Gone are the days when we could easily take off the smartphone’s battery and replace it with a new one. You didn’t need a heat gun or a specialised tool to pop open the back of your phone, and you could easily do that with your fingernails. It seems like we could get the good old days back, thanks to a law passed by the European Union.
According to a new report, the European Parliament has changed a previous law that will force all gadgets, including smartphones, to have easily replaceable batteries. The MEP’s vote count ratio for this change stood at 587 to 9. The term ‘easily’ means that users should be able to replace the batteries without requiring special tools.
This means OEMs, from Apple to Google to Samsung, all have to make drastic changes to their smartphone designs (by 2027) to adhere to the new change that asks them to mount easily replaceable batteries on their devices.
Yes, my experience (a Nexus 6P) has been that it is usually the battery that wears out first, causing a perfectly good phone to become largely useless unless you want to risk the almighty pain of heat guns and levers to pry the phone apart. I did a battery change once, and it is just not something I really want to do again.
I know manufacturers are going to say it is about size (well I’ll gladly have a slightly thicker phone) or water resistance (I’m sure designers can come up with something again that includes rubber rings etc). I do get the feeling that manufacturers deliberately went the route of sealed phones so that we get pressed into buying new phones every two or three years. Now we have longer software updates, but batteries die after three years or so.
It is not just about the environment, but I’ve also seen that so many disposable products actually become far more expensive for users (for example cartridge razor blades).