EU Just Changed Smartphones Forever

hi welcome to another episode of Cold Fusion in cold Fusion's early days back in the early to mid-2010s a lot of Android phones would make their way onto the channel one very common feature among these phones was use a replaceable batteries at the time carrying a spare battery in your pocket wasn't that unusual of an occurrent but have you ever wondered what happened to that nowadays thanks to industry-wide design changes glass glue and metals have become the industry standard for materials because of this easily replaceable batteries are no longer possible this just been the way

things have been for the better part of a decade but things are about to change in a sweeping new law by the European Parliament replaceable battery products will be forced back into fashion the law will have an effect on phones tablets and laptops not just in Europe but worldwide in this episode we'll take a quick look we were watching cool Fusion TV [Music] in June of 2023 the European Parliament voted 587 to 9 in a bid to force all consumer devices to have easily replaceable batteries easily replaceable means that the battery changing process should require

no special tools this means manufacturers can no longer use adhesives the direct quote from the EU is that battery replacement should require quote no tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part or basic tools the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a Layman almost all smartphones today are designed like a glass sandwich this was the design that was settled upon as the smartphone market matured the glass sandwich method of construction is Sleek and thin but relies on an extensive use of adhesives this law would

mean that the very fundamentals of how companies design phones will need to change unless companies figure out a new way to build the same phones without adhesives manufacturers from Apple to Google to Samsung will be affected foldable phones will face a huge challenge when trying to comply with these laws so we'll have to wait and see on that front so how does the law in the EU possibly affect the rest of the world well it's likely that phone manufacturers aren't going to design a specific phone for the EU reason being it's expensive so it's going

to eat into their profit Apple for example is unlikely to design a European iPhone with a replaceable battery and another iPhone with a sealed battery for other regions this EU lore will have a Rippling consequence across the world but it goes further the law also affects tablets laptops EVS e-bikes and basically anything with a rechargeable battery in July of 2023 the law was approved by the European Council and will come into effect in 2027. this gives over three years for manufacturers to get their act together this will be an especially big change for Apple who

have never featured removable batteries since the very first iPhone Samsung stopped featuring removable batteries on their flagships back in 2014. so many people think that waterproofing and dust proofing will be much harder to achieve but right to repair Advocate Lewis Rossman argues some good points so I am old enough to remember when this was not a repair but maintenance and I'm also old enough to remember that Society seems to have this Collective Amnesia regarding water resistance there was an article going over this where it said that one needs to be aware that incorporating easily removable

bags will mean these handsets will lose water resistance unless a well thought out design is undertaken again selective amnesia for the phases like the Samsung S5 which is IP67 or the Sony xb10 which is ip68 this device is ip68 with a user removable battery some others argue that removable batteries will make smartphones bulky and less premium but the LG G5 proved that it was possible to make a phone thin premium and with a removable battery right to repair campaigns coordinator Christina gnapi calls the ruling quote a big success for right to repair [Music] for those

of you unfamiliar right to repair is a movement that calls for consumer goods to be easily repairable we've all seen the trend when your TV or phone is broken it's more common for people to just buy a new one instead of repairing it this is due to the components becoming more complex and integrated over time but some companies are straight up anti-consumer in this context apple is the biggest culprit if you own a later model iPhone and the screen breaks and you go to replace it with a perfectly good screen from the same model Apple

will disable some features and warn you that it's not genuine the same goes for replacing the battery or camera and even if they are genuine parts but don't have the same serial number things don't work as they should this wasn't the case for older Apple products it's an effort to make their users send their devices only to Apple so an exorbitant fee can be extracted from consumers further to this apple does not supply diagnostic software and they've even raided repair shops for having a large stock of genuine repair parts let's say that in your MacBook

you have a broken display Flex cable Apple intentionally connects the display Flex Cable in such a way that you can't just replace the cable you have to replace the entire display and this can cost over 700 or a wire to it if we're looking at a flex cable a flex cable that is less than 50 cents I'm telling people I'm telling technicians that get paid 30 to 50 an hour spend an hour trying to fix this Flex cable that costs 50 cents because we're not allowed to replace it so if the pads are missing we

have to start scraping away with a dental pick and hope that we can solder a little jumper wire onto a flex cable to reattach it to a chip that was corroded that we then have to file away at to get to the metal because I can't put a new 50 Cent Hall sensor on that person's MacBook because if I do it won't work I understand the argument for Apple wanting safer repairs but should this mean that even a qualified external repair technician should be blocked from helping people with their damaged devices of course Apple isn't

the only company that does this but for the context of this story they're the most relevant [Music] so what's the intention of this law the new law isn't for consumers as much as it is to protect the environment today when a phone's battery dwindles after a few years it's much easier for the common user to just buy a new one instead of repairing it over 50 million annual tons of E-Waste is generated this way the European Parliament is making sure that the environmental impacts of batteries is considered they're aiming to create a circular economy for

batteries this means that in a product life cycle as little as possible of the battery's raw materials should be wasted here are some rules covered by the law pertaining to replaceable batteries phone manufacturers will need to collect 63 of portable batteries that would normally go into landfill by the end of 2027. lithium recovery from waste batteries will need to be at 50 percent by 2027 and EV batteries will need to be made of certain percentages of recyclable content initially 16 Cobalt 85 lead 6 lithium and six percent nickel all batteries should have a recycling efficiency

Target of 50 by 2025. this all sounds fine but the first point seems difficult getting consumers to responsibly give their older phone batteries back to the manufacturer will be tricky to enforce we'll have to see [Music] so it's unlikely that there's going to be any changes in the next few months to a year but after this Smartphone makers will have to start gearing up for compliance with a new law we'll start to see the results of these efforts over the next few years I did say earlier that it's unlikely that manufacturers will Design two different

phones an iPhone for Europe and another for the rest of the world but anything is possible really it's also going to be fascinating to see what happens to laptops e-bikes and EVS regardless things are going to be shaken up in the next few years and an interesting question that I post to you is do you think that the phasing out of user replaceable batteries was just the natural progression of design as dictated by consumer demand or are these changes motivated by profit resulting in anti-consumer products let me know what you think in the comments section

below if you want to see another cold fusion episode on battery recycling I'll link that below oh and the third and final episode of my AI series with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation will be live soon I'll leave a link for that in the description below cheers guys have a good one [Music] all right all right [Music] cold fusion it's me thinking