Sounds reasonable to me, although I expect the zero-regulation folks to have their usual meltdown about this.
Heat for removal works but is always like defusing a inextinguishable bomb and takes much more time than it should. I also have rarely seen a design where the glue was really necessary for the design. Basically they could just have put the battery in without glue and it would have worked just as fine.
Maybe companies really need that kind of regulation to so the common sense right thing.
There are excemptions in cases where it is really technically needed as far as I can tell (medical, water-tightness for safety reasons, data integrity needed so battery can't be removed). I hope they are not too lax with those.
The problem is that you need heat to open up the device itself (all that is between the battery and the hot air gun is about 1mm of glass), followed by a bath in isopropanol and lots and lots of twaddling around with tweezers and spatulas to get the old glue residue removed from both the display and the case (risking damaging either in the process), followed by really annoying meticulous work to place a new glue sheet exactly onto the case (or display) to make sure it fits again. Oh and you always risk cracking the display while removing it.
Try it with a modern Fairphone for example. I had one for years and not a single time the back lid fell off or the battery disconnected. I had a couple of batteries die in phones tho. General point: If you argue with people who have more experience on an issue than you, bring the receipts and red-team your own statement before you make it. Everything else doesn't really shine a good light on you.
By creating a standardized digital record for larger batteries, it provides the transparency needed to finally make a secondary market for "second-life" storage (like using old EV batteries for home solar) viable at scale. It’s a great example of how regulatory standards can help solve the information asymmetry that usually prevents circular economies from functioning efficiently. It will be interesting to see how this shifts industrial design priorities over the next few years.
It's already causing problems for me there. I often repair small electronic devices, or I remove the battery and repurpose them. For example I use some old tablets and phones with the (often bloated) battery removed, and replaced by a DC-DC converter set to 4 volts or so. This way the device 'thinks' there's a battery. Because most devices with an originally integrated battery will not even power up on USB power if they think the battery is not present or deep discharged. And bloated batteries are unsafe to keep on a charger 24/7 so I remove them.
However the local recycling point is getting increasingly difficult about accepting loose Li-Ion and Li-Po cells. I put them in individual ziplock bags and tape over the contacts but they seem to view them as industrial waste or something. They sent me to the central disposal unit far from the city center but even there they were very hesitant to accept them. And at one point they accused me of running a business because I had 5 different batteries to recycle (I had saved them up because they always give me such a hassle). I think businesses have to pay for recycling or something, I don't know and don't care because I don't run a business.
This in effect stimulates 2 things: People just throwing them in the normal bin which is a waste and can cause fire. Or recycling the whole device instead which is a waste of resources if the original device can still be used.
The battery passport links the device to its battery and only 'approved' facilities can break that link so I think this is a very bad idea for smaller devices when it comes to self-repair people like me. And I will fight that with a passion.
For EVs etc I don't know how that works, I don't use cars nor care about them. But I think even there being able to work on a car at home would be a good thing no?
The whole point is that people don't throw away their original device.
Yours situation seems rather niche, and it sounds like you might be going out of 'business' while at the same time allowing 1000x times the number of people to want to do dummy-self-repairs (i.e. replace their batteries) even if it's with a bit more theater about who is licensed.
The total number of people means much more demand - even for what you cook-up manually as not-a-business.
Next time you see one, look for the "no bin" symbol)
https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/removable_battery
Man, is it empty these days. The chart used to be pretty full. Now it only has about 1% of all phones that are in the Product Chart database. As the other 99% have fixed batteries.
I'm looking forward to see if the EU decision will push some companies to do this for their US versions too and revive the chart.
[0] https://repair.eu/news/making-batteries-removable-and-replac...
The amount of avoidable e-waste generated since then is unfathomable: We are talking about mountain-sized piles of discarded electronics, much of it exported to Africa and Asia. There, people (often children) burn those pieces to extract the remaining rare earths, inhaling toxic fumes in the process, while the remaining hazardous garbage is buried and left to poison the groundwater. It is an absolute moral failure that our society, and politicians beholden to Big Tech lobbyists, let this go on for so long in the name of pure profit for a few big companies at the expense of everything else.
But I get it. This ideology has more to do with how much money these types can then extract from a government and if implemented fully you would have some sort of neo-feudalism where everybody needs to pay them to even exist. But that is not a real utopian vision of something that moves humanity forward (quite literally the opposite).
The EU should mandate reparability for a reasonable price for 20 years for cars. The engineering would be absolutely no problem and this would have a massive positive effect on the environment.
But the car lobby of Volkswagen, Merc & Co will never allow this - the repair costs of a 10-year car old push people to buy new ones. In Germany the car lobby even managed to have the state pay a prime in 2009 if you trashed your >9 year old car.
Brussels gets more and more lost in over-complicated 'little-little'. Just mandate repairability and spare part availability for extended amounts of time for adequate prices. Plain, easy, simple and very effective.
We even made it compatible with Bosch ebikes!
At least on critical sites.
GAFAM and big tech do not like protocols and file formats simple to do a good enough job and stable in time, because you would not need them.
cyrusmg•2h ago
atoav•1h ago
There appears to be a few reason to become excempt from the rules, e.g. medical reasons (if it is in your body safety is more crucial than removability of the battery). So who knows what Apples lawyers will do with this.
cyrusmg•45m ago
padjo•7m ago
oulipo2•22s ago