TL;DR
- The European Council has ended its adoption procedure for rules related to phones with replaceable batteries.
- By 2027, all phones released in the EU must have a battery the user can easily replace with no tools or expertise.
- The regulation intends to introduce a circular economy for batteries.
Because the EU is such a massive market, EU law tends to bleed out. It’s expensive to keep different SKUs for different regions, so compliance tends to seep out.
I’d expect at least some of this to have an impact outside the EU.
It also means that other places can introduce similar laws with less friction. Like the GDPR and the various American privacy-oriented laws.
And they know people are going to be importing these smartphones once it goes live and it’s not a battle that can be fought.
The company Fairphone makes almost perfectly repairable smartphones, but they’re only for the European market and the radios won’t really work in the US. I think it would be a similar case for a lot of phones so it might not actually be super viable to import phones in the future either, unfortunately.
I remember when iPhones first came out, they were locked to a single telecom provider. It got jailbroken within a week and every patch following it for over a year got jailbroken too.
If there is enough demand by big brands, unlike the fairphone, there will be a way to use it outside of the EU. Combined with the extra cost to manufacture, I don’t see big companies just producing it uniquely for the EU or even if they do, not for long.
Fairphone just partnered with Murena to bring it to the U.S. https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/5/23783714/murena-fairphone-4-us-release-date-price-sustainability-repair
oh damn! awesome! my current phone still functions well, so hopefully the next one has a headphone jack and I’ll get one, thanks for linking that!