I’ve never lost a phone to water damage in my lifetime either before or after batteries became more difficult to swap.

I have bought some old used electronics lately. Having an easily accessible and replaceable battery in the Game Boy Advance SP and the Nintendo DSi is very nice though.

I’d probably replace the battery on my phone right now if I could.

Interesting.

I remember struggling to find a phone with replaceable battery. The galaxy S3 was good because of this. "We can't make the battery replaceable, otherwise the phone won't be waterproof", yeah that was bullshit.

This will make the phone more expensive and this is totally fine and expected.

As someone who tends to hang onto my phone for ages, I like being able to get replacement batteries... but I wish they would just take everything fairphone does (removable battery + lineage + and especially right-to-repair stuff) and base new standards on that.

OTOH, I also believe that would not be impossible to engineer a phone that could be taken apart where you could have replacement parts for both the battery and seals (e.g. while many companies currently frame things as "removable batteries OR water resistance", I see no technology reasons why BOTH couldn't exist in the same device) ... There just hasn't been a big push for businesses to develop something like that bc everyone buys their products without them needing to put that much effort into it.

If companies stopped auto-voiding warranties over users opening a phone and stopped treating everyone as incapable of doing their own repairs, I could totally see user-replaceable seals being a thing. You can basically look at other markets that do have right-to-repair. Sure, replacing seals on a phone might be a bit much for grandma. But grandma is also probably going to call either a repair shop or someone in the family who is good with it. Really not much different than upgrading laptop ram/hdd or doing your own plumbing or changing the oil on a car today... pretty damn easy if you know what you're doing, but not something everyone is going to know how to or want to do.

I've missed swappable batteries so much. The convenience of having another loaded battery with you, increased drop resistance due to parts flying, replaceability. So good.

If you're worried of water resistance, get a water-proof case or be more careful with the device costing you possibly hundreds of dollars.

I held onto my older GalaxyNote for this very reason. During the good times of PokeGo it was like having a super power to just switch out my battery and be back to 100%.

User choice is always good, but for me, I prefer the water resistance rather than a swappable battery.

IDK about this one, removable batteries will generally mean less water resistance won't it? Also, these days batteries are custom built for every phone so that they can be as large as possible. Forcing them to be easily replaceable might screw that up.

I love the EU's approach to consumer repair rights, but I think this one might do more harm than good.

I'm all in for replaceable batteries. But don't think swappable batteries are possible with modern devices.

Oh gawd yes. I love the EU.

I'm all for this. The big argument against it is that it makes it harder to waterproof but I'll take that over a phone I have to replace every 18 months because the battery is shit.

The question is will this new system work like it used to be, as in can you just buy a battery from some seller in china or is it going to be similar to what we have now where the batteries are paired to the device.

The article never said a company like Apple couldn’t pair the battery to the device and charge €100 for it.

The article goes into it a bit but the downside to user replaceable batteries is that they are bigger while not giving more charge, you have to include the plastic casings to ensure that they aren’t damaged when being pulled out or dropped or thrown in bags so you do end up with a thicker device and while some devices may allow a hotswap if the phone is plugged into a charger that’s not guaranteed.

I also question the viability of it leaving the EU market, take Apple for example, they already make a different model for the US market and a different model for the china market and a different model for the international market for the 12,13, and 14 lines, they could just make it a Europe only model as it will likely effect the design of the phone in some ways. USB-C I can see coming to all models as it’s something that doesn’t affect the design as much and it’s already on their other devices. But we’ll have to see.

At this point I’d say for any skilled repair person replacing a phone battery shouldn’t be too hard but I guess this can make it easier. For the iPhone 14 lineup you heat up then remove the display, pull the battery pull tabs, life the battery and put in the new one then reseal the display and your good.

While having easy to swap user replaceable batteries seems nice on paper I worry it will lead to chunkier devices. I’m more in favor of right to repair, or basically requiring the parts such as batteries and displays have to be available to everyone including third parties at a reasonable price and ensuring that third parties can actually do the repairs without having to say call up a customer support line to recalibrate the battery(ie pair it to the device); cough couch, apple self service repair.

*disclosure; I’m a certified Apple partner repair technician and as such my view point may be skewed.