That's a false dichotomy. User replaceable batteries don't come at the cost of thin and sturdy phones.

Laptop manufacturers have been saying that for years, and look at the Framework.

As someone who bought a Framework to try to support a better model, my #1 complaint about it by far is that the battery is essentially worthless. It maybe gets 3 hours of use on a full charge, and 9 hours while closed and hibernated.

I returned a M1 Macbook Air to get the Framework instead, so essentially, I've now paid 50% more to get a laptop with almost infinitely worse battery life when idle and 3-4x worse battery life in use. It's also slower, heavier, thicker, and has a screen resolution that a lot of apps don't know how to use well.

At this rate, I better be able to replace the battery because I'm having to do a full charge/discharge cycle multiple times a day if I'm not just constantly leaving it plugged in.

I love the idea of it in theory, but it's essentially a worse laptop than even the decade-old Apple laptops that did have replaceable batteries.

You seem to think that Framework can fix their battery by gluing it in and welding the case shut?

I don't know, but whatever they did has made for a decidedly worse laptop, and I assume they didn't set out to make a laptop that had an essentially unusable battery. I'm assuming good intent on their part that this is the best laptop they could make with the parts/design constraints. I'll be happy if the v2 of it is better though.

Is it the battery, or the power usage of the laptop? The battery is a pretty physical thing, storing that many Watt-hours. If you have a 100 Wh battery, Apple uses 10 W and Framework 50 W, then you’ll get a 5x difference on the same battery.

Does it matter? It's not as if I designed this laptop myself. I had 2 options. If you can only put a battery in your laptop that holds X W/hrs of power and you sell it with a CPU and other components that demand enough power to drain it in 3 hours, then that's a design flaw.

At least unless you put a big glaring "This laptop has 3 hours battery life" on the purchase page. Instead, they just repeatedly say how many Watts the battery holds and leaves you to assume that it's such a big number that it'll have great battery life.

> It's also slower, heavier, thicker,

The Framework and M1 Macbook Air weight the same at 1.3 kg, and are both 16 mm thick, according to the specs that I can find. Did it really _seem_ thicker and heavier to you?

I'm a little surprised, but the weight being roughly the same makes sense. The thickness is a little deceptive. I think they're both measured from their thickest point, but the Framework is essentially a solid brick with only a slight taper on the front and back edge, while the Air tapers to nearly a point on a number of sides. For reference, Apple lists the Air at:

Height: 0.16–0.63 inch (0.41–1.61 cm)

So they're the same thickness at their thickest point, but I'd guess that the Air has much less of the laptop at that thickness. I'd be curious about a volumetric comparison.

It's not the battery size which is the issue here, but how much power the hardware uses. The capacity of the battery of the Framework is 55W, while the capacity of the battery of the M1 MacBook Air is 49,9Wh. So apparently Framework managed to fit a larger battery in a equally large case, without the need to glue it in.

To my point above, I'm pretty sure the Framework case is quite a bit larger in volume than the MBA case, so it's not really apples to apples there. Perhaps it's just that the Intel processor in the Framework is a massive energy hog (likely), but even my old Intel Macbook had easily 2x the battery life.

In the end, I wasn't even trying to say that the battery size mattered. If anything, the fact that it's a bigger battery almost makes it worse. They crammed more battery in and it's still a drastically worse user experience when it comes to everything about the battery.

Some of this is definitely because they're having to buy worse parts to try to make sure they're replaceable, and maybe that would improve if more places made parts for it. Maybe I could upgrade to a more efficient CPU/Mobo in the future, or a better battery, but then what do I do with the old one? I'm still contributing to e-waste.

Well, you'd have almost twice the battery-life, if you used Windows.

And you can get comparable results in Linux, but you need to tweak it yourself at the moment.

I'm using Linux and Windows. I regret to inform you that neither helps all that much. I've even spent a decent amount of time shoving values into config files to try to improve things on Linux.

The comparison begins and ends with M1 vs Intel chip. Linux is the second factor unfortunately.

I like that everyone just assumes I'm using Linux. But even my 2017 Macbook on Intel was doing better than this, and the issues I'm seeing with Framework occur on Fedora and Windows essentially equally.

The 2017 MacBook MacBook with just 1 port and a battery 8/10ths the size of Framework but with a CPU that is under a quarter the wattage in TDP? (7 vs. 28W?). And has a lower screen resolution (yes it matters) and has a manufacturer custom tweaked OS?

Correct? And yet, with all of that, that old Macbook was a more capable laptop in almost every way than the Framework I have now. It doesn't matter that the Framework has a better CPU or monitor if it dies halfway through even a short flight. And all the extra resolution only helps so much if both Linux and Windows barely handle the resolution/aspect ratio well.

The ports are great - I love that about the Framework, but having an HDMI port only matters so much if the battery is so bad you can't even show a fully movie on a TV with it not plugged in to power (and with a fairly beefy power transformer at that.)

I'm not arguing the Framework isn't more powerful on paper, but functionally, I just can barely use it. I was on a trip the other month and walked to a coffee shop in the morning to do some work and lost 20% of my battery charge on the way to the shop with it just in my backpack. Every minute using it I'm aware of how fast it's discharging in a way that literally no other electronic device I've owned in a decade has made me think about it.

I've heard the HDMI expansion in the framework can draw 1W doing nothing. Heard similar things about other framework expansions.

Just ask for someone else to replace your battery, these laws wouldn’t prevent that.

Making better designs to allow for easier to replace batteries isn’t crazy hard either, current designs already tend toward that. This proposal seem to only mandate that “users should be able to exchange them with commercially available tools.” so it leaves a pretty wide array of options for the manufacturers. They could probably even make their own custom tools available if this is what it takes yo keep phones thin and sturdy as you want them.

My Note 3 with replaceable battery was 8.3 mm thick. How thin is your non-battery replaceable phone?

7.4 mm. (iphone 12)

Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?

It's important to remind ourselves that the metals in these phones are mined in part by people with very difficult life conditions, often so bad that they die on the job. We ought to be able to repair what they contributed to build instead of asking them to mine yet another pound of metal just so we can save 0.9mm. This will also reduce need for mining, which creates all sorts of pollution.

> Is 0.9mm really worth throwing away so many phones?

Quite the opposite. I want larger/heavier devices. Make my phone a bit thicker and heavier and sturdier, please. I feel the same about a laptop. I recently got a new laptop, and the flimsiness of high-end machines was a turnoff. The salesman kept saying "but it's only X lbs, so much lighter" as though that was a selling point. But I want strong hinges, large replaceable batteries, etc. I could care less about 3 vs 7 lbs.

I don't understand this fetish with thin phones and laptops.

You don't have to throw those phones away right now. Apple can easily replace batteries for you. The consumer doesn't need to be able to do this with a bigass Philips-head screwdriver in order to accomplish this goal.

If any third party repair shop can replace it, that'd already quite good. But manufacturers have been known to make it impossible even for 3rd party repair shops to do anything, or at least to make their lifes as hard as possible. That's a no-no.

Define "but ass Philips head screwdriver".

You could do this #2 screws which are tiny, use 3-6 of them around the edge. Add a rubber gasket. And you have a water proof battery that is replaceable in under 5 minutes with a precision Philips head (aka those little screwdriver heads you get with the multi-head screwdriver kits)

I am going to give you a candid answer: I don't give a shit.

That answer is going to sound unpopular here, but deep down is how most people feel.

This is one of the central supporting arguments for government regulation: customers won't pick what's better for society, but rather according to their own short-term needs. Since customers don't care, companies don't either (save those that use their environmental concern as part of their marketing...I suspect most of those measures don't really move the needle, though). That leaves only government. I wish it weren't this way, but I can't argue with the evidence.

I guess cars would be slightly lighter and faster without seatbelts or airbags.

Or planes would cost slightly less to fly if they were not required to carry safety equipment.

That’s exactly because people like you don’t give a shit and corporations will do anything to save/make a buck that laws and regulations like this have to be made and enforced.

> people like you don’t give a shit

Let’s be honest here: This is all of us to some degree. OP is just one of the few that admits it.

Is this all of us to some degree? Or is this you and OP and you tell yourselves it's everyone to make yourself feel better?

Or is your "to some degree" take into accounts degrees so small as to be meaningless?

I interpreted OPs sentiment to be an example of consumerism. Individually, sure, “some degree” could be considered meaningless, but collectively, the sentiment drives supply and production decisions, so no, I don’t think it’s a spurious or meaningless assertion to make.

His point was very clearly about each individual and not cooperative behavior. And I deny that "each individual" doesn't care unless "to some degree" is used to support degrees so small they are approximately nonexistant

I have never seen appealing to personal responsibility drive change at a large scale. Like all creatures, humans are driven by a balance of incentives and disincentives. If you want to drive change, systemically alter the balance. I think the approach of the policy discussed in TFA is aligned with this view.

I’m not sure exactly where we our disagreement lies, but I think it’s a mistake to dismiss small degrees of sentiment as those small degrees manifest as purchase decisions, which collectively manifest as multimillion dollar industries that are supported by those individual actions. Additionally, asserting that someone either cares or doesn’t care and that there’s not some continuum is a false dichotomy.

I agree that systemic changes are important. However, I disagree that personal responsibility cannot drive sufficient behavior. Look at individuals recycling.

But we're talking about this line of discussion. Which was sparked by someday saying they didn't care and no one did. I objected to the latter part of that. It's bullshit that no one cares. There are ethical vegans and people who do all kinds of things because of personal responsibility.

That makes no sense because people won't buy cars without seatbelts or airbags - and if they do, it's them dying, which they should have the freedom to do.

It’s not only the owner of the car dying. It’s also the passengers who may or may not have had a say in the decision. Never mind the cost to society as a whole from medical bills resulting in these preventable injuries, the psychological trauma for survivors/witnesses, or the effect of orphaned children growing up without parents.

I'd say you're dead wrong here - just look at the pushback against seatbelts when the laws were introduced. Look at the devices on sale, today, to defeat seat belt alarms.

Regarding your second point, that's also objectively incorrect. When accidents happen, passengers, especially backseat passengers, become projectiles that cause additional injuries or excess deaths for other occupants. It's not just the dude not wearing a seatbelt dying, it's also the people around them.

Don't you worry, if we keep using the planet like we currently do, and like you do by saying you don't give a shit, then we'll all die soon enough because of our lack of respect for our environment — lack of access to clean water will hit loads of people in the coming decades.

Either that or we come up with laws that keep us competitive without destroying everything around us. I hope that's what Europe will do and I will support regulation that takes a tiny bit of comfort away if it makes us more resilient in the face of climate change and geopolitical difficulties.

Whether you give a shit or not isn't important. Regardless what you personally think, a law is accepted if it's acceptable. And most people will think "OK, I get that we can't continue to throw away phones and keep using some countries as slaves just because we want the latest iPhone now". Just like people in Europe accept to pay more taxes than in other places of the world because we get that solidarity is important.

It's unpopular because it makes you a selfish cunt.

And yes, many, if not most people are selfish cunts in many ways. Myself included.

But that does not make it good. It is something that you, I, and everyone else should be deeply ashamed of.

When did how most people “feel deep down” become a sound policy making strategy?

To be candid: in some matters, the regulators should not give a shit about how you want your phone.

Good for EU and their mandates.

I don't understand. Are you saying that the government should do whatever they want even if it goes against what the majority of the population wants? That is everything but democratic.

Democracy isn't and shouldn't be absolute.

And you do realise that no countries have complete democracy? Even Switzerland with their many referendums doesn't put every decision to a democratic vote. Partly for practical and pragmatic reasons, but also because some things are best not decided by the masses.

The government frequently makes everyone do things they would rather not do because the aggregate result is good. And the results of the collective action make everyone happy to the point that the law is supported. That's the basis of all tragedy of the commons based laws.

The clear point is people that don't "give a shit" about the environment or their fellow people are not the majority and so the government should continue to make environmentally lead decisions regardless of the existence of sociopaths.

Democracy has many flaws, you just identified one of them.

> I don't give a shit

Applying the golden rule, so why should anyone give a shit about what you think?

There's some pretty smart people in the field, don't you think if they are forced to come up with a solution that they will?

You can have both thin, sturdy, and replaceable batteries.

It really isn't that hard. Maybe a few extra days of design and development by a team of engineers. If that... Once you come up with your preferred design, it more or less can be replicated to every other similar device.

I agree with your sentiment overall, but “a few extra days” is pretty unrealistic. Probably a few extra weeks at best.

> I agree with your sentiment overall, but “a few extra days” is pretty unrealistic. Probably a few extra weeks at best.

Still not a problem: The examples upthread of phones from many different manufacturers that had replaceable batteries, headphone jacks, and card readers and were watertight a decade or more ago show that those weeks have already been invested and paid for.