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.
2027 is just too long to wait.
I mean, while the idea is nice, it’s too slow. There are many ways to fuck up a consumer device, and they are making them illegal one thing at a time.
It’s like those privacy laws - no effect at all, while we are now discussing stuff here, on a network designed without any government participation.
There’s not that much choice there, it genuinely takes 2-3 years to implement hardware that is radically different from what you’re currently doing.
Because they’re making millions upon millions of phones, they need to really nail the design before they start mass production. And that’s neither cheap nor fast.
The big manufacturers can probably afford to do this faster, but the smaller ones might struggle so you need to make it fair.
By ‘those privacy laws’ do you mean GDPR? Because that’s caused Threads not to be released in the EU, and you’ll notice that all your devices now have USB C. These regulations have had a pretty significant impact.
Phones take years to develop. Forcing removable batteries onto manufacturers under an aggressively short timeline would cost billions.
Do phone manufacturers have a design that conforms to this EU law right now? Or is it a decent enough time for a majority of manufacturers to design conforming devices?
Some do, e.g. Gigaset won’t have to change a thing. Ok granted it’s largely been Gigaset when it comes to non-budget phones, judging by new Android releases since 2022. 33 models in total.
By 2027, I expect we’ll be using Solid State batteries and longevity/lifecycle and replaceability will be generally irrelevant.
Chemist here. Solid batteries aren’t anywhere close to ready yet, let alone high performance enough to replace regular Li ion. Liquids just work really well for moving ions around.
Toyota have recebtly been claiming to have figured out a viable method to make practical solid state batteries at scale with the intention to have them powering cars in 2027. Whether they will or not by then is yet to be seen of course…
They’ve been claiming this for years, the have form for it…
https://thedriven.io/2023/07/05/solid-state-batteries-toyota-has-history-of-talking-big-on-ev-breakthrough-but-not-delivering/
I see what you’re saying but the previous claims were more along the lines of “we have invented an entirely new type of battery that is more advanced” and the current claim is “we have had a breakthrough on how to manufacture a battery that has already been invented but wasn’t practical to produce at scale previously” which is slightly different. As I said originally, we’ll have to wait and see what if anything they actually produce.
2037 maybe. Ain’t happening in 4 years.