Honestly, with Apple making it incredibly fucking hard to take out their batteries with excessive amounts of glue, I’m okay with this.
Do they not have the tabs you can pull out anymore?
They do, but they’re incredibly prone to breaking when you pull and sometimes they’re just hard as shit to grip so you have to use a screwdriver to twist and pull.
I don’t think I need to explain why that’s so dangerous.
As someone who has changed hundreds of iphone batteries, the adhesive sucks. At least they changed to a different adhesive around iphone 8 because alcohol does wonders on it. I don’t even attempt to pull the tabs on those anymore.
May I ask how you do that? Do you just…douse the battery in alcohol? There isn’t much of a gap between the adhesive and the battery in my experience, so it just sits inside the chasis and rolls around. I haven’t had any luck with that but I’m probably doing it wrong.
I drizzle some in the corner and then use a sturdy tool to gently pry up on the battery to allow the alcohol to get deeper under. Since the adhesive patches are small to fit around the wireless charging coil, it doesn’t take much. Once you get one side of the battery loose the other will easily come with it, especially if the alcohol got to them.
Phones are getting more expensive so people are holding on to them longer, so it’s a nice quality of life improvement to remove the barriers to battery replacement so less people have to go down to a phone repair store to get it changed. The more of a hassle battery replacement is seen the more likely people are to just upgrade and create e-waste.
The problem here is that in order for most people to be able to replace the battery themselves safely they need to be really idiot proof. We’d need to return to back covers with latches or big screws and batteries in cases and contacts. This shit is bulky, heavy and hardly waterproof.
New iPhones use lipo pouch with a ZIF connector straight to the motherboard with a “pull to release” adhesive strip hidden under a panel with a single use sticky seal and two small screws. There is no black magic in replacing the battery yourself and the solution is small, lightweight and waterproof. However most people wouldn’t even know which way to turn the screws to loosen them and probably wouldn’t be bothered by throwing the phone away and getting the one with a better camera AI and more emojis.
[edit: deleted, echo chamber here. Android good, Apple bad. Moving on and blocking this community, can’t have a reasonable conversation, just like reddit I guess].
The difference is that most of the people isn’t expected to own a mechanical watch, but having a smartphone is pretty much expected. You cannot treat a basic commodity as if it were a luxury item.
[edit: deleted, echo chamber here]
Fingers crossed that this will be implemented well, im tired of having sleek electronics be irrelevant in 2 years when the silicon could go for 5 or six
The silicon could go on for decades if both the modem and processor were fully documented hardware that the community can access and support in the Linux kernel.
I can run a secure and current form of Linux on 30+ year old hardware if I want to, because the hardware documentation was expected by everyone at the time even if some end users were oblivious to what this meant. The whole reason google pushes Android is because they provide a base Linux kernel that hardware manufacturers can easily slip their proprietary junk into without requiring them to add the kind of open source code needed for mainline kernel support by the community. This is the mechanism that depreciates your device. It is totally artificial and an end user exploitation by design.
It’s usually not silicon on the PCB that fails, but the other electronic components (usually the capacitors) that fails first, and since they are surface mounted devices it’s really difficult to solder them by hand.
There are no electrolytics in phones, and most newer phones don’t even have tantalums. So long as there are no flexing stresses induced, which is nearly impossible with the way phones are constructed now, the all MLC capacitors construction has the potential to outlast any PC motherboard or laptop by a large margin.
The most critical issue is board connectors and moisture ingress. The USB-C connector or any other high pin density micro sized connector with a tiny pin pitch, and large electrical potential will fail from charge cycling and a resistance forming between pins. USB-C is particularly bad because reversing the connector doubles the number of pins on the board in a ridiculous amount of space. Just using a standard USB-C connector when ordering a prototype to be fabed at any common board house will double the price. The USB-C pin pitch is too tight for the most common fab process resolution.
Hooray! Younger generations will finally be able to experience the joy of dropping their phone and having to pick up three to four different pieces! /s
(I’m all for this change, by the way)
Oh I remember that with Nokias. It’s like shock absorbing for cars lol.
Do y’all remember the days when you dropped your phone and it exploded into 3 or 4 pieces? 🤣 Those were the good days.
This is great.
I might be in the minority here, but I feel this is actually a step back.
In the 5 years I’ve had my phone, there have been two times I’ve ever really needed to pull the battery, and still the hard reset sequence still eventually worked in both cases.
Anyone remember how some phones had issues with the battery door becoming somewhat loose over time, causing any slight bump to turn the phone off? Many have already commented on how they explode into multiple pieces when dropped. Traditionally the battery covers are incredibly flimsy plastic, even on flagship devices (cough Samsung). Waterproofing is a common concern too, however it actually can be done with a removable battery (e.g. Galaxy S5).
What really needed to be addressed here was how cumbersome it is to get into these devices to replace the battery, and how often people are price gouged to replace them. I believe this could have been better written to allow for either a removable battery, or a standardized and affordable built-in battery replacement process.
I actually love all these regulations on smartphones (mainly by the EU), like the recent USB-C standard. That one in particular makes it so much easier to share chargers around the house!
Wonder if phone manufacturers will fragment their offerings to satisfy EU requirements or if we’ll all end up with removable batteries.
It will be a pretty major redesign of the chasis and body to accommodate a removable battery and the cover, so I think it would make little economical sense to maintain two designs for every phone sold here.
Really hoping this happens. I want to be able to replace the battery on my phone after a year because the performance on the battery degraded by nearly half.
That being said, I’m also willing to bet some time shortly after this goes into affect, the cost of mobile service (at least in the US) will go up another $10/$15 a month, and phones will increase in cost by another $100-$200. Not because materials cost more, or designs change. But to preemptively screw people over.
on the battery degraded by nearly half.
One year nearly half ? wtf , even my 24/7 power used phone lost approx only 17% on battery health and its a Poco x3 pro
This is actually pretty crazy. Wonder how much it’ll affect the overall design of modern smartphones. Will we witness the return of flagships with plastic back covers?
Yeesh I hope not.
I hope everything just becomes brushed aluminum ffs. I hate all these glass back phones
Phones only have glass backs to let wireless charging work so I don’t see aluminium making a come back any time soon.
I hate wireless charging too, though. It’s inherently less efficient than wired, and you have less range of motion while charging. With a wire, I can still use my phone while it’s plugged in. Wireless charging needs to go away imo.
I interested in how your hate for wireless charging has anything to do with this thread?
We’ve had wireless charging in every single material back and it’s absolutely wonderful QOL improvement.
It can’t be done through metal backs, for what it’s worth.
Holy. 👍
I wonder how thick phones will be because of this, what about phones with dual-cell battery? I know some of them do this for faster charging speed.
Absolutely nothing will change You can already swap the battery very easily, once you win the fight with the glue. Granted, most of the recent phones now allows removing said glue more or less easily, too. The only problem i can see are the IP ratings, as the backplate would need to be swappable
I don’t think the IP ratings are gonna be that much worse.
The galaxy s5 had IP67 with a removable battery back in 2014.
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I’ve never understood the whole waterproof thing. I’ve never been in an instance where my phone was in any danger of getting wet. I get float trips and stuff but that seems like an uncommon case and even then there are ways to waterproof a phone temporarily.
