It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
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The Galaxy S5 had waterproofing and a removable battery, and it worked alright. They’ll just have to make sure the gaskets and latches aren’t garbage.
Gaskets brother, waterproof phones existed for a long time, they have been there since phones had SIM cards under their batteries
Look at things like mechanical watches where a watch that is rated for less than 100 meters of depth in dry test chamber is called “delicate” even though you can unskrew both the crown and the back with your hands on pretty much all of them
SIM cards are becoming one-time eSIM activation QR codes slowly. Prepaid eSIM QR codes didn’t exist in my country until PLDT-Smart introduced them, with Globe and newcomer DITO following suit soon.
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So far it’s improving due to their own MVNO GOMO PH and strong competition.
My XCover 6pro is ip68 rated and has a removable battery (and a headphone jack)
This is my concern. I typically replace my iPhone with a newer model before I need to replace the battery, but the newer waterproof ratings all of my devices are coming with are nice in case I accidentally drop my device in the tub. I understand why people want to be able to replace batteries and I support options for that, but I’m not sure if you could achieve the level of rating newer devices are with this added requirement.
There are diver watches with replaceable batteries. Probably most of them in fact. The reason these irreplaceable batteries became popular isn’t because they’re more waterproof, it’s because it’s just easier to do. Still perfectly possible to have decently waterproof phone with a replaceable battery. It’s not like we didn’t have such phones back in the day.
It is a common misconception, this and this are the same phone. It’s a 2016 model btw.
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Anything is possible but it costs more money and makes the product bigger. I don’t see how consumers are going to stomach a wireless ear bud that has removable batteries when the ear buds get large, uncomfortable and expensive. I guess we will see what the market bears.
Airpods could literally just have a little threaded battery with an o-ring, as that stick part. The added expense and engineering challenges are minor. They just don’t do it because they want you to buy new ones every couple of years.
Yeah, this kinda hit me whenever my first pair of AirPods died because I was using them so much. They have such tiny batteries, so a percentage difference in total charging capacity was felt quicker. Additionally, the use-case lends to them being discharged almost completely, which hurts life further. While it’s convenient, I realized I was paying a really sharp subscription service where there’s no service from the manufacturer to continue the use of the parts and ultimately the product is designed to be landfill debris.
I switched to a wire after that.
There are lots of ideas like this when you don’t consider the battery certification process and the tons of safety standards. A stand alone battery like this requires it’s own housing (needs to be thick so you can’t crush the soft battery), certified connector for measuring it’s temperature and getting power out, include it’s PCM circuitry and be perfectly safe for whenever a customer might accidentally do to it. It’s far from from trivial. I do this for a living.
Honest question: is this different than the standards for things with non-removable batteries?
Same standards, and some extras depending on how you do it, but now the burden is on a small accessory part (the removable battery) instead of the complete system. The biggest hurdle here is the EU say it needs to be tool free and done by the customer. That’s a tremendous hurdle. Even today with cell phones that are considered repairable they require tools and don’t meet this bar.
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but if a product can only exist if it’s consumer-unfriendly, perhaps it shouldn’t exist at all.
Sure wireless earphones can be convenient, but the extra e-waste, the non replaceable batteries, the Bluetooth transceivers, the DACs used (while the device you’re streaming from almost certainly already has these things) is super wasteful.
I think if we have any chance as a society, we need to start thinking about the products we use and how they are produced and how much waste they create, instead of just how convenient they are at the time.
I agree and that’s the point I was making, wireless ear buds are completely disposable and likely can’t be anything but. Not sure why I got downvoted to hell.