It’s been long enough that people of forgotten what’s it’s like. Cameras still have replaceable batteries, there are several benefits:
I can have two (or more) batteries, if it runs out I just change it. I don’t need walk around with a USB battery pack and cable hanging off the device preventing me from using it properly.
I can put the battery on charge somewhere and leave it, even if not completely secure, because just the battery not the device. This way my expensive device and my data is not at risk.
I can use 40+ year old cameras, because I can just put a new battery in. This is not something you can do with newer device, e.g. and iPod and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
Battery tech moves on. There are now some batteries with charging ports on them. Other batteries offer more capacity than the original ones. Apple even did this once for me, when MacBook Air batteries were fairly easy to replace, I had mine replaced (it wore out) at the shop and they put a slightly bigger one in, which was the standard on the newer models.
The final law just makes replacing batteries more accessible (i.e. no glue or special screws), but it doesn't mandate battery packs. Also some devices like hearing aids are exempt.
I question whether battery packs would be a good thing to bring back now. USB power banks have 100% interchangeability among many device classes, which is something that not even dry cell batteries achieved. I can choose to leave the house with or without a power bank and just rent one in my city (YMMV). Modern charging wattages are high enough that I don't miss shutting down my Nexus, changing the pack, then rebooting.
It's tempting to say that this could be solved if battery sizes were standardized, but that would inevitably limit device dimensions. For example, I especially loathe how the 18650 has made almost all modern flashlights clunky. I would hate it if Apple pushes for a 4.5mm thick battery standard to kill all foldables because they don't want to enter the market and cannibalize their iPad demand.
Agree - I read this as it will be easy to replace the battery when it reaches its end of life and no longer can hold my charge. It will still take time to replace it, but that's okay since it'll only be done once every few years. It's not meant to re-introduce swappable battery packs, so you won't be able to carry spares on long trips etc.
You will when people sell mods for phones, such as a replacement back wth easy access.
Or when phone manufacturers realise they may as well do so, at least on some models, because why not. And yes, the battery compartment can be waterproof with a rubber seal... but even so? Many would prefer battery swap to full waterproof, if that was the cost.
The trade-off between having the field-swappability feature and going the lean way (it's not just cheaper, also smaller, lighter, less to go wrong) shifts though: when regulation forces companies to go 20% of the way towards field swappability, more will take the bet that there might be a niche worth serving at the 100% mark.
I still would not expect this to happen for mainstream phones, but other devices? There will more field swappability with the regulation that enforces layman replaceability then without.
Isn't Apple supposedly entering the market this year though? By the time any regulations has passed, they'd probably already be established. Though I agree I don't really see too much point in making batteries quick-swappable rather than just easily swappable as you say considering it's unlikely to be a true hot-swap without requiring a power cycle.
There are standardized sizes for cylindrical Li-ion cells, and that's often what's inside battery packs. The majority of current mirrorless cameras, for example use battery packs that have two 18500 cells inside, but no two brands have compatible batteries. There are only bad reasons for the lack of compatibility.
I'd be happy if everything sized for it took standardized cylindrical Li-ion cells with protection circuits stuck on the ends. That's common for flashlights and rare for everything else.
I don't think this is where peak battery tech ends up. At current capacities, batteries are becoming genuinely dangerous, and faster charging only amplifies the risk. Charging high-capacity cells outside a temperature-controlled charger is risky, and even reputable chargers shouldn't be left unattended — many workplaces ban it outright (it only takes one fire to make that policy).
Phone batteries are the worst of it: highest power density, fastest charging, odd geometry, and tight space constraints. Manufacturers shrink the phone by offloading temperature monitoring and heat dissipation onto the phone's own electronics and housing — so replaceable, externally rechargeable batteries are tricky to design.
IMO, swappable batteries were a feature because batteries used to suck. In less volume-constrained devices like cameras, swappable batteries still work — but you're trading single-charge runtime for that convenience.
This last point is actually a real killer, an easily swappable battery in a phone probably sacrifices >10% "maximum" capacity in lost space. e.g a phone with a glued battery can have 5000mAh but the same phone with a more durable battery connector can only be 4500mAh.
We COULD have an EV with a 200kWh battery that can go 1000km++ on a charge in -30C weather. But nobody really needs that beyond a few outliers.
What we NEED is ubiquitous and easy charging.
Going for a burger, it'll take 20 minutes for you to order, eat and walk out. On a 300kW charger in the parking lot you can in theory get up to 100kWh charged. Or less with a slower one. Even plugging in to a 50kW charger for 20 minutes is enough.
Same with shopping etc, giving "everyone" a 2kW charger in a parking lot is table stakes in 2026.
And with phones: just have the possilibity of charging everywhere. I have 13€ Ikea Qi2 ("Magsafe") compatible chargers[0] everywhere in the house. Anyone can just slap their phone on one and it'll charge a bit.
There's no reason why we can't have more of those in public - we did try when wireless charging first appeared, but it was a whole chicken and egg thing. Nobody had phones that supported it and finding the exact 1x1cm spot where the phone charges was a pain. Qi2 with the alignment magnets takes that problem away completely.
Yeah, ubiquitous slow charging stations more than anything else is really what's needed to make EVs practical for everyone.
They can be ubiquitous for anyone that owns a home which takes a large load off the need for public infrastructure. Adding more L2 chargers and even L1 chargers could easily cover anyone in apartments. And even if there's not quite enough, L3 chargers can quickly cover any gaps if you start running low and couldn't get a spot with a charger.
I think there is a too much focus on L3 chargers in general. For the cost of a single L3 charging station you can put in multiples of L1 and L2 chargers.
But why put charges at burger shacks? For most people most of the time charge while you sleep. On trips charge along the highway. Every single store doesn’t need chargers, it’s a waste.
Apartments are rather ideal for charging, if the infrastructure could be planned for. Parking spaces with restricted access... basically ideal for having every space with a charger.
That basically leaves street parking as the last problem child, and that could be solved with lamp chargers like they do in the UK. It's all possible, it's just a matter of will in my view.
Load shedding and load management are 100% solved problems. You can even do it with pretty much purely electromechanical components with zero AI, Cloud, NFTs or blockchains =)
It can be a bit better if each charger can, for example, be adjusted independently based on their total load. Even better if the cars can report their charge level to the system, it can optimise by giving more charge to the ones with the emptiest batteries first.
> Assuming that the landlord (or condo corp/HOA) is willing to pay for the infrastructure upgrades. Also assuming there is electrical capacity.
Like I said, these are problems of will, not real problems. If you mandated that all newly built apartments have a L2 charger in every parking spot, it could be done. Retrofitting is much more expensive, but even that is not insurmountable.
There are reasons for burger shacks to NOT have chargers, for EVs and phones alike: restaurants make money by maximizing customer throughput. Excuses for customers to extend stays is damaging to them.
There are other types of businesses, such as high end restaurants and furniture stores, that benefit from customers extending times in the store. Burger shops aren't one of those.
I've literally driven past restaurants on road trips because there was nowhere to charge close by.
It's not whether I stay for a long time or not, it's whether I come in AT ALL. The map on my car shows be both restaurants and chargers, as do many EV-specific charging map apps. I just filter by "food+charging" and the rest might as well not exist for me.
Similarly I have family and friends with serious food allergies: If the restaurant isn't disclosing allergens in their menu up front and says "ask the staff", we go somewhere else instead of playing 20 questions with the waiter after parking and getting seated - and then discovering they have no idea what "actually gluten free" means.
And you don't charge an EV to 100% every time you stop, it's basic chemistry and physics. The last 20% takes as long to charge as the first 80%. A 20 minute stop at a burger shack's 300kW charger will easily give a modern EV tens of percent of extra charge (100km+) while people eat.
"Most people" with EVs charge while they sleep, because right now it doesn't make as much sense to buy an EV if you're in the actual majority that does not have access to a garage you can install a charger in. That fact is one of the major things slowing EV adoption.
Those of us who live in apartments and charge our BEVs with public chargers also mostly charge while we sleep. If your battery is large enough for a week or two of normal use, leaving the car in a public AC charger overnight when you get down to 10% charge left is by far the easiest. And AC chargers are generally also cheaper than DC chargers.
I charge at the school across the street, it's a 3 minute walk from there to my house.
Granted, it's a tiny bit of a hassle compared to before when I had a charger at my parking spot - but not a massive issue. Mostly the problems come from people parking their ICE cars in front of the chargers because they're too lazy to find a parking spot.
That brings back memories! Yes, many devices before iPhone had normalized internal batteries indeed had aftermarket extended batteries. They would come with matching bulged back covers to fit the significantly oversized battery.
> Maybe Apple should use radioisotope batteries to never have to change them, ever. I jest.
They could make an RTG battery out of Promethium-147, a beta-emitter with half-life of 2.6 years and history of use in nuclear batteries, or Iron-55, an x-ray source with similar half-life. That would be perfect and totally on-brand for Apple, as the battery would naturally force the phone to be replaced in 3 years, and they'd have a solid safety/security justification for why any repair or replacement must be done in authorized Apple stores, by authorized personnel, with authorized parts and equipment. In a store where you could, oh so conveniently, just buy a new iPhone.
My early iPhones had external battery cases, which even when attached (when travelling a long distance) were smaller than modern iPhones in the important dimensions.
The main thing that makes all this hard to do is the form factor.
Give these phone batteries a standard geometry and interface and pretty much all these problems immediately go away. 3 prongs on the battery (ground, positive, data). A standard protocol so the battery can communicate things like SOC or acceptable charge rate with the charger. And viola, you are off to the races.
Yes, this will mean manufacturers will have a hard limit on how thin they can make their phones and a constraint on what designs they can employ.
Ultimately the main benefit obtained from not allowing battery replacement, is an increase in sales of newer models.
While your reasoning has _some_ merit, it reads as an apologia for the status quo .. rather than an example of why we should prevent easy battery replacement.
The danger of batteries doesn’t have much to do with their capacity. Many solid state batteries are far safer than liquid electrolyte ones, while also having higher energy density.
We don't need fast charging. Phones will be left on wireless charging surfaces, which will eventually be ubiquitous. Everyone hates usb-c plug in. Just leave it on a surface, pick it whenever you want.
We don't need to fast charge anything, phones or EVs. Slow charging preserves battery life and smart charging will charge whenever it is cheapest.
I hate USB-C. Hi. I do a lot of woodworking and the port easily clogs with sawdust and lint. It was very easy to clean it each day when I had a lightning connector, a common toothpick would suffice.
Now I have to purchase specialized non-marring micro tool scrapers to clean the port without damaging it. The scrapers break after a few cleanings, so this is an ongoing monthly recurring cost. Yeah I can charge wirelessly, but I still don’t want sawdust in my phone hole after a day of ripping wood.
Finally someone with an argument. I do hear why you dislike it, most people seems to do it without any reason... As it was said by someone else you might be able to cover it up somehow, either a rubber plug, or 3d print a small strip of plastic and put it in your case.
I do ranch work in a place with a lot of iron in the soil. I often have these sand sized grains of dirt in my port. But I had it in a lightning days as well. I just hate ports.
Before MagSafe, this used to kill phones. Now my son has a phone without a port, but it’s not dead.
Those ports are most of the time, at least in the android land IDK about iphone, on daughter boards and easy to replace. Even though in a perfect world this should not happen, still it is possible to do without too much of a hastle
Most of phone repair parts available to consumers are factory leaks. They are scraps and/or stolen stocks. They only exist because law enforcement in China is still, sort of strategically left, lacking. They are destined to go away as time goes by and/or parts are standardized and/or parts supply are legalized and/or mandated.
This seems like the ideal use case for those 'rugged' phone cases with flaps over the ports, no? Not ideal, but certainly a lot easier than having to clean gunk out of the port constantly.
Yep that is annoying. There are USB-C magnetic charge adapters. It will prevent shit from getting into the slot, and easy to charge magsafe style. And of course you can easily take it out temporarily to use a standard USBC charging cable.
Charging a 5Ah phone empty to full every day of the year adds up to all of about 7kWh. Nobody cares if you shave off a couple cents per year if the experience is worse.
Wireless charging, on the other hand generates heat, which is bad for the battery.
Slow, wired charging is the best combination for battery service life. A basic 5-10W power supply when the phone is going to be plugged in overnight is a universal method to achieve that; AccA on a rooted Android device with suitable hardware allows fine-grained control in software.
Even more important is to avoid charging the battery to full. The higher the voltage, the quicker it wears out.
The fact that pretty much no phones have a replaceable battery says something. And it doesn't mean that all manufacturers are somehow colluding with each. The market is very competitive and pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit. If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would. But everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it. And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because people will buy that phone and keep it much longer. When phones had replaceable batteries, they needed replaced after a couple of years because they were terrible. I'm now on a several year old pixel phone that I'm happy with, but eventually the battery will wear out and I'll have to replace it. Google likes it that way.
I think OP meant the phone was going to be replaced in three years tops, so no one cared much about battery longevity. Nowadays, the battery can be the constraint for practical phone life, since few consumers can replace one themselves and by the time they pay someone else to do it, may as well trade it in and let Verizon subsidize a new one.
Having an easily swappable battery returns some power to the user.
As an example of public policy it had significant impact on death, injury, medical costs, etc.
Road Traffic Accidents before and after Seatbelt Legislation-Study in a District General Hospital (1990)
Injuries among samples of car accident cases attending the Accident & Emergency (A & E) department of a District General Hospital (DGH) in the year before and after the introduction of seat belt legislation were classified applying the Abbreviated Injury Scale using information recorded in the patient case notes.
Those who died or did not attend an A & E department were not included in the sampling frame.
The number of those who escaped injury increased by 40% and those with mild and moderate injuries decreased by 35% after seatbelt legislation. There was a significant reduction in soft tissue injuries to the head. Only whiplash injuries to the neck showed a significant increase.
The downsides to have seat belts usage not mandatory outside of reducing deaths/injuries. A few that comes to mind:
1. Parents don't wear them -> kids don't wear them
2. Friends don't wear them -> peer pressure not to wear them
3. Accident happens -> body flies out the window (risk of hitting someone, makes a mess to clean up)
4. Accident happens, person survive but is injured and is now a cost to society
Upsides (I worked with someone who refused to wear it and told me something like that):
1. Anecdote about someone that was wearing one and got into an accident and the seat belt somehow prevented them to escape the burning car and they died
2. It's less comfortable
3. Makes me feel alive (freedom)
He would only falsely wearing it when there was suspected police presence.
4. Occasional anecdote about someone who knows someone who was in an accident while wearing seat belts, and the seat belts proceeded to slice their head off or cut the body in half or something else like that.
I assume an event like this happened more than zero times in the history of the world, but AFAIK it's too low-probability to worry about (with possible exception of kids under a certain age/height, that shouldn't be strapped in with regular belts in a standard adult configuration).
> 1. Parents don't wear them -> kids don't wear them 2. Friends don't wear them -> peer pressure not to wear them 3. Accident happens -> body flies out the window (risk of hitting someone, makes a mess to clean up) 4. Accident happens, person survive but is injured and is now a cost to society
If you are so concerned about this chain: price out the whole thing and add an appropriate tax.
Also their families (the kids normalise no seatbelts and spend their childhood with no seatbelts), also first responders (???!!!)
In reality, the worse an accident is (deaths, injuries) the longer and more difficult the clean up process is .. increasing the time that normal traffic flow is impacted and increasing the danger to all those attending who are exposed to potential (and common place) cascading disasters.
The deaths and injuries impact the local health response services - raising costs, demand for resources, and impacting triage decisions (fewer injured non seatbelt wearing idiots to look after, more free resources to devote to other patients).
Have you seen footage of how quickly an unbelted person moves around a car when it crashes? If there's someone in the passenger compartment without a seatbelt they can cause serious damage to everyone else - especially children.
I already said that I will wear a seatbelt whether any government forces me to or not. I just don't see the point in telling other people what's good for them.
Because the cost of taking care of a paraplegic who didn't want to wear a seatbelt falls on the insurance and healthcare systems, which are already over strained and horribly broken, and generally distribute their costs to the rest of us. forcing seatbelts is a good thing.
> If it's a considerate decision, I support people's right to ending their own life.
I support euthanasia after proper waiting period and psych evaluation.
But if I see someone trying to end their life on a street I'm trying to stop them. It's far more likely it's impulsive and not a rational, thought-out decision.
Same with not using seatbelts. There's basically zero reasons not to, so the probability of it being someone exercising their freedoms after a careful consideration is basically zero.
> So the seatbelt mandate should only apply when kids are in the car, or only to kids?
It should apply always, because the benefit is literally life and death, and the cost is basically nothing. Why complicate law, then?
In addition to all the sensible reasons others have pointed out, if you crash at a high enough speed without a seatbelt you become a projectile. If you are in the back seat when this happens, you are most certainly a danger to those in the front seats.
If the seatbelt saves your life from an accident in which you were at fault, it is easier to prosecute and extract compensation from the living than from the dead.
> In addition to all the sensible reasons others have pointed out, if you crash at a high enough speed without a seatbelt you become a projectile.
This pales in comparison to the projectile that your care already is.
In any case, just work out the expected level of danger, convert to monetary units, and tax people who don't wear seatbelts.
> If the seatbelt saves your life from an accident in which you were at fault, it is easier to prosecute and extract compensation from the living than from the dead.
Tax non-seatbelt-wearers ahead of time. Or make sure everyone has insurance, get the money from the insurance, and beancounters at the insurace will make sure premiums go up for non-seatbelt-wearers. (And use the full force of the law against people without insurance. Or have some clever mechanism design, like selling default insurance with petrol, but give people with proven insurance a discount on that, etc.)
> However people who don't want to wear seatbelts generally only endanger themselves.
If they sell the vehicle, the decision was already made for the new owner (nobody would buy separate aftermarket seatbelts for a used car). So no, they also endanger other people. Mandating them outright is the right decision.
> No one is forcing you to buy a specific used car.
In a hypothetical situation with no mandated seatbelts it could take decades for the market of new cars be close to 100% with seatbelts at best. And of course much longer for the used cars market. So yes, many buyers in the meantime would essentially be forced to buy such a car, simply because at their price point and locality there isn't one available with a seatbelt.
Their still go down after two-three years. Needing to charge twice a day is literal reason why I ever change the phone - otherwise I could use 10 years old one.
You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Very few people do that. I don't.
Because a) general software enshittification makes me need a more powerful decice anyway, and, more importantly, b) people are just happy to have an excuse to get the the new shiny.
Every time a small device like a cell phone or watch or camera or etc gets opened and worked on, they never come back the same. Waterproof seals get broken, parts get misaligned, heat doesn't sink properly, etc. You can extend the life of these devices with repairs sometimes, but they tend to limp along.
> You don't have to replace the phone. You can go to some repair shop and get the battery replaced. It will be several times cheaper than a new phone.
Still way more expensive than swapping a battery pack, and this mean leaving your phone to a stranger for a few hours or maybe a day if the shop is really busy.
Anything that add friction to changing battery will help sell new phone.
Nah, sorry, enshittification is not "just an excuse". My current 2020 phone(xperia 5-ii - I wanted that sd slot&jack) is noticeably slower than when I got it, even though the battery is holding up decently(it basically needs to last a day, and it usually does). Software shops seem to get focused on testing their stuff on "modern" devices. It looks like, once your device starts to slip out of that "testing pool", things get increasingly buggy until it eventually makes general use enough of a pain to require replacement.
I think last couple years' improvements to battery tech made software take over batteries as the bigger contributor to device obsolescence.
I have 4+ years old S22 Ultra and there is absolutely nothing slowed down. I didn't install any crap semi-random apps just for the lolz, its basically static set of features with maybe 2 new apps per year added as it keeps doing more and more like ebanking or work auth. It doesn't even have Snapdragon processor, just their own Exynos and its simply fine.
It keeps getting all updates and will keep for few more years.
Camera results massively improved cca 2 years ago with some update so that they are cca on same level as current ones. Plus I still has 10x physical zoom which trumps all current models, iphone pro max including since we still can't bypass physical limits of optics.
Really, 0 reasons to update and battery capacity is the only upcoming issue - still fine now but I feel the decrease a bit. If I could swap it easily myself without paying some phone shop to do it, that's a massive advantage.
There's flash degradation that's unfortunately a factor, too. If not for that and thermal problems (which I learned were common in this model), I'd probably be still using my S22.
(OTOH, I upgraded to a foldable, and don't want to ever use a regular candybar phone ever again.)
Fairphone exists. The batteries are easily replaceable, they have a video on their website. It's no thicker than many other phones, runs on non Google OS, maybe just check it out. I have one and am totally satisfied with it.
I support changeable batteries as a 'no duh' feature. But when I checked out Fairphone previously (several years ago when I was phone shopping) and personally found it as 'neat concept, but a shame it seems to have been born obsolete' and lacked some of the hardware features I was looking for.
I don't think the objective is to make it a "superior product" in the somewhat circular way you're defining it (i.e., the market equilibrium that we settled on). It's one of several measures to try to have people keep their phones for longer and cut e-waste.
I think it’s far more likely to introduce additional dead batteries into existing waste. Probably drop in an ocean given how much batteries are already dumped.
Do you think fuel efficiency or emission standards "slowed down innovation"? They brought a huge amount of innovation: lighter materials, better aerodynamics, higher compression ratios, direct injection, better mixture control, etc.
There will still be innovation; the solutions will just have satisfy the new parameters.
Yes, they definitely slowed down innovation and decreased consumer surplus compared to the counterfactual of just taxing the behaviour you don't like (like taxing fuel or emissions).
Sure, but they could have taxed it more and not have any official fuel efficiency standards.
(And compared to most of Europe or Singapore, US fuel is taxed very lightly, and their CAFE standards are especially stupid. Especially since their loopholes led to the replacement of practical station wagons with silly and dangerous SUVs. With a more car-agnostic fuel tax, this wouldn't have happened.)
You stumbled onto the pain point. The problem isn’t the intention but the execution. The EU historically has done a better job at nailing the execution of this type of regulation.
If it slows down innovation is debatable but even so there’s still a solid principle behind it, a small speed reduction can grant a huge efficiency gain. It’s usually a worthwhile compromise. You don’t run tour engine only in the red zone because that’s where it makes the most power.
In that same sentence I mentioned the slowing down of innovation, not cars.
The government gets to decide for the people because that’s what a democratic majority wants. If you don’t want it go full anarchist. Just don’t come crying to the government to protect you when you inevitably take it on the chin.
For example would you want laws that ban giving people the mother of all beatings in the street? Or just tax it really high? Someone might just have some money burning a hole in their pocket and an intense desire to teach a lesson in regulations. Everyone has some strong opinions about their own freedom until someone else’s freedom punches them in the teeth and then they’re little lambs lining up to ask for regulations.
> doesn't mean that your neighbours need to vote on what underwear you are wearing.
You’ll be happy to find out that they in fact don’t. They only vote for representatives which then decide on important topics especially if they have impact on the wider population. Enjoy your freedom to pick your underwear while respecting all the fuel and speed related regulations.
You can’t have infinitely improving standards for an infinite time, otherwise you end up with bullshit like Dieselgate, and ecotechnocrats forcing everyone to drive around in mobile inextinguishable incendiary devices.
I noticed this first hand: past year I was driving near home and a ICE car was burning in the shoulder of the road, with the firefighters working on it. It didn't reach even local news, in the following days I couldn't find anybody who have heard about it. A few months later an electric car catched fire around 100km away from my house, and the day after everyone was talking about it at workplace and how dangerous they are.
I don't know why it happens. Maybe a case of "if a dog bites a man, it's not important. If a man bites a dog, it gets newspaper cover". Maybe it is that an ICE car burning is extinguished in minutes, and then towed away, while an electric car burning is basically a two hours firework show.
All ICE cars, or only those as old as the BEV fleet?
At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
Well, kind of. You have some seconds to try to cut it short, after that they will burn to a crisp, exactly like an electric car. The difference is that a battery will burn until the end no matter what. OTOH, an ICE fire is potentially explosive.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
They can and they do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lu7tQ2-x61k or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKOQUE9U1Ek or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFvzTOZsnsg. That Youtube channel alone (Jersey Shore Fire Response) has more than a dozen ICE car fires, nobody comments nothing about ICE cars being dangerous, just "firefighters great job". ONE single case of electric trucks burning, and all comments are "lithium bad". ICE cars contain oil, gasoline, paper, rubber, plastics... They have some parts that get really hot on normal functioning, and any failure (e.g. an oil duct leaking, debris on the exhaust) could lead to a "spontaneous" fire. The difference is that a lithium battery can burn from a cold state without being our fault, while for an ICE car you can blame the driver for bad maintenance, parking over dry grass, reeving too much... we like to find causality, so we can convince ourself we can avoid that happening to us.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Any car can catch fire after any impact if the luck is bad. A gas or oil leakage can lead to a "spontaneous" fire very quickly. Any car can catch fire even without any impact, just driving around, as shown in the videos above. If your car catches fire, the fumes will be toxic, it doesn't matter if the toxicity comes from plastics, oil, rubber or lithium. Get far from the car quickly.
You are ignoring the fact that ICE cars are more prone to catch fire, proportionally. And the try to steer the debate to what is the cause of such fires, or if the ICE car can be extinguished with water. That would be a different debate.
> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.
That's not quite right. It's not like a non-special equipment like bucket of water or a garden hose (and I, for one, always travel with one of each!) work well for extinguishing any working car fire.
The remains of ICE car fires I've seen while out and about, while very few, are usually just hulks of vaguely car-shaped metal that have turned rusty from the heat by the time I come across them.
Car fires are never good. They're seldom easy to put out. EV fires can be worse in a lot of ways, but that doesn't make the other kinds of car fires saintly or anything.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
Nope. Except: One doesn't have to go very far on teh Interweb to find videos of car fires at gas stations, either.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact
Sometimes.
> and lock the occupants inside
Sometimes people can't get out.
> and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Nope.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Not usually.
People don't usually die from getting hit on the side of the road while pouring gas from a jerry can into their EV, either.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night
Not often, but sometimes.
> and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
I'm not answering that. I take too much pleasure in ignoring uselessly-specific addendums to questions like this. You'll have to forgive me.
> All ICE cars, or only those as old as the BEV fleet?
You tell us.
From the way you wrote this comment, you seem to have a pre-existing belief that ICE is safer despite the evidence to the contrary, it looks like this because you're asking questions that are nonsensically specific, to paraphrase "does a ICE car catch fire while charging?", given that depending solely on how you count the tiny little lead battery in an ICE they *either* don't charge at all but rather refuel *or* they continuously charge while running.
> At least ICE car fires can be extinguished, and without special equipment.
False.
There are many different classifications of fire, each with their own special equipment; liquid fuel is amongst them, just as electrical fires are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_extinguisher
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames while you’re sitting in it waiting for it charge?
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames after a relatively low speed impact and lock the occupants inside and immediately fill the cabin with fumes from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery?
Re "lock the occupants inside", that sounds like you're talking about Tesla's design flaws, which is a "Tesla" problem not a "battery" problem. Other EV companies aren't as dumb as Musk has been with Tesla over the last decade.
Also, firefighters have for my entire life carried tools specifically for breaking open vehicles that had been smashed in ways that stopped the doors working: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_rescue_tool
And window-breaker hammers have likewise been standard emergency kit for a long time, though I don't know when they started getting recommended for drivers themselves.
Re "from a rapidly degradging lithium ion battery", petrol and diesel fumes are also pretty nasty.
Irrelevant framing aside, post-crash fires are actually more common in ICE vehicles due to fuel system breaches.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames taking down whole RORO car transport vessels at sea?
Yes.
Stats I've found with a cursory glance say that there's more risk from the ship's own engine than all the vehicles, ICE and BEV combined, that it carries.
> Do ICE cars spontaneously erupt in flames in your garage at night and ignite your whole house, while you and your family are sleeping?
Yes. Here in Hamburg you have to pay some useless consultant to come to your house and check that there's no other way to decrease the temperature before you are allowed to install one.
You are also not allowed to but your bicycle in the garage.
> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.
There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
Short term thinking, if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape, it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.
> it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.
You know what, I'm absolutely fine with that.
I still remember when every single manufacturer had their own shitty 10-30 pin connector that effectively did the exact same thing: Transfer some current, analog audio, and some USB data. It was absolutely not worth the mutual incompatibility (you'd actually have to always carry your own charger and could not borrow one).
If some amazing new technology comes around that needs more than 240W charging or 80 Gbit/s data transfer to smartphones and can't be retrofitted into the USB-C form factor, let's take the time to change the law.
> if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape
You seem to be misremembering how it actually played out: We didn't end up with the EU stranded on some standard, quite the opposite: The EU effectively forced Apple (the last non-negligible non-USB-C holdout) to switch to USB-C globally.
(1) The EU fundamentally didn't care which standard so long as there was one; they only forced this because Apple dragged their feet with their own proprietary thing that wasn't a significant advantage. The other end of Apple's Lightning port being a USB port does not suggest it added anything except deliberate incompatibility.
(2) what would "significantly better" even look like? USB-C can do 120 watts, enough to fill a 20 Wh battery in 10 minutes, except the batteries themselves aren't ready to charge that fast.
(3) if someone somehow manages to make a significant advance, nothing prevents them from having two ports. Or indeed lobbying for a law change on the basis of a tangible thing they can demonstrate rather than a hypothetical that still hasn't happened in all the time since these discussions began.
(4) Or just as the law states, you can update the regulation accordingly. There are avenues of update just in the law. The connector should be just modern enough. At the same time I do believe thermodynamics itself will be the limit and 120 W is more than enough for any phone.
The same Europeans that were miles ahead with their GSM standard?
We can compare that to the US. Here, we stayed stuck with power-thirsty analog phones for many years before bouncing through a litany of mutually-incompatible digital non-standards...and finally landed on the ~same actual-standards that Europe adopted.
I think they'll be OK. (I think the rest of us will be OK, too.)
I assume OP thinks more like me: the EU will move to the next standard in a reasonable amount of time after it's available.
I'll be the first to complain if the new standard isn't adopted in due time, but as a strong example I'm still very content with how the GSM legislation standard has played out.
You miss my point. The ‘new standard’ will be settled on by various committees each composed of different people with different priorities including maintaining the status quo. It will take years to potentially decades to settle on any technologically superior alternatives.
Design by committee is how Europe works. It’s also a reason Europe moves slower and is less innovative than America.
Europe is not less innovative. Many advanced machinery that makes everything else originate and get perfected in Europe.
EU is way more efficient in making citizen-friendly laws too.
The USA just likes to splurge unnecessary amount of money and call that "innovation" where there isn't any. They can do that because they have lots of money and infinite debt limit due to US Dollar's special status. This also makes everything else expensive for other players in the world. Remove the special status and see how the worlds change.
You're aware the maker of the lightning connector helped produce the USB-C standard in the same year they created lightning?
> The design for the USB‑C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc., with the help of Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum.
USB-C is rated for 10,000 connections, while Lightning is rated for 40,000. Except if you disconnect and reconnect your phone 4 times a day every day of every year you own it, 10,000 is enough for just under 7 years. And Lighting was introduced in 2012, while USB-C was 2014. In those days, the average lifespan of a smartphone was 2.5 years. Even today, the software is only supported for 7 years at most. You don't need a connector that's going to last nearly 30 years.
And the additional durability of Lightning is itself not free. It's not cheaper than USB-C. Quite the opposite. That additional cost means that it either uses more resources to manufacture, or more resources to make the tools to manufacture. So, it's just wasteful. Lightning is "physically superior" but USB-C is better engineering.
Apple knows that. So Apple chose to go with Lightning because it was theirs, not because it was better. Because it's not really better. Not better for the customer. Or really better for business. Apple chose vendor lock-in.
Worse than that, Apple's connectors are higher durability, but their cabling itself is awful. I work at a K-12 and we were in an iPad and Chromebook pilot back in the mid 2010s that ran about 4-5 years. We had a fleet of 3500 of each. The iPads saw less than half the usage hours as the Chromebooks, but had something like triple the incidence of cable replacement. The cable insulation splits. The plasticizers degrade, the cables get really sticky or oily, and then they split and expose the braided grounding sheath. That braided cable will shock you. That was true for both student and staff devices. So they had these wonderful connectors, but the cables still failed at effectively five or six times the rate of the alternative. And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!
> And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!
Godswallop! Aftermarket Lightning cables were readily available shortly after Apple first use the the port.
Agreed though, their own Apple branded cables that came with the device are terrible, and I always just threw them straight in the bin.
And connection cycles is the wrong metric for USB-C vs Lightning. The correct metric is how many and how much side-force removals can the port withstand.
My experience shows that for USB-C the answer is wildly insufficient whereas for Lightning it’s sufficiently high enough that it won’t be a concern.
IMX, the third party cables are fine... If you're interested only ever doing slow charging with about half of them. They were real bad when we tried them.
This is fully on Apple themselves. USB consortium asked apple to use lightning for what became USB-C, but Apple didn't want to give up the ecosystem control.
What does any deity have to do with it? Btw, has anyone done a post mortem analysis of that mandate? I wonder if it delivered what it promised. I doubt it:
All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable.
The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet.
The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.
Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.
How much cool aid do you have to drink to genuinely believe the corporate argument that using proprietary connectors is "innovative"?
> Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.
Eh, no? USB-C was already pretty much the standard before, and you could plug in lightning cable with a cheap adapter cable.
Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.
And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
> Not even that.
>
> Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.
>
> And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.
OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
>
> Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.
And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.
Well good thing is that they didn't. The only thing you need is to provide a USB-C port for charging. Nothing stops a manufacturer adding additional ports for charging, data sharing etc.
So Apple could give people the ability to use their oh-so-superior Lightning cable while also being able to use USB-C for charging. If nothing else, it means that there are no longer any "does anyone have an iPhone charger" discussions at parties because people can just charge all their phones with USB-C.
> Well good thing is that they didn't. The only thing you need is to provide a USB-C port for charging. Nothing stops a manufacturer adding additional ports for charging, data sharing etc.
That's a bit silly. There's only so much space in eg a phone.
Companies often comply with upcoming/expected legislation ahead of time if its expected to be cheaper to do so rather than having to rush things afterwards.
On one hand: It does seem a bit late to regulate that.
On the other hand: I used to work with a briefcase full of different phone cables, when the people that paid me had the swell idea to offer the service of transferring phone books between dumb phones and nobody agreed on how the connectors should be shaped. I think the number of them was >40. Some of them even looked identical in shape, but were not identical in function. Some were USB. Some were serial, with different voltages. Some used two data wires for serial comms, some used only one.
I was very pleased when we stopped doing that and I got to get rid of that stuff.
I'm also pleased that someone is making assurances that we won't go back to that way of doing things.
It's OK to have a common standard, and to stick with it. (It's also OK to draft a new standard when the old one turns old-and-busted somehow.)
I don't understand your issue with USB C. Mini and micro USB connectors routinely got loose and fell out of multiple devices I owned, USB C is everywhere now and I have not encountered such issues.
The only issue I had with USB C has been lint collecting at the bottom of the port that would then prevent the cable from plugging in far enough for a good connection. Far easier to clean that than replacing the connector though.
I don't mind USB-C. Most of my devices have USB-C charging, and it works well.
I mind bureaucrats locking that in.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Haha, what? I like to complain about this piece of legislation, but it's not that important. And it's not like Russia has better policy. Oh, just the opposite. (Like waging wars they can't win, or running crazy high corruption.)
Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph.
I really appreciate it, keep up with the good work.
Bloody Clippers.
You always got to watch out for the Clippers, they’ll take whatever you say or write and clip it out of context and make it mean something completely different to what you really said.
The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
> Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph.
Eh, you know that people can just scroll up?
> The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
$10 says that by 2040 Europe will institute massive concessions to Russia for helping deal with the Islamic Caliphate in Europe.
Which wouldn’t have happened if Europe had been paying more attention to stuff that mattered, and less on which charge port people had on their phones.
At 1:1 I'm very willing to bet. We just need to nail down exactly what 'massive concessions to Russia for helping deal with the Islamic Caliphate in Europe' means in a way a neutral third party can adjudicate.
Because I don't have a few billion dollars in my back pocket and even if I did, planned obsolescence and dark patterns are infinitely more profitable thus regulation is needed to achieve consumer positive outcomes?
All it says is that thinner phones look better on advertisements. Let's not pretend that product decisions are the rational best result for the market even if they are industry-standard.
> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.
I do not think they are colluding, but they are definitely chasing the same trends and users preferences don't seem to play that much role, unless it is one of the few essentials things. Effectively, users do not have much choice except in few areas. All phones being the same is not just because "everyone likes their phones to be unpractically huge or slow" .
The trade-off is basically having a thicker phone. Nobody except apple thus all manufacturers 6 month later want paper-thin phones. Never the actual consumers.
1. It's easier to design and build Ingress Protection without user-accessible compartments.
2. There's a lot of tech on the back: NFC, wireless charging, structurally important [magnetic] attachment points. Ensuring electric contact and physical strength on a door is again hard and expensive or all that tech has to live on the battery.
3. Design. A glass-like openable door is going to be extremely failure prone.
4. Compatibility. You can't guarantee quality of 3rd party batteries, even more so if the tech is in the battery pack.
5. Planned obsolescence. Let's not kid ourselves, encouraging replacing the whole phone is good for business.
Does it really say something? If so what? I think the assumption that suppliers are always just catering to whatever the market demands is dubious at best. In uncompetitive markets with strong moats and price inelasticity, there's no need to cater the demands of market, the market must cater to the supplier's demands. And since markets tend to collapse into a few main stakeholders, markets eventually end up this way, rather than the assumed way.
Manufacturers are chasing tends. What is superior about the stupid notch at the top of the iPhone and some competitors -- and what is superior about getting phones thinner and wider? They're too big to put in a pocket, you're not even netting anything with all that extra space. etc. The point is that phones are not getting "better" in any material way except maybe for picture quality from the cameras.
>> pretty much every manufacturer decided the trade offs are not worth the benefit.
Isn't worth the benefit for who? the manufacturers? sure.
Let's say a single manufacturer decides to offer some phones with a changeable battery, invests in their marketing, and they start becoming very popular.
What happens next? Every manufacturer does the same, nobody earn a premium, total sales volume gets cut in half.
Yes for batteries, but I do think there are anticompetitive reasons for phones mostly not having headphone jacks anymore. It's not exactly collusion, it's more vertical integration.
> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
That wont solve the problem of carbon footprint this is trying to solve? There is still going to be iPhones and samsung phones of the world in EU. And people will buy it. Unless you want EU to go full autocratic and enforce people to use just 1 phone manufacturer!
Last 4 phones I had, 3 was replaced cos of old battery and 1 was due to broken display.
Imagine you not being able to replace the SMPS (Power) in your custom PC even though your ~$2000 worth of hardware which includes GPU, CPU and motherboard is working perfectly fine.
> If Samsung or Xiaomi or Google could sell you a better phone with a replaceable battery, they would.
It's an interesting theory. I'm going to call it capitalist-optimism. It's roughly oppositional to Doctorow's theory of enshittification.
> but everyone came to the conclusion that the trade off is just not worth it
The trade-off here being profit margin versus customer convenience. They've calculated that they'd make more cash with non-changeable batteries (e.g. by encouraging more buying of new devices rather than changing batteries) would make them more cash than selling a phone with a replaceable battery. And they might well be right, but that doesn't make it a good thing for civilisation.
> And now the EU, in its infinite wisdom has decided it knows whats best.
Before the EU mandated USB-c chargers pretty much every phone had their own charger. It was awful. You couldn't easily borrow a charger because everyone had a different configuration.
Now things are far better. It turned out that the EU did know best. It maybe wasn't best for phone manufacturers in the short term, but it was better for customers.
> why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Is this a serious question? In order to create a competitor to the major smartphone operators you'd need a huge amount of capital. I don't think I could convince a venture capitalist or bank to give me that kind of investment just to start a company selling a phone with a replaceable battery.
and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
I'm quite certain you can find many companies in the far East who will produce cells of exactly the size and shape you want, as long as you're willing to order a minimum quantity. There are also a few semi-standard sizes of prismatic cells available.
That said, having a few truly standard sizes like we had with 1.2/1.5V and 9V batteries would be a good idea. BL-5C and its variants were a de-facto standard for many years too, and apparently are still available new.
I tried to find a phone battery once and found very similar looking ones with prices ranging from expensive to terrifying with everything in between. I don't trust the ones that are to cheap as I don't know how they cut the corners. I don't trust the more expensive ones because they look the same. I cant see the profit margins. I was unable to pick one. I ask a guy with a repair store. He said he always buys from the same shop and the badges look different every time.
This is what happens when the market for phone batteries only exists for OEMs who buy millions at a time, custom.
It will stop only when there is a reason for consumer-detectable battery quality indicators — ie non-tech people have a reason to buy them. Which will now be the case with this law.
> This is what happens when the market for phone batteries only exists for OEMs who buy millions at a time, custom.
Even a few years ago when phones with replaceable batteries weren't that rare and I was in possession of one – by the time I started thinking about a battery replacement, offers of original OEM batteries usually seemed to have vanished into thin air and it was having to find out which aftermarket battery seemed reputable enough…
People do forget what it was like. Device battery life was way shorter and the manufacturer was incentivized to keep it that way because it sold more batteries.
Devices all had proprietary batteries. If I had 3 devices on me, I was carrying 3x extra batteries, one+ per device. My Nikon D1H required 5 huge proprietary batteries to cover a day of shooting sports. Plus a battery for my BlackBerry, plus batteries for my headlamp.
Devices were not waterproof except for a few expensive, complicated options. Upsell! My Canon waterproof camera came with a tube of silicon I had to dab on the battery compartment gasket every few times I charged it.
Today devices are lighter, more water resistant, and easier to charge in the field—just bring one power bank. And you often don’t have to power off or stop using the device while it’s charging.
This is not just a phone thing, even headlamps are moving toward a built-in battery for all the reasons above.
Or device battery life was shorter because we hadn't developed better battery technology or better power management
You talk about the misaligned incentives of replaceable batteries but fail to point out the incentive built-in batteries: need to replace a battery, buy a whole new device.
My points are about what it’s like current with removable batteries in cameras with current technology. Battery usage is dependant on usage to some extent. For casual use my cameras last weeks on a battery and even shooting all day e.g. in a studio, I would only get through one battery. Modern cameras also have usb-c charging and can be used whilst you do that, so that’s an option too, though less practical in my view. Yes, camera batteries are proprietary and it would be better if they weren’t, though they are generally the same across similar cameras from the manufacturer and the same in the successor cameras. Many mirrorless cameras are water resistant (with the right lenses) so the can be used in heavy rain, though not under water without a housing. Action cams like the GoPro 13 Black are waterproof with a removable battery.
My headlamp is waterproof and it has a replaceable 18650 battery without needing to dab silicon(e?) on it. It is also rechargeable over USB type-c so I have both the option to replace the physical battery or plug it in to charge that battery.
> My Canon waterproof camera came with a tube of silicon I had to dab on the battery compartment gasket
And those devices are MORE water resistant than most phones. The grease is to improve ingress protection beyond what's possible with double sided tapes used in "waterproof" phones. And the manuals for that gear should mention a retention period of x hours under y depth counting down from the moment the housing was closed.
Contrast to that, waterproof ratings for most glued-shut waterproof phones are invalid after purchase. Out of package, out of spec. Most manufacturers don't honor warranties for water damages for waterproof phone, and very few offer requisite gasket maintenance to retain waterproof ratings.
Apple doesn't have a recertification option even for battery replacement at Apple Store. Do ANY service and it's invalid. Not waterproof even in THEIR hands. Frankly their terms is one of the most egregious.
Headlamps for sensitive applications will ALWAYS involve a replaceable or external battery. Can't have your light going out when you are in a dangerous situation. When I used to rock climb, I always kept 3x AAA's taped to the strap in case the one I had in died. Never needed to use them, but made me much more confortable.
A lithium ion headlamp plus power bank does the same thing for the same weight and more flexibility. You can also charge phone, InReach, cameras. You can decide what is most important use of power. That’s the standard these days.
Another approach is to bring 2 charged headlamps. Again, same weight as an old headlamp + 3AAAs. But covers additional failures like breaking or dropping.
Separate battery modules can be subjected to obsolescence too, being hard pressed into finding a suitable replacement with similar specifications and which manufacturer that still makes them. I am on my 3rd Zenfone2 battery and it is definitely no longer in production..
Having a battery pack has its uses though. As crazy as USBC is, you can now get a relatively large amount of power from a battery pack.
There’s a bunch of things that don’t need their own battery if they just drew enough power off USBC. I have an office coffee setup. My grinder and espresso maker have their own batteries. But there’s no reason I couldn’t have a single battery pack and just plug both into USBC saving me a ton of weight. (In fact the Lagom Mini 2 grinder is powered straight off USBC with no internal power.)
For phones and cameras, that need their own power source, a replaceable battery is mostly just an end of life thing for me. Because I’d still have to carry a cable or spare battery around.
These things aren't mutually exclusive. Once upon a time, batteries were generic and fit some standard form-factor. You could swap batteries between devices and often did! You could even connect your device to a pack of batteries, and swap out the batteries within the pack.
240W max is very little when it comes to hearing up water, and most powerbanks don't even do more than 100W output. That's more in the range of those swappable tool batteries.
Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.
As to why we want to make phones as thin as possible... I don't know, but I guess it makes them look futuristic, which helps with sales. The same goes for highly-reflective, glossy screens. I guess I'm not gonna cry if that gets regulated away.
> Phones don't have removable batteries mostly because of the desire to make the device as thin as possible. The battery is just a delicate, flexible pouch that can easily be damaged and catch fire if removed from the phone and carried around. To make it safe, you'd need to add a hard shell, which would probably make the device 2 mm thicker or so.
Fairphone 6, recent with replaceable battery: 9.6 mm
Galaxy S5, has a replaceable battery, released _12 years ago_ - battery tech has improved a lot since then: 8.1 mm
iPhone 17 Pro Max: 8.8 mm
iPhone 12 Pro Max: 7.4 mm
We want to make phones as thin as possible so the latest flagship iPhone is 1.4 mm thicker than the one from 5 years ago? A whole 0.8 mm thinner than a recent one with a replaceable battery with maybe 0.1% of the iPhone's R&D budget, and 0.8 mm thicker than one with a replaceable battery made 12 years ago?
Galaxy S5 had a tool-free replaceable 2800mAh battery, with hard sides for protection. NFC. Wireless charging (as a user-installed option -- again, no tools, but did add some thickness and weight). USB 3 with OTG. HDMI over MHL. An excellent camera for the time. An OLED screen. A headphone jack. An SD card. A sim card. An IR blaster for changing TV channels at the pub. (I'm probably missing some functions here.)
The bootloader was unlocked in many regions (and became unlockable in all regions). Custom roms were abundant.
And it was waterproof.
(In the subsequent decade+, I have heard it said over and over again that this is an impossible combination of traits. And yet, there was a time when we had all that.)
Bullshit. This was the reason the industry gave for why they were removing battery replaceability support. Everybody hated it when it was first introduced, and to this day I only buy phones which have easily accessible ways to put a new battery on when the day comes. Fuck this BS of "people wanted thinner phones".
It’s also very hard to make them resistant to water and dust, I really like that I can wash my iPhone in the sink and don’t have to worry about it getting wet in general.
This is a lot harder to achieve with battery doors, especially if they need to be as big as a phone back.
Rugged phones are so far removed from any consumer phone in terms of size and weight the comparison is about as apt as comparing military use laptops with a MacBook.
Easiest way to get rid of dust and other buildup, free flowing water for a few seconds and done. Compared to the Middle Ages of using tooth picks or similar to clean the ports and speakers it’s much nicer.
And no, I don’t have my phone in any weird places, just my pocket.
Several years ago when I bought a slr, I went with nikon, mainly because their F-mount lenses are mostly compatible back to 1959.
It is a lot of fun to pick up and use nice old glass from garage sales and such. They tend to require manual control, but that is the fun part of taking pictures anyway.
Software security updates seem to be the limit to phone life, not batteries (the latter of which I've had replaced at Apple stores). Apple still seems to have the longest support for security updates.
A camera doesn't care if you take the battery out, except for that sub-second bit when it's saving the photo. Otherwise it doesn't notice you swapping the battery at all.
Modern phones are different because they are basically computers, and computers really don't like it when you just cut the power with no warning.
Some action cameras have replaceable batteries, some don't. I had a perfectly good Contour Roam 2 where the battery died and I still have a Contour Roam 3 with some low capacity battery.
Action cameras seem to have less than a 2h run-time though. One could argue that a replaceable battery is a desired feature on such a device as many users of these cameras participate in activities lasting much longer. They also tend to have replaceable memory for the same reason. And it all is achieved without EU directives as far as I know, just from the pure market demand.
PS. Consumer surveillance cameras, on the other hand, don't have replaceable batteries in general, as they can operate indefinitely off a small solar panel or for months on a charge.
With cameras you don't care about every mm of width, nor about how resistant it is to falls. With phones you do.
I, for one, don't welcome that change. I'd be ok with paying someone a bit extra to replace the battery. I mean, I'd be ok if I had a battery die in my phone in the last 10 years, which I don't remember it did.
Just to be clear replaceable doesn't mean removable/hot-swappable in this context. There doesn't have to be a battery compartment, the battery can still be glued in place. The phone can still be sealed.
Manufacturers only have to make it possible for users to open and close the phone to replace the battery without damage, using common tools.
Personally I’m confused why people say they want a thinner phone while carrying a phone that’s keeps getting larger every model.
When was the last time you kept a phone longer than 2-3 years? That’d explain why you haven’t had one die.
Assuming you do get a new phone regularly, easy battery replacement will probably help the resale value of your own a fair bit - the labour cost of a battery replacement is priced into most older phones on the second hand market.
My average time on a smartphone is now at 4 years, feels like it's going to 5 pretty soon. [Last upgrade was for USB-C. Next upgrade will be for on-device LLM. It's wild how approximately 0% of what Apple has done outside of the USB-C connector has mattered to me in the last 10+ years - low-light photography is probably the only other thing that comes to mind. ]
I've had two battery replacements since 2015. One of them was required, the other was mostly optional (battery had dropped to 90% on my iPhone - which was probably sufficient).
USB-C - that was an awesome requirement that it was unclear whether Apple was ever going to do.
User Replaceable Battery? Zero desire, particularly if it reduces water resistance on the device. Dozens of things I've wanted from a phone - being able to replace the battery has never even entered my mind as something I wanted.
Your cycle is 4 years, and you’ve had two phone batteries replaced in 11 years? That’s 2/2.75 phones.
Ok, one was optional, and let’s round up to 3. So 1/3 of your phones. Kinda sounds like you would benefit from replaceable batteries.
Regardless, those 4-5 year old phones likely went to ewaste immediately or soon after you were done with them because the cost of replacing the battery was less than their resale value after 4-5 years.
That’s a pattern our planet literally can’t handle. Wars over digging up minerals using slave labour then putting them in phones for 3-5 years just to send them to have children get chemical burns stripping the metals out of them.
My last computer lasted me 11 years, with two battery replacements along the way. My phone should do the same, just as easily.
What really annoys me is Apple EOLed the iPhone 8 and then came out with a virtually identical SE version. Of course they soon discontinued the SE too…
Maybe they updated the CPU slightly but screen and camera were identical.
I would have kept my iPhone 8 if they kept updating the software. Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8…
I know there is a cost and overhead toward supporting old platforms. But for the premium on these devices and the level of waste generated, manufacturers can still do better…
I’d prefer no new features and only security updates… perhaps I’m weird.
Look doesn’t matter but they seem to be supporting exactly the same feature set as before.
They aren’t trying to support all the flashy stuff done on newer models… Hence, it seems like they could have easily made it work on the older models but chose higher profits instead.
Not weird. The last few os updates have made my phone laggy and slow. I want security updates, i don’t want new features that kill my battery life and usability.
Apple had been switching their various iOS devices to USB-C for several years before the EU decided to mandate it, so I don't know how you can assert that them switching the iPhone to USB-C was because they were forced to. It looks more like the EU just had lucky timing and told them to do something they were already doing.
Apple fought it the whole way, commissioned studies to show it was a bad idea, etc etc. This after they had a decade prior been subject to the same thing with micro USB and skirted that agreement by shipping more unnecessary cables.
The sensible thing for them to do is fight regulation, even if their underlying strategy is going towards a compatible goal. They do not want to set a precedent that they can be bullied into changing their product roadmap based on the whims of government.
> subject to the same thing with micro USB
And thank goodness for that! Micro USB is a disaster, they did their customers a favor. When I was still rocking Android phones back then, I kept a box of Micro USB cables on hand because I was having to toss them so often.
Laptops, the ipads. Phones and airpods came after the eu law. Debatable, but it seems to me like they consider the ipad in the same class as a laptop, so it got grouped with those. Otherwise why did it take 5 years between the first ipad with usb-c and the first iphone?
The iPhone had by far the biggest ecosystem of Lightning accessories, the biggest base of users with Lightning cords. It was a foregone conclusion that a bunch of people were going to be angry about losing their Lightning accessories and having to buy new cords, and another bunch of people were going to be happy to switch their last non-USB-C device over. Apple needed to find the crossover point where the latter would outnumber the former.
I very much miss the ability to never use my phone on a charging cable. Just swap the battery on an external charger and go. 5 seconds to charge to full. It was freeing and simple
I always wanted an internal battery of like 1 minute, so I could hot swap batteries. Then the battery capacity would be largely irrelevant. What would be cool is to have a large case that could charge the battery multiple times like with ear buds. The magnetic wireless charging blocks that just stick on the back of the phone are pretty fair compromise though.
I've had the same phone for over 6 years now (iPhone 11). It's a bit slower now, but I suspect that's more to do with software changes than anything else. In particular the battery is still in pretty good shape.
Sort of a funny example since "batterygate" centered on degraded iPhone batteries in which Apple argued the best possible move is to throttle phones so they don't shutdown unexpectedly.
Most people would argue the best outcome is spending <100$ and 1 min of your time to have your phone restored to like-new speed.
Not sure what replacable has to do with thickness.
When I bought my first smartpone, a Moto G (1st gen) it was as flat as any phone most people carried around at the time (2014, I think). And the battery was replaceable.
I think also Samsung phones had replaceable batteries then. And this was the case for a few years after. Until it wasn't.
Devices didn't suddenly get thin when batteries were glued in. Why would they?
My grandma is still daily driving my ancient Galaxy S5 Neo. When someone says thinness is opposed to removable battery, or water resistance, or headphone jack, or durability, or SD card... I always think of it.
I'm not sure about too thin (although I switched to the qi-charging back after a year), the replacements /where/ thinner.. but lost the IR blaster, replaceable battery, eventually μSD housing, eventually headphone jack.
I don't know, it just felt flimsy. But in almost a "flimsy meaning it can handle a beating" way. It sure did.
I did ruin the water protection on mine pretty quickly though, because the back panel was made of plastic and was... flimsy. It basically became a fidget toy.
When thinking of how flagship phone producers are going to keep making sexy phones that also keep their watertightness, my biggest worry is repeated stress from any removable component becoming a fidget toy
We've had thin smartphones with replaceable batteries 15 years ago. That was the standard. Galaxy S5 was the last one in that series, and it's not looking too different from today. It was even IP rated for water!
Batteries also don't really die, but you get shorter and shorter life. When a device that barely could make it through 2 days of use now survives for less than one, an "upgrade" seems nicer than it really would've been if you could just swap the battery.
The S5 was IP67 rated but only if the USB port flap was sealed. Modern phones like the S24 and iPhones are IP68 rated without covers.
As someone who spends a lot of time outdoors in the rain, giving up superior IP68 water resistance for a replaceable battery that I'll never replace will be a downgrade for me.
Do you toss it in the trash when you’re done? Pop it in a drawer to rot? Ewaste will bury us all, conflict minerals and all. Replaceable batteries are a net good for humanity, and i personally believe that the smart people at phone companies can solve the problem of waterproofing even with replaceable batteries
No. Apple refurbishes and reuses the majority of trade-in phones. They recycle a small fraction. None of it ends up in landfills. In my case, they aren't paying me hundreds of dollars for my old phone to throw it in a landfill.
The comment above mine you linked to said they never had battery problems. I was saying they probably don’t keep their phones long enough to encounter battery problems. I wasn’t suggesting that’s a good thing - just that it’s very common. And if you need me to defend my position with action: I’m 5 years in on this phone and planning to do a diy battery swap soon to keep it running a little longer.
IP_7 means it's ok with water immersion for up to 30 minutes, down to 1m. You can go swimming with an IP_7 rated device.
IP_8 is "more than 1m, more than 30min water immersion" rating.
"outdoors in the rain" needs IP_5 rating if you want to be safe. You do not need a dive watch to go out in rain.
Even non-waterproof devices are not exactly made of sugar. My first iphone was a 3gs. I want running with the device in an armband. My rain precautions were plugging in 3.5mm earphones, and pointing the charge port downwards. Regularly got caught in rain with it, and the device was completely fine two years later when I sold it.
Ports develop rust if exposed to elements. This applies to USB-C ports too. That's why all seriously rugged phones has flaps for every ports with all-plastic enclosures over metal frames(not all waterproof equipment are seawater rated; they have to be specifically designed and tested to be resistant to galvanic corrosion if the water to be submerged in is not deionized or at least potable).
Urban rainproof phones like S24 and iPhone aren't actually intended to be left drenched in mud or seawater, so they don't have to be equipped to be resistant against pieces of soil or soaked driftwood jammed in the charge port.
That's true. More-modern phones can be IP-rated without a cover for the USB port like the S5 required.
That doesn't mean that a modern phone of vaguely S5 shape, with an S5-esque battery door, can't be fitted with a more modern USB port, though. Does it?
They seem like very unrelated things.
(Those modern ports, by the way? They're pretty slick when they work right. They detect moisture and turn off the bit of normally-externally-available power to help prevent galvanic corrosion.)
"...that I'll never replace", I mean you will replace the whole phone, including the battery? (Unless this is your last phone, in which case you won't be affected anyway :P)
Most digital cameras above mid ranges are made of painted Magnesium alloy material for both weight and durability. Only cosmetic parts are made of Aluminum and plastics. They don't talk much about those because all the remaining companies in the market are from one same country that don't speak English that isn't China, and there is no differentiation to be made in that area.
Both of those things are also important in cameras, there is even sites that compare the size such as https://camerasize.com/. Cameras have got smaller in recent years and it makes the size makes a big difference to whether you take it with you on not or fits in your pocket or not for compact cameras. Ricoh’s gr4 camera is 0.5mm thinner than the previous model (gr3). Cameras are essentially smaller than they would be otherwise because they have replaceable batteries. People who need at more power usually use several batteries rather than use a bigger camera with more capacity.
Cameras also need to withstand drops for similar reasons to phones, it’s in you hand and you could drop it, also tripods can fall over, car mounts fall off etc.
I don't care about every mm of width, and don't understand those that do. A phone up to 3/4" fits into any pocket that a 1/4" one does.
I had multiple android phones with replaceable batteries and many were no thicker than modern phones, especially once you've added the protective case.
You can just say “aftermarket” or “knockoff” or even “3rd party”. They all get the same point across and don’t rely on an outdated stereotype about chinese manufacturing.
The battery in my iPhone 11 pro (6.5 years old) is still basically fine as long as I charge it every day. None of my previous smart phones were able to keep enough charge to be useful after 3-4 years.
The title of site should probably have "for gaming" at the end as it doesn't consider GPUs for compute such as the A100 or the GTX 580 3GB that AlexNet was trained on.
Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.
That's true, but as a Waterfox user, I'm not worried!
If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.
Yes, I agree. I suppose when I said "I'm not worried" - I meant in the context of "it doesn't put me off using Waterfox". I am worried from an overall software ecosystem point of view.
If most people move from Firefox to Waterfox, then Waterfox can acquire Firefox devs, no? Obviously it comes to money, but the first step to gain funding is to gain popularity...
First off I’d say you can run models locally at good speed, llama3.1:8b runs fine a MacBook Air M2 with 16GB RAM and much better on a Nvidia RTX3050 which are fairly affordable.
For OpenAI, I’d assume that a GPU is dedicated to your task from the point you press enter to the point it finishes writing. I would think most of the 700 million barely use ChatGPT and a small proportion use it a lot and likely would need to pay due to the limits. Most of the time you have the website/app open I’d think you are either reading what it has written, writing something or it’s just open in the background, so ChatGPT isn’t doing anything in that time. If we assume 20 queries a week taking 25 seconds each. That’s 8.33 minutes a week. That would mean a single GPU could serve up to 1209 users, meaning for 700 million users you’d need at least 578,703 GPUs. Sam Altman has said OpenAI is due to have over a million GPUs by the end of year.
I’ve found that the inference speed on newer GPUs is barely faster than older ones (perhaps it’s memory speed limited?). They could be using older clusters of V100, A100 or even H100 GPUs for inference if they can get the model to fit or multiple GPUs if it doesn’t fit. A100s were available in 40GB and 80GB versions.
I would think they use a queuing system to allocate your message to a GPU. Slurm is widely used in HPC compute clusters, so might use that, though likely they have rolled their own system for inference.
The idea that a GPU is dedicated to a single inference task is just generally incorrect. Inputs are batched, and it’s not a single GPU handling a single request, it’s a handful of GPUs in various parallelism schemes processing a batch of requests at once. There’s a latency vs throughput trade off that operators make. The larger that batch size the greater the latency, but it improves overall cluster throughput.
Palm was the market leader, it would have been the obvious choice. Palm had been around since 1996 and by 1998 had sold 30 million devices [1]. PocketPC didn’t come out until 2000, in 2001 they had only sold 1.25 million devices, equating to less than 10% market share [2]. From what I remember Palm Pilots were the go to choice for PDAs, they were simple and worked. Other devices had come and gone. It would have been odd if they chosen something else. I doubt anyone was thinking it would be used for 20 years, though I don’t think people would have thought it would go away at the time.
I was thinking it’s not actually an obvious choice for controlling hardware. It was either an interesting choice that was small and didn’t need a lot of components, compared to the obvious PLC. Or it seemed like an obvious choice to someone that didn’t know better.[1] Either way, someone probably made a good decision to keep the old system maintainable by emulating the palm pilot instead of replacing it.
Mind you, it’s not clear how much of the control is done by the palm pilot. For all I know, it’s not much more than a screen connected to a PLC. But my gut feeling is it’s actually doing at least some of the control to be worth emulating and keeping the original software.
[1]You see this a ton now, with people reinventing the wheel using arduino, raspberry pi and spark fun parts to automate something in the small business they are employed at. Because they know these things as hobbyists, but they and anyone around were never exposed to PLCs. Soon after they leave, a newer employee will rebuild from scratch, maybe using ESP32. Overall the lifetime cost is probably much higher. Meanwhile a PLC from 1990 is fairly easy to maintain, repair or replace (including porting the software).
The costs could be as you say. And a arduino may last 25 years but a cheap power adapter janky wiring soldered to a hobbyist proximity switch will not.
I was thinking more of a scenario where a young engineer at least knows what a PLC is and buys $1k of stuff from automation direct. And starting from a PLC/googling about PLCs will lead you down a path of PLC cabinets, high quality power supplies, labeled wires and industrial limit switches. Vs another engineer that only knows the world of arduino and messes of wires in boxes.
In the first case, when he or she leaves and the thing breaks down, the next person can either call or pro or have a chance to connect to the PLC, do some troubleshooting with the ladder logic and figure out which sensor needs to be replaced. In the second case there’s probably no documentation and the source code is long gone so the only thing to do is scrap it and start over, probably incurring a large cost because now it’s an emergency to get the thing working again, and/or it causes lost production. I failed to mention earlier I wasn’t just talking about the cost of parts.
I’m not saying the imax solution may be so bad in the “arduino direction”, but thinking about it for me thinking about some professional experiences I’ve seen in both directions.
In my experience, hacked together arduino projects easily exceed a 25 year MTBF (if you exclude day-1 failures because someone did something stupid like wiring it backwards).
However, ESP32's do not (they seem to require a power cycle every few months - and in my view, that is a failure). R Pi's certainly do not (they require human attention for software updates, which IMO is also a failure - and even if you don't update them, there is almost certainly some tiny memory leak and it'll need a reboot in a year or two anyway).
That device specifically was cheap and readily available. If it failed you could have gone to any OfficeMax or Circuit City and picked up a replacement.
I assume at least one engineer aggressively argued for DB9 serial along with a Windows and Mac app instead and lost.
It was clear that the longevity of the installations would far outstrip the longevity of the Palm pilot
If I was in the room I'd even argue for DOS. As a target it had stopped moving, was ubiquitous, not going anywhere and is in enough important places that it would even survive the demise of Microsoft if they were to collapse in the future
"Yes, there's plenty of Windows CE and DOS palmtops. You can make a palmpilot application if you want but that should be a port, just like to BeOS.
The pure serial binary option is fine but this is infrastructure. Like the bridges that run on 5 1/4" disks, this will outlive both us and Palm if we do it right. Hell, if this is still running when our grandchildren are old and grey, this will be one of our greatest achievements as a team.
When I walk down the street and I see a masonry stamp on the sidewalk from a contracting company that installed it 100 years ago, I appreciate the fine work they did that I'm still using a century later.
Let's hope people will feel the same way about what we decide to do in this room today.
We need to at least provide documentation on the protocol.
It has to be made so competent people in the future can easily make this system accessible to the computers of the future as well. That will Not best be handled by a binary blob on a palmpilot"
Saying it should have been Windows CE is just survivorship bias IMO - and we don’t know that they didn’t write documentation on the protocol or that it’s poorly understood - it might just have been easier and safer to emulate an app that everyone is happy with rather than rewrite it (these film projectors might be more in “keep them alive” mode rather than “improve” mode while digital is growing for them).
I’ve put a dos application running in an emulator on an android device for a project to roll out new hardware because that took a few hours to configure rather than a year of development.
Did you you ever attempt programming anything under PalmOs back then? It was quite fragile because of the extremely low amount of memory on board, which forced the use of relocatable memory handles, a bit like classic mac OS.
PalmOS and it's extreme focus on low end hardware was a super weird choice at the time. The one reason for using PalmOS was extreme battery life, which obviously was not a factor here.
There existed plenty better alternatives at the time.
The latest Nvidia driver no longer supports the K40, so you’ll have to use version 470 (or lower, officially Nvidia says 460, but 470 seems to work). That supports CUDA 11.4 natively. Newer versions of CUDA 11.x are supported: https://docs.nvidia.com/deploy/cuda-compatibility/index.html though CUDA 12 is not.
In my testing, a system with a single RTX3060 was faster in tensorflow than with 3 K40s and probably close to the performance of 4 k40s.
If you are considering other GPUs, there are some good benchmarks here (The RTX3060 is not there, though the GTX1080Ti was almost the same performance in the tensorflow test they run): https://lambdalabs.com/gpu-benchmarks
As others have said Google CoLab is free option you can use.
The industry was already moving away from the big 64 bit SMP machines made Sun, SGI & IBM. In many cases a cluster of 32bit x86 machines made more sense than one expensive big machine with high priced support contracts and parts. 32 bit x86 machines already supported more than 4GB total memory with PAE, it was just that one process couldn’t use more than 4GB. Other 64bit chips were already well established (SPARC, POWER, MIPS), probably for most of the users they couldn’t easily move to a new CPU architecture. For other users by the time they needed the bigger machines x86 64bit was already available, including from Intel themselves. AMD was limited 8 sockets from what I remember, so their was still a small market for big Itanium systems (like SGI’s Altix).
The Sony RX100 series would be in most top lists. Though personally I'm not sure why they went with a slower lens from the mark 6 onwards. The ZV1 continues with the a similar lens from earlier models. I have the RX100 mark iii, that's still quite good.
I second the RX100 series. As a step up, there is RX1 with a full frame and fixed lens. And HX99 the other way with a smaller sensor, but goes all the way up to 720mm.
I can have two (or more) batteries, if it runs out I just change it. I don’t need walk around with a USB battery pack and cable hanging off the device preventing me from using it properly.
I can put the battery on charge somewhere and leave it, even if not completely secure, because just the battery not the device. This way my expensive device and my data is not at risk.
I can use 40+ year old cameras, because I can just put a new battery in. This is not something you can do with newer device, e.g. and iPod and you can’t even find anyone who will fit them for the older models.
Battery tech moves on. There are now some batteries with charging ports on them. Other batteries offer more capacity than the original ones. Apple even did this once for me, when MacBook Air batteries were fairly easy to replace, I had mine replaced (it wore out) at the shop and they put a slightly bigger one in, which was the standard on the newer models.
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