TL;DR
- The European Council has ended its adoption procedure for rules related to phones with replaceable batteries.
- By 2027, all phones released in the EU must have a battery the user can easily replace with no tools or expertise.
- The regulation intends to introduce a circular economy for batteries.
Because the EU is such a massive market, EU law tends to bleed out. It’s expensive to keep different SKUs for different regions, so compliance tends to seep out.
I’d expect at least some of this to have an impact outside the EU.
And they know people are going to be importing these smartphones once it goes live and it’s not a battle that can be fought.
The company Fairphone makes almost perfectly repairable smartphones, but they’re only for the European market and the radios won’t really work in the US. I think it would be a similar case for a lot of phones so it might not actually be super viable to import phones in the future either, unfortunately.
Fairphone just partnered with Murena to bring it to the U.S. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair
oh damn! awesome! my current phone still functions well, so hopefully the next one has a headphone jack and I’ll get one, thanks for linking that!
I remember when iPhones first came out, they were locked to a single telecom provider. It got jailbroken within a week and every patch following it for over a year got jailbroken too.
If there is enough demand by big brands, unlike the fairphone, there will be a way to use it outside of the EU. Combined with the extra cost to manufacture, I don’t see big companies just producing it uniquely for the EU or even if they do, not for long.
It also means that other places can introduce similar laws with less friction. Like the GDPR and the various American privacy-oriented laws.
idk, apple is already ramping up their region locking systems just to get better about locking out non-EU countries for when sideloading is mandated in march 2024
We’re talking about substantial hardware differences, though, which are substantially more expensive to maintain than simple region locking.
yeah, absolutely, but at apple’s scale and stubbornness, i wouldn’t be surprised if they made a europhone that was intentionally thick and non-waterproof, supported sideloading, had a usb-c slot and a replaceable battery, and then they just made the regular iphone with their original plan (probably fully sealed with no charging port whatsoever)
i do want eu law to bleed out to everyone and finally fix up the phone industry, but the iphone is literally apple’s main money-maker, and regulation is cutting away at all the ways they optimize that revenue stream, by enforcing failures to increase the frequency people buy phones at, maintaining an iron grip on the ecosystem to sell with a nebulous sense of wonder (and also make switching away as hard as possible), and keeping a vendor lock-in through their ecosystem. these are all horribly anti-consumer strategies that the eu is rightfully cutting down on, but all of these directly prop up apple’s product line, so at some point it’s gotta be cheaper to isolate the eu and keep the phone to their specifications everywhere else.