Having standardized chargers for phones and laptops is SUPER nice and would never have happened without intervention IMO.
The only equivalent for US "useful, average-citizen friendly legislation" that I recently heard about was the standardization of powertool batteries pursued by doge-- which turned out to be an april hoax when I just looked it up :(
If they paid German gas and electricity prices for example while having European wages, they'd care a lot more about energy consumption, believe that.
Just ignoring energy efficiency/repairability labelling is always an option for consumers on the other hand.
> If they paid German gas and electricity prices for example while having European wages, they'd care a lot more.
I'm not so sure on this; I think environmental concerns are mainly culture driven I think, because even after all the price increases over the last decade, especially electricity is still dirt cheap compared to e.g. rent, basically everywhere.
Not sure about the distinction there, improving the environment and energy usage is benefitting the consumer, because the consumer is also the citizen living there
[1] https://www.energyprices.eu/electricity/germany
[2] https://spotprices.eu/de/spotprice/de1
[3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/Energy-Prices/Electricity/Monthly...
[4] https://www.learngermanonline.org/salaries-and-living-costs-...
US $0.18/kWh [1]
DE $0.44/kWh [2]
EU $0.32/kWh [2]
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610
[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
I can't get manuals and software access to fix a new car made in EU.
I don't really care that I can't fix my all-glued-up phone for <1000 EUR but I do care that I have to spend thousands on car repairs that I could do myself.
That's a bizarre starting point to me. Iphone / Android made/make the world a better place. There were no laws mandating creation of them!
This belongs in that category in my opinion because it is something that costs very little in absolute terms (manufacturer has to run some tests and print some numbers that they probably already had), but it makes the whole system work better because it enables people to vote with their wallet, and gets inefficient products eliminated because people can spot them before sale.
No company would advertise a "20% below average battery lifetime" without regulation like this, which is why objectively bad devices can still get sold easily on unregulated markets.
The EU bureaucracy itself is significantly lighter and more purposeful than any of the underlying individual states' bureaucracy, though that might simply be a function of youth and restricted scope.
The EU ""states rights"" (subsidiarity) is a lot stronger and more real than the corresponding structures in the US. It also doesn't really do direct enforcement - there's no EU federal police checking tablets, it's all done through national level enforcement.
> Battery endurance in cycles.
Hopefully online stores will add ability to filter by these criteria.
I'm happy to be more conscious, but someone is working against the scheme: I don't have a real choice...
Seems most people want that nice TV more than a small, dim picture that uses less energy.
All in the name of not having to place your TV in a shaded corner, and maybe acheiving a higher contrast ratio on paper.
So is it something like "only produces light where needed on the screen" or "uses the least energy when turned off" or "does image processing for x format with the least energy" What are they measuring here?
Your "does image processing..." part is also important. Different processors consume vastly different amounts of energy. A hobbyist example would be trying to run something on a battery powered ESP32 with or without deep sleep.
It's human job is to convey information. If you're measuring efficiency that way, it would be most efficient to have the dimmest screen possible (using the least energy) as long as you can still tell what's happening on screen. If that's already happening, then surely a screen twice as bright as you need it to be would use twice the energy and be half as efficient, even if it physically is equally as efficient making light at any brightness.
You could be using half the energy to do the "same" job.
It's the electricity usage when running the TV. There is e.g. quite a difference between LED and OLED.
TVs is also quite a large part of electricity usage in a household. Maybe 75 - 150W running a few hours a day. You have to keep in mind that not many people have PCs, NAS, etc. running 24/7.
On one side, it is good to have consumer friendly regulation like manufacturers to be forced to support right to repair. But on the opposite side, lots of bullshit requirements again like the energy labelling, that will do that we have less products, mostly from big actors only, and more expensive due the then useless regulation barrier.
And the mixed feeling is stronger for things like manufacturers that needs to provide support for the os for 5 years and more. Sure, I'm happy that it applies to big tech like apple, Google and Samsung, when it is what I'm expecting. But, I, as a consumer, I would like some times to be able to buy other products, cheaper, crappier (for a burner or test devices for example), and to have small actors being able the try innovation without needing a 500 millions backing to be able to see in Europe.
What I would have preferred is a law more oriented on consumer rights than manufacturing regulation: Forbidding more clearly explicit monopolistic behaviors like what is done with app store; and for right to repair and co, not needing the company to provide support for repair for 5 years but that if they don't, or after 5 years, that they have to release in open source the software, blueprints or tools that are needed to be able to support your own device yourself.
Yes. While I'm generally in favor of the EU regulatory approach they need to learn about and understand the concept of "small business", including the fact that you can't get a new large EU business without it going through the small business stage. There should be a lot more de minimis exemptions from the whole CE marking system.
There are a lot of EU wide requirements that create barriers to entry. Before Altman's scareware campaign to "regulate" "AI", there was:
Exhibit 1:
https://pcengines.ch/recycle.htm
See the blurb about not being able to sell direct to customers in the EU.
[Think the company has shut down or is shutting down, possibly because of that too.]
Everyone can agree regulation burden exists, but I too often see it invoked in bad faith, like in the case of GDPR. This primes me to ask for concrete proof why any regulation would be especially burdensome for small business.
If you want to market small circuit boards from the EU into the EU, you need to register in all EU countries. It's not 100% clear whether the requirement is incurred at "making available for sale in country X" (ie as soon as you put it on the website) or at the point you make your first sale.
This is on top of trying to untangle what CE marking testing may be required.
On the other hand, if you're a Chinese small board vendor, you just advertise it on AliExpress, put it in the (subsidized!) small parcel post, and ignore the EU rules.
... I know far less about, say, refrigerators. So last time i needed one i bought the one with the most economic energy label from the ones I liked.
An appliance plugged into a wall is different as most people have no easy way to discern energy usage. But they are reminded everyday of their mobile’s energy efficiency.
And no one is going to use a black and white mobile to save 100kWh per year.
I think the main expected gains here are less from the estimated 0.2% electricity savings and more about longer average product lifetimes (thanks to better repairability).
If a manufacturer gets his phone to last for a day of heavy use, there is little motivation to improve efficiency past that benchmark I think (and this labeling provides that).
>And the mixed feeling is stronger for things like manufacturers that needs to provide support for the os for 5 years and more.
What I'd have liked to see for this (and still would) is that support is tied to control, ie, as a principle power being intimately linked with responsibility, not some ""big tech"" or not thing either. So maybe have some absolute bare minimum like 3 months unless bankrupt, but then link it to whether product owners are able to install alternate OS, access the source code etc. If a manufacturer wants to throw out some hardware and also give me all the source code and any certificate store access required for me and/or the community of fellow owners to alter and maintain it as we wish, then I'm completely fine with a very short (or possibly even zero) required support period on the software side. Conversely if a company (like Apple) wishes to profit by locking down a device very heavily, then they should also be forced to pay for all support costs for as long as they do. And I'd make that indefinite also, like, Apple would NEVER be able to stop supporting a device that they didn't at least offer alternative OS install capability for. If they wanted to EOL an iPhone after 7-10 years, they'd have to unlock the bootloader as part of that.
IMO that would most properly align all the incentives and then let various players small to large experiment with the best solutions, and for consumers to react in turn. Full open do-anything and walled gardens would both be allowed, but no profiting while externalizing the downsides.
And I think 5 years of software updates should be achievable if Qualcomm, Google, etc are more supportive of manufacturers.
“WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, or other reproductive harm.”
You can safely bet that there is no end product [you care this regulation to apply to] that has 100% in-house engineering, unencumbered with licenses. This would be either unenforceable or eliminate all but the largest players from EU market.
If you look at a distance, most of these regulations simply mandate managing product lifecycle. Yes, you can enter the market quicker and cheaper if you don't think about eventual recycling or bodger together something that barely works. We take warranties for granted now, but warranties are part of this family of regulations: if you introduce a product to the market, introduce something that is actually functional.
This is so great! A lot of manufacturers were counting from the date of introduction. A lot of phones only had a 3 year support period. If they are on the market for two years, the people buying last would only get one year of support. This swaps to the last date of sale, which is much more consumer-friendly. I still have to read up on what operating system upgrades entails.
rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market
Awesome!
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?toc=OJ%3AL%3...
The average power draw of a cell phone is what, 4 watts? 6 watts? Lets say 10W, which is silly high (most can only charge at around 20W for an hour and a charge lasts at least 12 hours, but lets just take a high number.) At 10W constant draw it would consume 87,600Wh per year. Lets round up for inefficiencies and call it 100kWh. (That's about $11/yr of electricity where I live, about 3 cents per day but this isn't my point.)
(For reference, my Pixel 8 Pro gets 16+ hours on average if I don't put it on my wireless charger, and it's battery is only 5000mAh, which my calculations say is around 1W of average draw. This matches what I see on the display on my charging cord.)
An average person in Norway consumes 24000kWh per year (according to wikipedia. Someone in Spain would be about 5000kWh). This regulation will cut their cell phone power usage by about 1/3 (based on the quoted estimated savings and the # of people in the EU, but I don't believe these numbers), so maybe about 33kWh per year (and remember this is using absurdly over estimated numbers). That is approximately a 1/1000 reduction in power usage (or 1/200 in spain). Using realistic numbers I don't see how it's possible to anticipate any reduction in energy usage, in fact it would be a huge increase if all phones only met the minimum required in this regulation.
I will wager that the cost of compliance will slightly increase, however. This is a benefit to established manufacturers as their cost per device for compliance is low, and they already have mechanisms to ensure compliance and testing, and relationships with regulators. It's a nontrivial increase in the already significant barrier to entry to everyone else, even if their devices easily comply.
Cell phones and other mobile devices already compete on energy efficiency being one of the primary factors driving purchasing decisions (in fact it's more potent competition than that, since it's battery life). There is no meaningful initial price/efficiency tradeoff like some other products, such as mini splits or other HVAC where people might be 'cheap' up front but then it costs them more over time due to less efficiency, in fact the more efficient a phone is the cheaper it can be to manufacture because you can install a smaller battery. This compounds the benefit of being efficient. Based just on my own intuition, I would predict that the anti-competitive barriers to entry this sets up will lead to a slight reduction in competition in the market, which will actually let manufacturers invest less in energy efficiency (and every other aspect of their phones) while maintaining their market share.
I predict that this regulation actually causes phones to become slightly less energy efficient than they would otherwise. Worse, if there were no regulation phones and other devices would likely become significantly more efficient than this regulation requires regardless, so the regulation just imposes a cost. Worse, there isn't a problem here to begin with, the energy usage of these devices does not show up in the data of total energy use unless you scroll all the way to the bottom, these devices are already using less power than a single LED light bulb turned on for 4 hours a day. If they just redirected the costs of compliance with this stupid regulation to something effective, such as adding to the subsidy on hyper-efficient mini split systems, it could save substantial amount of energy and push forwards electrification goals.
What makes you confident in that assumption? Because I would wager that cost of compliance is gonna be pretty much negligible, because manufacturers have most of the numbers already anyway, and this pales in comparison to EMF testing, too.
Estimates for effects of the regulation are right there-- they hope for total savings of 8TWh within 2030, but mainly from longer product lifetime through devices staying functional for longer on old batteries and easier battery repairability.
That's an interesting point I didn't realize. I still don't see how they can get to those numbers, do they quote the calculations somewhere? I toned down the claim to be less hyperbolic based on your feedback here.
I wonder how often a recent generation phone is replaced due to battery life issues, especially considering the 'smart charging' features that phones have now which makes battery wear a fraction of what it was previously (such as charging to 80% max, 'smart' slow charging at night instead of fast charging, etc)
Anecdotally, I bought at least one phone where slightly easier/cheaper repairability of screen + battery would have made me keep the old one.
I think making these metrics clear on product packaging is also becoming more important, because the improvements in phones have slowed down already, and longer lifetimes should be a consequence/benefit (but this is against manufacturer interests).
Screen/battery fixability was a major criteria when selecting my last phone and this was really hard to gauge, I'm hopeful that regulation like this is gonna help.
1: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/buildings/data-centres-and...
Repairability rules I like. Rules about OS updates are good too. But the energy claims look like BS to me:
> In 1990, the annual electricity consumption for (networked) standby of the base stations and charging cradles of cordless landline phones was 37.1 kWh. In 2020, without measures, this would have been 24.5 kWh. Due to the Ecodesign standby regulation, this was reduced to 16.1 kWh in 2020, a 34% saving. Due to the addition of the 2023 Ecodesign regulation on phones, this is expected to further reduce to 8.0 kWh in 2030, a 63% saving versus no measures.
sofixa•4h ago
> The regulations focus on measures to extend product lifetime (reparability, upgradability, battery life). The increase in average lifetime, e.g. from 3.0 to 4.1 years for a mid-range smartphone
myrmidon•4h ago
FirmwareBurner•3h ago
It's pretty easy to regulate things that aren't made by your domestic companies.
pjc50•3h ago
VW showed which side they were going to bet on with Dieselgate and should get no further sympathy.
nottorp•3h ago
In the EU, everyone who could afford an EV probably already has one. The rest will buy what they can afford and can charge.
myrmidon•3h ago
nottorp•3h ago
I'm driving a 15 year old car :) I want to replace it some time in the next 2-3 years. Right now I wouldn't consider an EV or PHEV because I don't think I can charge one regularly and the price premium is not worth it to me, especially compared to the hassle.
benjymo•3h ago
I'm not planning to buy a new car though, as mine is only 8 years old and still working fine. I'll check again when repairs start to get more expensive, maybe in a few years.
pjc50•1h ago
Obviously not: this depends on the price of EVs, which is a constantly moving target and is determined by .. the import tariffs I just mentioned. Not to mention that cars have a long product lifecycle. I could afford an electric car, I have a space to park it, but for the time being I'm using my elderly petrol car because my annual mileage is low.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/362910/average-uk-car-now... : average UK car is 9 years old. EV tech has changed a lot in that time.
This looks like a comprehensive, long list of Chinese incentives; https://www.csis.org/blogs/trustee-china-hand/chinese-ev-dil... ; each EU country has its own schemes.
myrmidon•3h ago
From a an average voter perspective, "sacrificing" local industry for a (temporary?) 20% discount on EVs is not too popular anyway, and neither is it gonna meaningfully save the planet IMO.
Tariff levels are basically the same as US import tariffs on pickup trucks, so not especially high, either.
sofixa•2h ago
Sacrificing the European automakers for a temporary discount would be very foolish.