L4sBotIt's official: Smartphones will need to have replaceable batteries by 2027
EntropyI wonder how apple will react to this
siniApple fanboy here… but they’re probably gonna market the feature with some cool new trendy name and make the battery replacements proprietary.
OrangeCorvusIt will be built from the ground up 😂
Overcomplicated, overpriced, and they’re gonna incentive just getting the next gen phone.
You mean built by some other manufacturer and marketed to seem like it was built from the ground up from Apple themselves.
Now i hope it says something about availability of the replacement batteries…
Due to unexpectedly high demand, the $300 battery you ordered has 5 months waiting list. Payment in advance, of course, for your convenience.
$300 battery for your iPhone
Screens are now up there for genuine. Oh, and btw Apple very quietly implemented an “alert” when you have an aftermarket screen.
It will be magnetic
I mean…battery replacements were ALWAYS proprietary. You can’t pop a Galaxy S4 battery in a GS 5.
But you can put up a firmware barrier that keeps the phone from booting up, or at least from operating at full advertised capacity, unless the it’s an “authentic” battery that’s been officially registered to that particular phone’s serial number, which can only be done via special tools and software that are only available to official Apple repair shops. They’ve done it with cameras and screens and buttons, why not batteries? It’s just another part.
At that point there’s no way they can argue that the battery is user-serviceable without extra tools. Sure, they could argue that the law doesn’t specify that they can’t sabotage the device if you swap your battery but European courts have traditionally taken a dim view of that kind of tomfoolery.
I’m pretty sure that Apple aren’t going to risk having to suddenly take all of their devices off the shelves. It’s cheaper to comply.
CoderKatYou can buy third party batteries. The batteries are customized to the phone, but they aren’t exclusive to the OEM.
“And we think you’re gonna love it”
🙏
makingStuffForFunThey’re going to see the battery is replaced and show your phone down. Just to be safe you know.
Oh you probably shouldn’t go around admitting that so willingly.
By designing a model of iphone with replaceable battery, of course.
Probably voiding warranty for any phone that has its battery replaced by the user instead of having it done at an apple store/apple vertified store. Or some good old planned obsolescence where the phone detects a replacement battery and just stops working as fast as it used to. Anything to get people to buy the next new iphone every year.
I don’t think Apple really want to be caught to do somenthing they are already been condemned for, at least not in EU…
Design batteries that can also function independently as a powerbank? That would be useful.
BobertI think they’re already complying. Tri-tip bits are already bought easily and affordably on Amazon. Same with suction cups, picks and tweezers. Literally $30 or less to get all of the above in one nifty carrying case. If you have suction cups then you can break the screen seal without using heat and let’s be honest, hair dryers are perfectly adequate for these repairs. It’s literally what I use for friends and family repairs that I do at home rather than in my workshop.
I think it’s a step in the right direction but not even remotely strong enough to force change on current cell phones.
Remember that consumers expect certain things from smartphones nowadays, which will mean that OEMs can’t just go back to the old way of doing things. An IP68 rating would be very difficult to obtain while still offering a premium-feeling device with an easily replaceable battery, for example. These are hurdles OEMs will need to get over to be in compliance.
this is straight-up BS. there were many phones with ip68 and user-replacable batteries back when sealing the battery in a phone was frowned upon. not all but many.
One of them being the Galaxy S5 (I think)
kaduYou’re correct, though the Galaxy S5 is a bad example though - the device looked and felt like a Fischer Price toy. It had flaps everywhere, was annoying to use, and even had a billion software notifications to keep reminding you to monitor and close said flaps. Nowadays we can certainly do better.
There still are today. Samsung Xcover series.
The term “premium-feeling” does a lot of heavy lifting in that paragraph, one might almost say that it’s a bit subjective.
It’s true though. I’ve become very accustomed to the premium experience of being forced to use premium apps and services that don’t work half the time in a very premium manner.
I think it would be pretty premium if I could have a spare battery on the charger for a quick swap rather than relying on a cable to charge my phone.
Move over 2010. Who uses a cable?
I do? And most people I know?
What they really mean is “very slightly thinner than the previous generation or current rival because we think that’s a super marketable thing still even though we’ve reached the practical limit where it no longer makes sense to go thinner.”
Meanwhile the phone can’t lie flat on its back because the camera protrudes.
Solution: add phonecase!
Or just have better (and slightly bigger) internals to make backside level…
MeanEYEI have a two-way radio which floats in water and has a replaceable battery. It’s just excuses. However I do believe they got rid of replaceable batteries to save on space and thickness of the devices.
I think you’re right. They then quickly learned that it’s in their best interest to have a sealed system. Makes it cheaper to obtain higher IP ratings. Sells more devices. It obviously did nothing that hurt sales. Samsung is making an IP68 rated device with replaceable battery and still takes SD cards right now. It’s only $600 to boot making it handedly cheaper than flagships. So why isn’t it what everyone’s pointing at in these threads? Cause the majority of people, even in these very threads, aren’t buying it. These are not the factors that decided buying a phone. Otherwise removable batteries, SD cards and 3.5mm jacks would still be ubiquitous, but here we are.
TakatakatakatakatakThe Galaxy Xcover 6 pro is a box full of lies in terms of IP68 rating and associated warranty. I have written about my utterly disappointing experience of getting caught in a storm a couple of months after I bought it quite extensively elsewhere. Save to say I will not be buying another samsung product. It seems they have forgotten how they used to make that design work.
Great phone, just not waterproof at all.
Honestly, I never buy a phone without an audio jack and sd card.
CthuluVoIPThickness is the only concern I have. I’d love to be able to replace the battery in my iPhone safely and easily, but I don’t really want to give up having a phone that’s less than 10mm thick.
The size thing is just another excuse.
There were/are phones with replacable batteries that are thinner than most current phones. Some were 7.5mm
Galaxy s5 was only 0.3mm thicker than an iPhone 14.
Ip67 and replaceable battery
And it had completely different innards and battery capacities. Just grabbing that old battery and putting it in a new phone would seriously limit the runtime on a single charge. Which is kinda the point, I really hope we don’t trade replaceable batteries for the need to recharge twice a day or switch batteries to even make it the whole day. Or have a noticeable bulkier phone that won’t fit as comfortably in my pocket. Or that it may not survive the rain shower I got surprised by because they skimped on the water proofing.
gilaThe main factor to consider in making an ultrathin phone in 2023 has nothing to do with the battery. It’s the requirement for a certain level of build quality to be suitable for end consumers. At some point we just need to develop new materials, because we can’t make it any more ultrathin without it also becoming ultrafragile using the materials available.
It hasn’t really been a focus since we realised back around the iPhone 5 that making these sweeping compromises for thinness was yielding diminishing returns and causing other problems. Today that’s still the thinnest mainline iPhone, only the SE and 12 Mini are thinner. 13 mini is thicker, and there is no 14 mini.
Ergonomics matter too. At this point going thinner is purely a marketing exercise rather than a practical improvement of any kind. If they were able to businesses would be making them so thin you can’t hold them without risking a paper-cut so long as that allowed them to convince people that meant it was better than their current, designed for human hands, smartphone.
Same thing with size. Personally I prefer a larger display and am willing to accept slightly worse ergonomics for it but even with more or less average sized hands I definitely find phones with 6 inch or under screens much more comfortable in the hand than the more typical sizes today and I know plenty of people with smaller than average hands (ie, half of the population) who really hate holding modern gigantic phones (and so often have held off on upgrading to a new model until I’ve steered them to something the same size as their old one.)
Thickness of your phone is now dictated by cameras. Because of focal lengths and what not, they need to be a certain size, that’s why they’re always with an overhang.
I have an old LG V20 (released in 2016) with a removable battery that’s just 7.6mm thick. That’s thinner than the latest versions of flagship phones from Apple, Samsung and Oneplus. By comparison the Iphone 14Max is 7.9mm thick, the Samsung S23 Ultra - 8.9mm and the Oneplus 11 - 8.5mm.
IMO the purpose of non-replaceable batteries is (just like everything else) profit. Companies want to push us to replace the entire phones every two years rather than just the batteries. They’ve been remarkably effective at doing just that.
Yeah my 2023 XCover 6Pro has a removable battery and ip68 rating. You wouldn’t be able to tell the back cover comes off. The only clue that something’s off is that it’s texturized plastic instead of glass or aluminium.
Yeah, I scuba dive and have multiple pieces of equipment with replacable batteries that are good down to 500+ ft. Not only do some of them get opened frequently, and without replacing seals or anything, but they’re also all way cheaper than my phone! Anyone who says you can’t easily meet an IP68 rating on a phone with replacement batteries is full of shit.
Do those have the same size and weight requirements a phone has? This isn’t about “can this be done”, it is a question about “which compromises do we have to accept to make this happen”.
Tbh, I don’t miss this.
Phone batteries generally last 3-4 years (sometimes longer depending on the size), and by that point it’s usually time to upgrade to a new phone anyway for the latest security updates and such.
Here’s a thought, what if phones weren’t made to be disposable?
Dark ArcExactly, every phone doesn’t need to be replaced 3-4 years. Fairphone is doing a great thing with Fairphone 3 getting 7 years of updates.
It’s not an original thought, but one that no-one has been able to realize. Turns out tech moves forward, and people want the latest and greatest.
There’s nothing I do on my current phone that I couldn’t do on a phone ten years ago, technologically speaking. When I upgraded my phone recently, it was solely because of battery deterioration and because the previous model was out of service for security updates. I don’t think I’m alone here.
On device ML.
The good news for you is that most 10 year old phones have user serviceable batteries, so you’re free to keep using those if you want.
Not much you can do about software updates, unless you want to pay significantly more for a new phone to cover the cost of OEMs having to pay their engineers to build those updates for the dozens of phones that get released over a 10 year window.
4 years on typical android at this point (fair phone claiming 7) 5 on an iPhone.
I did a battery replacement on my iPhone 7 at about the 3 year mark and got another 2 years out of it. Full updates from apple and 100% App Store app compatibility that whole time.
iPhones get OS updates for ~6 years, security patches for longer. In 2021, apple updated a 9 year old phone with a security patch.
Apple is objectively the only way to go if you want a device that you’ll be able to use for >5 years.
If I can install Windows 11 with the latest patches on a 5-year-old computer, smartphones should be able to do the same.
Throwing away perfectly good hardware because of updates is an inefficient use of resources.
L3ft_F13ld!Hell, I have a laptop that’s over 10 years old. It isn’t officially supported on Windows 11, but I’m sure I could get it on there in some unsupported way, using Rufus or another tool that removes the TPM requirements and have it be usable and secure. It runs Windows 10 without complaints. I can run an up to date Linux distro on it and be completely up to date and secure. So, like you said, why can’t phones do the same?
They don’t?
I’m pretty sure you can install iOS 16 on an iPhone 8, which came out in 2017, almost 6 years ago. And that’s a major system update. If you just need security updates, the latest one was in January and supported phones as far back as the iPhone 5s, released almost 10 years ago today.
But in reality, people want better phones and better cameras every few years, so they buy them. And they tend not to throw out their old ones, but sell/trade them or pass them along to someone else.