The beginning of the end of planned obsolescence: replaceable batteries to be mandatory in cell phones by 2027

[seanpm2001]

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The beginning of the end of planned obsolescence: replaceable batteries to be mandatory in cell phones by 2027

2023, July 13th

The European council and the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has made it a requirement for cell phones (also known as smart phones) to have a replaceable battery by the year 2027. This is a major step in the right direction against the practice of planned obsolescence, a practice that wastes valuable resources in order to make a device that is designed to fail within years of purchase and force the user to buy a new one. With replaceable batteries, the problem with companies like Apple, Samsung+Google, and others throttling battery performance on older devices is coming to an end. Samsung has been notorious for not allowing replaceable batteries in their devices, starting with the Samsung Galaxy S6 in 2015, where the ability to replace the battery was removed, and backed up by the false claim that this was necessary to make the device more water resistant. Apple has, however been more notable with this, not allowing battery replacement in any iPhone, iPod, or iPad since their introductions.

Batteries are a component that degrade with use. For quite some time, the market has made it so that devices only have 1 battery, and once that is gone, you have to buy a new device. We are now going back to the days where you can take the back of your device off, pop the battery out, put a new one in, and put it back together. Until other components begin to fail, the device will last much longer.

For the devices to be legally marketed in Europe (to be sold there) or the United States, they will need to have replaceable batteries. This will help get rid of some of the annual cell phone landfill production rate (where billions of computers are thrown away before they even are supposed to be, something that has made consumers waste trillions of dollars) this is only for Europe and parts of North America for now, hopefully it will spread to other countries. It will make Europe and the United States of America more attractive for buying computers, and if Apple, Google, Samsung and others don't comply, they will lose out on billions of dollars per year (over 746 million people live in Europe, as of 2021, and 335 million people live in the United States, as of 2024) which is something they likely won't want to do (they won't want to lose 1.081 billion potential customers)

This is the beginning of the end of the practice of planned obsolescence. It will be great for the user, and it will also be great for the environment.

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Sources:

• AndroidAuthority
• SlashDot

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