Great news! I remember the first cell phone I ever had I replaced the battery on twice. It's absurd that tech companies today just expect us to trash our phones when the battery starts going.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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It's like the only way they sell new ones now.
If batteries didn't fail, phones from 5 years ago would still be fine. Mobile OS and app demands haven't increased that much, so the only barrier to using our devices are the wear on the battery, and the refusal to provide security updates.
Next we need laws forcing some kind lf bare minimum of software support, though I have no idea what that would look like.
Sadly, it’s not just the batteries, there’s plenty of software stuff too.
Many phone manufacturers will release updates for only 2 years, if you got the most expensive flagship model; otherwise it’s just 1 year. So if you like having the new features of the latest version of Android, you need to upgrade hardware every year.
What if you don’t care about cutting edge software? Fortunately for you, a 3 year old phone should still receive security updates. For example, Samsung knows that many people don’t update every year. If you don’t support them at all, it’s going to be like Windows 95 all over again, and that would be bad for business.
Eventually, even the security updates will stop, because testing new software for a model that is used by only 0.1% of your customers takes a disproportionate amount of time, effort and money, so phone manufacturers simply can’t see the profit in that. If you get one of the enterprise models, you can expect to get firmware and security updates for 5 years. If you got a consumer model, expect much less than that.
Apple is a bit different, but I don’t want to make this wall of text any longer than it already is.
Weird, I've only replaced a battery on one phone, my wife's Samsung S3. Here's my history with phones:
- ghetto feature phone - switched for better features and different service
- fancier feature phone - had a qwerty keyboard and everything; hinge broke, and I wanted a smart phone
- smart phone - went through the wash and shattered the screen
- power button stopped working, and the screen was cracked
- my current phone
That accounts for about 15 years of phones, so about 3-4 years per phone (I had the first for a year). I didn't need to replace the battery on any of those phones.
I'm more interested in longer software support. My smartphones all stopped getting software updates after 2-ish years, and that's a pretty big deal to me. But I'll take better repairability any day of the week.
Yes! I can't believe this wasn't a law previously. I hope my current phone lasts until 2027 because I don't plan on buying another device without a user replaceable battery.
I wish the implementation would happen sooner than 2027.
A wonderful and welcome change. I don't care what the bootlickers think.
This is awesome for repairability especially with battery issues being a common issue, but I'm not sure how they'll keep IPX7 and IPX8 water resistance ratings.
Hopefully there's some clever solution.
can't wait to return to the day where if I dropped my phone sometimes the battery would fall out :) /s
for real hopefully this has some affect on the waste from old phones. also hopefully in future much more inner components of them will be replaceable because we all know why they glue in components and make proprietary ones >_>
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