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.

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.

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.

So we won’t be seeing more easily replaceable batteries in smartphones and tablets.

Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.

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.

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.

If producers aren't forced to sell batteries then we should at least mandate standard sizes that could be made by third parties.

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.

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.

We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!

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.

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.

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.