from the hey-buddy-can-you-spare-a-screen? dept.
Smartphone manufacturers supplying the EU will face stringent requirements to provide spare parts and ensure longer battery life, according to draft proposals published by Brussels on Wednesday.
The European Commission said that at least 15 different component parts should be made available for at least five years from the date of a smartphone's introduction to the market and that batteries should survive at least 500 full charges without deteriorating to below 83 per cent of their capacity.
[...] The draft regulations, which also cover tablets and standard mobile phones, suggest that if hardware is made more repairable and recyclable it would cut the energy consumption involved in its production and use by a third.
"Devices are often replaced prematurely by users and are, at the end of their useful life, not sufficiently reused or recycled, leading to a waste of resources," the document said.
[...] Smartphone makers argue that requiring more parts to be available simply increases the consumption of plastic.
Digital Europe, which represents the tech industry, said: "A potential overproduction, subsequent warehousing and destruction of spare parts will naturally result in wasted resources, reduced material efficiency and negative economic value ultimately resulting in higher costs for the consumer."
[...] "It will be a burden for the lesser brands and I'm sure we'll start to see limitations of smartphone models they will offer in the EU market," he said. "The net effect may very well be to make smartphones less affordable or wipe out the ultra-low cost category altogether."
(Score: 5, Funny) by krishnoid on Friday September 09 2022, @02:47AM (6 children)
What to do, what to do ... how about standardizing replacement parts, so a single set of spares can be shared among multiple devices! I'm a genius, just like those people who decided to standardize on micro-USB and USB-C.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 09 2022, @03:18AM
Three thumbs up. All are guilty, but Apple is probably the worst. Everything they make is stringently incompatible with everything else. But, buzzwords, catchphrases, and shine sells their products at exorbitant prices. Pay a little lip service to the ecology and sustainability, all while raping the idiot masses, and you have a winning combination: your product becomes a status symbol, as much or more than it is a useful item.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday September 09 2022, @06:59AM (2 children)
I had a quick read through of the draft and I couldn't see anywhere that they specified which 15 parts to make available. I'm betting on seven SMD resistors, six SMD capacitors, and two diodes.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Friday September 09 2022, @08:17AM (1 child)
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 09 2022, @08:56AM
Two to four months are still an awfully long time for security updates. Especially given that this is not the time after the fix is available, but after the fix is already rolled out on other devices of the same brand. In other words, there definitely has been enough time to adapt the fix at the start of that period.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Saturday September 10 2022, @02:30PM (1 child)
Yeah - now that the technology has mostly matured into a fairly small selection of popular screen sizes, a fairly consistent size of battery compartment (for a given phone size), and a fairly consistent amount of circuit board area, it's long past time to stop gratuitously rearranging parts with each new model.
There's absolutely no good reason why parts from next years phones couldn't be a drop-in replacement for their cousins in last years phones, which would virtually eliminate the need to maintain a backlog of old parts.
Has technology or tastes changed enough that you could really push the boundaries with your flagship phone if you could reshape the parts? Fine - just expect to use the new part shapes in your "normal" phones for years to come.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday September 10 2022, @03:37PM
Apparently, based on a 3-year old source I forget the origin of, the unwashed -- no wait, the carefully cosmeticized -- influenc-ial masses buy new phones based on selfie camera improvements. It's sad, but kind of makes sense, so they definitely could standardize most of the rest.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Friday September 09 2022, @11:43AM (7 children)
What is to be gained by this complex impairment of the EU's smartphone industry? Seems to be some vague "right to repair" and slightly better batteries. I wonder if the real reason is protectionism. Anyone competing in the market will have to provide a different phone than they would in less restricted markets - works great for you, if the only market you have is in the EU.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fraxinus-tree on Saturday September 10 2022, @12:13PM (6 children)
Works very well if EU is a significant market (e.g. more than 40%, exactly the case for phones & likes).
Works even better because both EU regulations and EU consumer expectations are used as a strong model for a lot of other markets (non-EU European countries including Russia, Turkey and their close friends, as well as India, China, the rest of the East Asia and sometimes even the US).
Did you see what happened with the phone/tablet/laptop chargers? Car efficiency/pollution? Detergents? Food quality standards?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 10 2022, @03:38PM (5 children)
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Saturday September 10 2022, @10:43PM (4 children)
Winter? I am European. What's the matter with the winter?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 10 2022, @11:04PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by fraxinus-tree on Sunday September 11 2022, @07:51AM (2 children)
Nothing to be obsessed about.
Yes, a major seller with about ~30% in the natural gas market is out, spot prices are rather shaky because the other suppliers struggle to fill the ~10% demand gap.
This amounts to ~3% of the whole energy market in the EU.
Pain in the ass? Sure. Disaster? Not really.
And we also have a major buyer out of the corruption market. A fair trade, isn't it?
The part of EU that has not planned for the war is ~100%, but the seller in question has an established practice of being an asshole, so some long term planning and preparation was pretty much done. This is what the whole "green transition" is and Germany in particular stands pretty good with their renewable share.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 11 2022, @01:40PM
How does a 30% drop in supply result in a 10% gap in demand? You're glossing over something - significant supply increase or demand reduction.
Energy isn't perfectly fungible. German homes that use natural gas to heat the home can't magically replace that with solar power from Spain or gasoline from Norway, for example. You're also glossing over that a 30% drop in natural gas supply is considerably more than 3%. According to this report [europa.eu] on pg 47, 23% of "Inland consumption by fuel" (appears to be all internal EU consumption of energy, including renewables) was due to natural gas. 30% of that would be about 7% of all such.
I see long term generation of problems. For example, from pg 37 there's a net 20% decline in EU energy production. On page 39, it breaks it down - renewables increased immensely, but not enough to cover declines in fossil fuel production and nuclear power.
All those declines mean large increases in energy imports.
Anyway, my point here is that you can brag about EU mandates being sticky and applying to markets outside the EU, but there's obvious signs that's a bad idea. My bet is that as the developing world gets wealthier, these complex regulations will just cut the EU off from the growing economic activity of the rest of the world. Sorry, present and past market share of cell phones won't reflect future market share when the EU only constitutes 6% of the world's population.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday September 13 2022, @12:13AM
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 09 2022, @05:01PM
I applaud this. I rebuilt my last phone five or six times until even the replacement parts cannibalised from other phones had disintegrated. It would be nice to use parts in better shape that are more available.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hendrikboom on Saturday September 10 2022, @02:17AM
Fairphone [fairphone.com] is already a fair way there.
Unfortunately for me, they are not shipping outside of Europe.