is certainly one way to have people keep their phones longer and cut e-waste. Imagine if they allowed air conditioners...
    • cataphract 6mo ago
      Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc. There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.
      • eru 6mo ago
        Yes, they definitely slowed down innovation and decreased consumer surplus compared to the counterfactual of just taxing the behaviour you don't like (like taxing fuel or emissions).
        • thrownthatway 6mo ago
          They tax the fuel as well, don’t you worry.
          • eru 6mo ago
            Sure, but they could have taxed it more and not have any official fuel efficiency standards. (And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)
            • close04 6mo ago
              You stumbled onto the pain point. The problem isn’t the intention but the execution. The EU historically has done a better job at nailing the execution of this type of regulation. If it slows down innovation is debatable but even so there’s still a solid principle behind it, a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. It’s usually a worthwhile compromise. You don’t run tour engine only in the red zone because that’s where it makes the most power.
              • eru 6mo ago
                > [...] a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. And customers directly benefit from the efficiency gain by burning through less fuel. So no need to decide for them.
                • watwut 6mo ago
    • Levitz 6mo ago
      ...You think air conditioners are forbidden in Europe...?
      • tsss 6mo ago
        Yes. Here in Hamburg you have to pay some useless consultant to come to your house and check that there's no other way to decrease the temperature before you are allowed to install one. You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.
  • trinsic2 6mo ago
    Also Products aren't being designed for individuals anymore. There being designed to maximize for ad revenue, we're the product. If there is any incentive to make a product better is to make it more accessible to their first party customers.
  • dzhiurgis 6mo ago
    I think it’s far more likely to introduce additional dead batteries into existing waste. Probably drop in an ocean given how much batteries are already dumped.
• ACow_Adonis 6mo ago
  Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?
• Rury 6mo ago
  Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.
• heavyset_go 6mo ago
  > If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone? Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C. There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
  • transcriptase 6mo ago
    [flagged]
    • thrownthatway 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  • eru 6mo ago
    What does any deity have to do with it? Btw, has anyone done a post mortem analysis of that mandate? I wonder if it delivered what it promised. I doubt it: All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable. The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet. The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.
    • thrownthatway 6mo ago
      Not even that. Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break. And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed. Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
• bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.
  • eru 6mo ago
    Battery tech has gotten a lot better every year over the last hundred years.
    • brewdad 6mo ago
      I think OP meant the phone was going to be replaced in three years tops, so no one cared much about battery longevity. Nowadays, the battery can be the constraint for practical phone life, since few consumers can replace one themselves and by the time they pay someone else to do it, may as well trade it in and let Verizon subsidize a new one. Having an easily swappable battery returns some power to the user.
      • eru 6mo ago
        Phones with swappable batteries are already legal to buy.
        • ben_w 6mo ago
          It was legal to buy a car that had a seatbelt before the seatbelt became mandatory. Or phones with USB-C. I suspect this will be a good thing to force, but I don't know for sure.
          • eru 6mo ago
            > It was legal to buy a car that had a seatbelt before the seatbelt became mandatory. Yes, making seatbelts mandatory was also a weird decision.
• someperson 6mo ago
  It means that everybody copies Apple. Just like 3.5mm headphone jacks and MicroSD card expandable storage. They're hard to find even on lower end devices any more, despite more ports being a premium/pro feature in other market segments.
  • aikinai 6mo ago
    That doesn't change anything the parent said. If not copying Apple created a better product that people want to buy, someone would be doing it.
• frm88 6mo ago
  Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it. https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-system https://www.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-sy...
  • clownpenis_fart 6mo ago
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  • tardedmeme 6mo ago
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  • Nasrudith 6mo ago
    I support changeable batteries as a 'no duh' feature. But when I checked out Fairphone previously (several years ago when I was phone shopping) and personally found it as 'neat concept, but a shame it seems to have been born obsolete' and lacked some of the hardware features I was looking for. If it works for you, great though.
• unsungNovelty 6mo ago
  > If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone? That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer! Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display. Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.
• Oxodao 6mo ago
  The trade-off is basically having a thicker phone. Nobody except apple thus all manufacturers 6 month later want paper-thin phones. Never the actual consumers.
  • Oxodao 6mo ago
    customer*
    • account42 6mo ago
      No, the consumer is no longer the customer these days. The customer are the advertisement companies.
• mentalgear 6mo ago
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• friendzis 6mo ago
  1. It's easier to design and build Ingress Protection without user-accessible compartments. 2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery. 3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone. 4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack. 5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.
• chimprich 6mo ago
  > If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification. > but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation. > And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best. Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration. Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers. > why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone? Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.
• everdrive 6mo ago
  Manufacturers are chasing tends. What is superior about the stupid notch at the top of the iPhone and some competitors -- and what is superior about getting phones thinner and wider? They're too big to put in a pocket, you're not even netting anything with all that extra space. etc. The point is that phones are not getting "better" in any material way except maybe for picture quality from the cameras.
• watwut 6mo ago
  > If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. I do not think they are colluding, but they are definitely chasing the same trends and users preferences don't seem to play that much role, unless it is one of the few essentials things. Effectively, users do not have much choice except in few areas. All phones being the same is not just because "everyone likes their phones to be unpractically huge or slow" .
• petra 6mo ago
  >> pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit. Isn't worth the benefit for who? the manufacturers? sure. Let's say a single manufacturer decides to offer some phones with a changeable battery, invests in their marketing, and they start becoming very popular. What happens next? Every manufacturer does the same, nobody earn a premium, total sales volume gets cut in half.
• windward 6mo ago
  Why do you want us to think you don't know what a negative externality is? Do you usually find that you benefit from people thinking you're unworldly?
• traderj0e 6mo ago
  Yes for batteries, but I do think there are anticompetitive reasons for phones mostly not having headphone jacks anymore. It's not exactly collusion, it's more vertical integration.
• account42 6mo ago
  All it says is that thinner phones look better on advertisements. Let's not pretend that product decisions are the rational best result for the market even if they are industry-standard.