This is certainly needed for lithium and other rechargeable battery tech going forward.
What _really_ happens to the batteries that you responsibly deposit in the recycling container at your local supermarket?
If you throw other recyclables in regular bin, you would also get a warning the first time, and the workers would not pickup you trash after that if you continue. Not sure how they are incentivized to check the bins, but they do.
Garbage collection in the US is increasingly mechanized, with trucks grabbing cans and dumping the bagged trash into a hopper vs. a person handling the trash can and its contents. People living in higher density areas would just put their bagged trash in a dumpster, with multiple homes or apartments sharing a cluster of dumpsters. So, I think it would require staffing or technology changes to inspect trash for proper recycling. I also think there would be a lot of resistance to this for cost and privacy reasons.
Some states in the US do use a deposit system for other things besides batteries. Glass and plastic bottles in particular have some sort of scheme where I think you pay extra up front and get it back when you recycle the bottle, but I've never lived in a state that had this so I am not sure exactly how that works. Generally speaking though, I think people would respond well to "cash for trash" and overall a positive incentive like this would be more popular and effective than having trash inspected.
Whatever the manager wants to happen of course. Unless you actually check some places out, see how they handle recycling and hit them with a hefty fine if they don't do it properly.
Apple has argued that they can fit a bigger, harder to remove battery into devices, and the added capacity because it's bigger makes up for it being hard to remove. I've changed batteries on a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, and it's very straightforward; I'm not sure how much truth there isn't to that argument on laptops. Phones are so small that I find that explanation more plausible.
Samsung used to allow you to remove your battery easily but they also stopped at least in their flagship phone, last time I looked at one anyway. I know they also offer phones that do allow for this but the flagship phones really set the tone I feel for the downstream expectations over time.
Rather unfortunately I don’t think Apple sees value in removable batteries, which while I understand the trade offs I think is a net negative in this case
No, that would be the various libre phones that have in-tree kernel drivers and correspondingly support updates to the latest system indefinitely.
The default in the industry prior to Apple was for software to be independent from hardware. You can install the latest Windows on hardware going back to the earliest x64 processors and Linux or BSD on hardware going back more than 20 years.
If random community-supported Linux distributions can support hardware from the previous millennium, Apple could support all the iPhone hardware ever made, but they don't. So that's just another instance of them doing something user-hostile so you have to buy a newer iPhone and Samsung et al following them.
Offering battery replacements in that context is just another way for them to stick it to you -- you have a four year old iPhone with a flat battery, they take your money to put in a new one and then stop issuing it software updates a year later so you have to buy a new one regardless.
The same is true for smartphones. The original iPhone didn't have a very long support life but the iPhone 6S from 2015 is supported in iOS 14 giving it at least a 6 year lifespan.
If an android manufacturer guaranteed 5 years support and stock android available on the same day as google releases it then it be willing to give android another try.
Not even google themselves guarantee that. Some manufacturers are charging the same price as an iPhone with sometime less than 2 years with of OS upgrades.
On phones there's a better case for fixed batteries, but at least I don't mind another millimeter thickness if that means I can replace the battery.
The core charge would be returned if the user sells the phone to any legit business (funded by the core charge originally paid to Apple). If the user sells the phone on eBay, the buyer can recover the core charge later, so it’s part of the market value of any phone that has a battery in it.
The charge also could be recovered if the phone is given to a recycling center. It’s on Apple to figure out how to get the batteries out and pay whoever does that work. Apple can decide whether to do the engineering to make the battery replaceable up front, or fund the delicate labor of taking apart the phone later.
They will already recycle your battery for free. I think they will actually also recycle other manufacturers' batteries for free as well, and also any random loose batteries you hand them.
Seems pretty reasonable to me?
I wonder how much empty space is in current gen iPhones, the 7 had so much that a YouTuber was able to squeeze the adapter Apple shipped with it convert analog audio to Lightning externally entirely into the phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LORsgF-fhgQ).
This is hardware engineering, and high quality engineering at that. When Apple decided to use an adhesive rather than screws they could would have had excellent consideration of cost/quality/aesthetic issues.
It is true that they could easily create devices to match the requirements of randoms on Hacker News, but that isn't going to lead to Apple - the once in a decade consumer products behemoth. It leads to the Openmoko. Turns out nearly nobody wants that.
So yeah, it is an "All Apple would have to do", but evidence is Apple is much better at deciding what it should and shouldn't do than back-seat designers. Sorry if that sounds a bit brusque, a nerve might have been hit here. But hardware isn't easy.
This fallacy seems to be common in discussions of Apple. Apple is very profitable, therefore everything they do is infallible and impossible to improve.
Look at a picture of an Openmoko device. Just look at it. Here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
Compare this to various modern phones with a replaceable battery:
https://www.androidauthority.com/best-android-phones-removab...
There are obvious reasons to expect the former to fail in the market but not the latter, even though they all have a replaceable battery.
Meanwhile the Apple devices further run iOS and are compatible with iMessage and the complete set of third party iOS apps, which are a large component of their success, but none of which would be any less true if they had a replaceable battery.
Doing a lot of things right can't prove that they're not doing a specific thing wrong.
Rather, they are iterating upon the same few products with a zillion engineers in eensy weensy form factors where space is at a premium, so they probably think about why they do things a certain way.
There is a good reason, and the reason is that Apple doesn't want people to easily repair their phones.
There is an esthetic consideration in that they won't be able to use a glass back, but that's seriously minor. They can put paint and gloss on top of ceramic or tons of other solutions for just a bit more cost.
I'd bet a lot that the primary reason they did this was to make the device a fraction of a millimetre thinner; Apple seems to obsessed with thinness at the cost of everything else.
Personally, I'd much prefer an ever-so-slightly thicker phone with a removable battery, and I rather doubt I'm alone in that.
I don't expect most people to refurbish their own iPhones, the way I do mine. That seems like it would be a weird thing to expect most people to do. And what's wrong with the million small shops that do battery replacements, or with Apple stores' own such service, that requires the "not difficult" total redesign you're so anxious to see happen?
This really isn't a total redesign, by the way, and it doesn't just apply to the battery, but helps repairing everything else. In any case, it absolutely isn't a total redesign, and FWIW the iPhones don't even have that much battery compared to more repairable phones of the same size.
This is one of the main things to beware of when you need to open up a phone with a heat gun and repair it. I've broken a couple of screens shortly after a repair until I realized I needed to be more meticulous about how I glued the cover back on, and to keep it in a vice until the glue dried.
I don't see how you could have a hot-swappable battery without making the whole thing a lot more bulky. Personally I think this whole "make it repairable" movement is mostly missing the mark when it comes to modern phones.
Maybe Apple is different, but if you break something on a modern $300-500 Android phone such as the screen, motherboard, sub-board etc. you can easily order a replacement from China for $10-50.
You need to own a couple of things like a heat gun, and maybe a soldering iron, but you'd also need a torx screwdriver set etc. for a "repairable" phone. The cost difference isn't that great.
Phones are wildly more repairable than most other electronics you can buy nowadays or would have bought in the 70s-90s. I know if I e.g. break the USB C port on my phone I just need a new $5-10 sub-board. Compare that to breaking something essential on my washing machine, drier, TV etc., those things are typically easy to open, but a lot harder to actually repair in practice.
It's much easier to find the replacement part for the phone - as long as it's not more than maybe 5 years old - then it is to find the replacement part for the washing machine.
That's been my experience, anyway. Perhaps I'm just not aware of where to go for appliance parts.. but I don't have much problem finding anything else I ever want to buy on the internet.
Usually the manufacturer has them, though they may optimize for selling to service professionals, and these days there tend to be third-party sellers more focussed on consumers, as well (and you can often get parts on Amazon.)
IME, getting the right part number is often the hardest thing, though usually docs available from the manufacturer (even for units no longer sold) can be downloaded that provide this, and lots of time searching by description and appliance model can find the part, too.
My experience with this has been terrible for e.g. circular saws & power drills, to name one example.
I had a part I needed for a Makita circular saw & Black & decker power drill. In both cases buying every replacement part would easily cost 10-20x of the retail price of a new saw or power drill, compared to maybe 1.5-2x in the case of a modern phone. The aftermarket for OEM car parts is similarly brutal for most manufacturers, but for some happy reason phones are the exception.
Can I ask what phone(s) you are talking about? I replaced the battery of an iPhone 7 recently, and maybe it was just early in the evolution of these designs, but putting the screen back on with the sealant ring was the easiest part. Personally found it much harder to break the adhesive - definitely the longest step, but this was my first modern phone battery replacement.
Sure, that's possible, and I'll give you that if you're manually soldering something on a circuit board that'll be a breeze compared to the surgery of trying the same thing on a modern phone.
My point was that for the average consumer without deep electronics repair knowledge the situation has become much better. If your $500 TV broke you weren't going to find a $10 replacement for its main board that you could pop in with just the skill of operating a screwdriver. But with modern phones you can do that with just a heat gun, credit card and a screwdriver.
Thus I think even though e.g. replacing the internal memory or CPU on these devices has become practically impossible, they're a lot more repairable in practice than most other electronics, current or historical.
Meanwhile I've repaired my old washing machine quite easily.
Do you also think that Fairphone is “a lot more bulky” and “missing the mark”?
I think that Apple simply designs their devices with planned obsolescence for more profit.
My mother inherited my late-2014 iPhone 6. It still gets security updates, although it won't run the current iOS.
The battery started to swell, so she took it in for a new one. They replaced it with a refurb, since they aren't authorized to do replacements of swollen batteries on-site. It cost her as much as a replacement battery would. Presumably, the original has been refurbished and someone else is using it.
If Apple is planning for obsolescence, they're doing a poor job of it, compared to literally any other phone manufacturer in existence.
I don’t think that’s true at all. The Fairphone 2 came out the year after your mothers’s iPhone and got an OS update this year, and if she had it then she would be authorized and likely capable of replacing the battery herself.
Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size.
The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down.
Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum.
There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.
It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.
Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.
Or do you want to avoid a 4 year old Android phone because of performance?
With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case.
But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.
Before June 2007 every mobile phone had an easily replaceable battery, except some extremely niche “design phones” like the Nokia 7280 [1].
I'll gladly take the daily convenience of sturdier, more durable devices over the once-every-two-years convenience of a battery replacement with less labor. It's an excellent design trade off, IMHO.
Calling them non-replaceable makes people think these devices are far less repairable than they actually are. And with the prevalence of phone repair shops, we really need to stop calling them "non-replaceable."
Certainly they can't be swapped out on a daily basis. But that's a very very different use case.
On one of those drops, the tiny plastic hinge holding the door on broke, and that was the end of that flip phone. It wasn't a popular enough model that I could find a replacement door online.
Compactness is definitely a major tradeoff though.
By the very nature of the design constraint, a removable battery will take up more space inside a device than the same chemistry packaged without the protective case, springs to hold the contacts in place, and so on.
That means by eschewing it, you can take your pick among: a thinner phone, more components, or a larger battery. There's no way around this.
That's making a lot of unstated assumptions. To start with, that the battery needed to consume all available space. The width and length of the phone are determined by the size of the screen, and a certain minimum depth is required to prevent this:
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/5/24/17389220/a...
So then you have the dimensions of the phone already dictated by concerns other than the battery. At that point you could still use all of the available space for a battery, but if that's more battery capacity than you actually need, it makes the phone heavier. So you could very well already have some unused space inside the phone and not have any trade off with thickness at all, and in practice this is true for several phones that nonetheless have epoxied batteries.
Moreover, even if the trade off you're describing exists for a given phone, that doesn't prove it's significant. Do we have to destroy the environment over a fraction of a millimeter?
You know what carries less risk of fire than quick charging? Swapping a battery.
This doesn't prevent battery recycling, but it does junk the entire phone, which as you saynis harder to recycle.
Mandate standardized batteries. (Perhaps antitrusting battery manufacture would achieve this automatically, since they'd make more money.) California has led this kind of change before, with citizen bills. C'mon California!
If it isn't profitable to recycle, you can make it profitable by making the fee reclaimable when it's recycled.
It's quite possible that throwing all the used batteries in a dump now then digging them back out in the future once recycling tech has improved and raw resources become more scarce might be the best way to go. This cycle has already occurred with old electronics (companies are successfully mining garbage dumps for the gold connectors and traces).
The fact that there have been instances where this has occurred doesn't mean its a good plan. I agree that not all plans work out in retrospect, but neither does doing nothing. If we look at the balance of cases, we have done a lot more harm with a lack of environmental policies than we have with poor policies.
Overall the mechanism is solid enough. If a product has EOL issues, a recycling deposit builds the solution into the initial price. It doesn't even need to be recycling. Could be safe disposal.
A perfect example is ethanol. It's pretty clear especially by now that we would be better off investing in solar/wind and electric cars, but good luck getting rid of those ethanol subsidies and related legislation.
The recycling industry itself is another example. Now that China is no longer buying our recycling (due to the extreme air pollution generated when processing it), waste management companies don't know what to do with it and most are just dumping it in landfills. Of course we're still paying them to collect it and requiring everyone to continue sorting.
My Samsung Galaxy S6 has a thickness of 6.8mm and a 2550mAh battery that requires unglueing to replace [1].
I'd much rather carry around the extra 1.8mm for the extra repairability.
[0] https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php
> You sit back and let the market sort out the details.
You say this but you are suggesting the imposition of a very substantial regulation.
That has definitely cut down on a lot of waste.
1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery
How do you propose to mandate this?
That would shift the market pretty quickly towards user replaceable batteries.
They are fewer these days, but they still exist:
Better recycling may not be equal to ease of replacement.
Not if you choose a company that cares about the environment: https://fairphone.com
We do this with the likes of glass bottles and beverage cans and lot of them just end up in the trash. It only makes sense economically because consumers can bring them back in large batches, but even then the money you get back often doesn't justify the extra hassle economically.
If you're going to raise the price until it does you've just recreated the cobra effect[1].
Indeed, the comparison with bottle deposit programmes is apt— there are people in my city who rifle through blueboxes on the curb pulling out refundable items. Maybe this bothers some people, but it seems like a reasonable thing; you couldn't directly pay someone to do that work, but you can incentivize it to happen anyway, same as shopping carts get gathered up and returned by homeless people for a dollar a pop. If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return, that would be terrific!
Yes they are. You can buy Li-ion batteries of the mAh size commonly used in phones for $1-2 in bulk on AliExpress. Any price incentive to return them is going to either be too low for most people to bother, or so high that you'd have an incentive to produce batteries just to throw them away.
> If a token reward motivated people to scrounge disposed-of electronics pulling out lithium-ion batteries for return [..., it works for bottle deposit programmes!]
This works for bottles because e.g. on a Friday night in a major city trashcans downtown are going to be full of drink bottles. This works because there's a lot of them, they're big and obvious, and people consume them in large quantities.
A battery in a phone that you keep for months or years isn't worth digging through general trash for.
I recycle my own batteries because it's easy to do while I'm at it for some feel-good about reducing pollution. I'm not against recycling. I'm just saying that I don't see how a price incentive for this makes sense.
the point of a deposit is that it's charged on the production, and only refunded on the return. you're not just paying people to return batteries. If there was a $5 deposit on a phone-sized lithium-ion battery, it would no longer be possible to buy those batteries for $1-2 because the deposit would have to be charged on import.
This sort of deposit scheme makes sense and works for e.g. glass beer bottles because in practice they're high-volume items (a consumer might return a 24 bottle crate/week), and the bottles/crates are actually still useful items in themselves and can be immediately returned to consumer circulation after some washing and gluing a new label on them.
The price/volume/weight of glass bottles & beer crates also makes any sort of return fraud impractical.
As opposed to Li-ion batteries which are going to be broken when they're returned. How is a vending machine that gives me money for a deposited phone battery going to know the difference between a battery and a piece of wood I covered in some duct-tape and wires?
And all for what? Reducing Li-ion pollution? It isn't some massive problem in developed countries, and people mostly do sort their batteries in recycling if given the chance.
So again, I'm not arguing that the recycling is a bad idea, but that this idea of giving it a price incentive in this case is a terrible idea.
Whereas the suggestions in this thread that I've been replying to are going to involve some combination of a massive ramp-up in customs inspections, as well as local recycling facilities where returned Li-ion batteries would need to be manually inspected. It just doesn't seem worth it.
I worked briefly at the Molson plant in Etobicoke and they literally have machines which cut apart skids of 12-pack boxes, wash off the old labels, all of it.
I ask because with the current system those individuals have basically zero protections -- they aren't guaranteed at least minimum wage, they have no compensation if they aren't working (e.g. if they were stabbed by something in the blue bin), they generally have no other benefits (more of an issue in the US with healthcare, but this isn't a peachy situation elsewhere either), and so on.
The fact that the current incentive structure makes rifling through refuse attractive points to some sort of deeper issue. While I'm spitballing a bit with ideas, do you agree that something seems off with the status quo?
Depending on how implemented, you can combat this. In CA, it's a deposit you pay on purchase. You get that deposit back on turning in the recyclable item. There are problems (it's illegal to bring items in from out of state for obvious reasons, and the bulk rate paid to the collection centers for the material needs to be closely kept track of (or just let them deal with it and require they accept all items in the program to be official, I dunno).
A Federal law would be easier, as then you wouldn't have to worry about transfer between states, and we already track goods at the border with customs. Better ability to control fraud would allow higher deposit rates, and I imagine you could charge based on mAh or something (maybe with a logarithmic scale so car batteries are enormously expensive, but still something you have to pay for and want to recycle). If every phone had a $10-$15 deposit for the battery, I think that's enough that people would definitely recycle, or other people would do it for them.
There's info on how well the program is working here.[1]
1: http://www.bottlebill.org/index.php/current-and-proposed-law...
I'm sure the rates would be a bit lower if poverty was eliminated. Plenty of people collection bottles from trash cans and parks. The high rates imply that most people recycle bottles consumed in their own house though.
There's a straightforward solution to this and the recycling problem:
1. Mandate that every mass produced device with a li-ion battery have a simple mechanism to remove the battery
2. Add a very small tax to each device with such battery (in the order of cents)
3. Pay the same amount back to whoever brings the battery to a recycling plant
There you go. This system has only one knob (the amount paid per battery) and by tweaking it you can adjust the incentive to recycle. You sit back and let the market sort out the details.
Not to mention that this would extend the lifetime of phones by making it easy to replace the battery.