It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
Question.
Will this force smartphone makers to use removable batteries outside of the EU as well? Or is it just devices within the EU?
EU is such a large market that it would likely force manufacturers to adopt the standards, since making two variations would be prohibitive cost wise.
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Didn’t Apple throw around the possibility of usb-c iPhones for Europe and Lightning ones for everywhere else? It seems like they gain enough from the proprietary cables to make it worth.
Next iPhone is pretty solidly confirmed to be USB-C, barring something drastic, which would spell the end for lightning, unless I’m forgetting something.
From what I saw they confirmed there will be iPhones with usb-c, but not explicitly that all of them would. Though they also didn’t mention that anymore after the initial law announcement, so it might’ve just been an hypothesis that got scrapped along the way. We’ll see I guess, I’m in Europe so it doesn’t really matter either way to me.
The EU does not have jurisdiction outside the EU, so they can’t force it. That said, the EU is a large enough market that it would force manufacturers to also make these modifications outside the EU.
They either make 2 versions of the device, 1 for the EU and 1 for the rest of the world, or they just make the EU version for the whole world.