Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods

Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by dvfjsdhgfv on Thursday March 04, 2021 @04:19AM (#26340337)

It will be very difficult to unwind. Years ago it was natural for electronic devices such as mobile phones to have a replaceable battery. Then a popular brand decided to make the battery irreplaceable by the consumer and the rest followed. The justification was the need to make thinner devices is far more important. Now user replaceable batteries are a rare thing in last generation devices, even in laptops! So call me skeptical if after a decade or so they will all go back to what we had before, when one could upgrade a HDD or memory in a typical laptop in a couple of minutes, and business models were even more easy to service.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by anon98356 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:31AM (#26340795)

> So call me skeptical if after a decade or so they will all go back to what we had before.

The implicication of the article is that they won't have a choice. If your product doesn't meet the repairability standards then you won't be able to sell in the EU.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by aequitas on Thursday March 04, 2021 @04:57AM (#26340579)

But technology still advances, so in the future Apple will present their thin and battery replaceable revolutionary new iPhone.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by HPsquared on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:00AM (#26340609)

I prefer ~~products~~ PHONES where everything is glued together, it makes for a much stronger structure. Old phones which were screwed/clipped together were thick, bendy and creaky. Closed structures (think of an egg shell) are more structurally efficient.

The price to pay is it's harder to open when you need to repair it, but that's a sometime-maybe-never activity, vs. using/holding it which is hours per day.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by blub on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:03AM (#26340630)

Not true at all. High end Symbian phones were rock solid. One just has to use quality materials.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by HorkHunter on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:14AM (#26340692)

the only phone people swear -or meme- by how strong and sturdy it is had a replaceable battery!

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by HPsquared on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:28AM (#26340778)

Strong yes but it's also thick and plasticky with wide borders around the (2-inch) screen. The battery is tiny.

In other words: because of the construction method, lots of space is needed for structural elements.

Large glass screens require a rigid structure (or a border of some kind).

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by diggernet on Thursday March 04, 2021 @01:12PM (#26345924)

Just checked my Nokia collection... N800, E90, N8, N97, N900, N950, N9, E7, 920, 1020... Big screens, rock solid. Thicker than an iPhone? Sure. But most are thinner than the protective cases most folks I know put their iPhones in.

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Re:Europeans get ‘right to repair’ for some electrical goods by southerntofu on Thursday March 04, 2021 @12:43PM (#26345443)

> Strong yes but it's also thick and plasticky with wide borders

A lot of people are pretty happy with that. For those that aren't, there's been a lot of progress in engineering in the past two decades since the 3310 came out.

It's not impossible to make something strong, while enjoying newer features. If we had a conscious choice in the shop between a slimmer phone that'll break apart in 6 months, and a thicker phone we could keep for 10 years, most people i know would choose the latter. There's just no such information for customers.

> The battery is tiny.

That was a technical limitation of the time and does not apply to today's batteries.

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