New EU regulation will require phones, portable gaming devices to have user replaceable batteries starting in 2027

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Cobretti2 said:

Biggerboat1 said:

'EU defines as a battery that maintains at least 83% of it's battery life after 500 cycles and at least 80% after 1000 cycles, are also exempt'

Do we know roughly what the bar currently is for flagship phones on this front? I just grabbed an s23 ultra & can't imagine having to upgrade for a very long time except for battery degradation...

1000 cycles doesn't seem much tbh. I've had my phone (Samsung Note 8) for almost 6 years. The first three were great then the last three the phone needs to be charge 3 to 5 times a day. Last two years I get the battery degradation warnings but just ignore them lol

1000 cycles when fully charging once per day is almost 3 years. Considering how weak your battery got after that point, it's pretty clear it was already below 80% at that time already and got weaker quickly after that point.

I think the biggest problems to the law however is not the batteries shelf life, but

1. Older phones still getting updates, especially cheaper ones. What good is a 5 year old phone with good, replaceable battery if the OS is EOL, not getting critical updates anymore and security has more holes than swiss cheese?
2. Phone provider plans with "free" phone upgrades every 1-2 years. Since most of the general population doesn't know all that much about smartphones (as a rather extreme example, an elderly client at our company needed a cellphone just for calls and SMS, and they sold her an iPhone 13 Pro for 1€ plus a fat subscription she'll never need and 2-year repayment plan for the phone itself) and are happy to get the newest phones for "free", not many phones will actually get older than 2 years anyway.

In other words, it's great for people who want to keep their hardware longer, but it will not move the needle all that much in terms of battery e-waste. It should result in all batteries lasting longer before they become useless however and it will certainly benefit all right-to-repair movements, so there's at least that already.