TL;DR
- The European Council has ended its adoption procedure for rules related to phones with replaceable batteries.
- By 2027, all phones released in the EU must have a battery the user can easily replace with no tools or expertise.
- The regulation intends to introduce a circular economy for batteries.
Hopefully this doesn’t go the way of charging cables and we have a different battery shape for every phone… Otherwise a 2040 regulation will be to standardize battery shape(s)
Battery shape (and connector) will sadly still be a thing for a long time, and usually it’s for engineering reasons, so I don’t really think it will be possible to standardize it
We really should just adopt the “best one” that becomes the standard. Only change it with significant advancement
It depends on the layout of the phone though. Size of camera module, placement of fingerprint sensors, other sensors/modules, heat sinks. You name it, really.
As such the batteries tend to be oddly shaped, and even spread out in different places to get as much battery in as possible.
The “best one” differs from phone to phone.
I‘ve had a couple dozen different phone batteries in my hand. It’s really not that complicated if you have to make it work. Sure, manufacturers will yell that they couldn’t make their 27 lenses at the edge of the case work. I say make them 16:9 in 5 different sizes and manufacturers can work around that, end of story. New sizes can be adopted if the benefit for everyone outweighs the cost.
I’d really like to see it but I don’t think we will see it unless legislation forces it.
I’d like to see it in more than just phones. Standardise battery sizes for cars and other vehicles as well, and make it possible to replace them manually. If there were automated battery charging stations I might even be convinced that electric cars will work for more than just city travel.
I agree again. EVs do work imo but proprietary stuff always gets in the way. It’s actually time to reform the way intellectual property works and is enforced. It’s a way to leech out millions of dollars for insanely old or convoluted content which is not how our world functions anymore. There should be a limit on how big of an idea can be patented as well. Just think about tissues in boxes. If that got patented, they would be insanely expensive. That’s why I think things that are insanely common (medical formulas) should have very short patent spans. We need to take power away from megacorps (which is a can of worms in itself). Same goes for ev batteries, vaccines, etc.
There isn’t one “best one”. Always depends on requirements, which vary by device, underlying technology and use case.