Removable batteries were standard in the early days of mobile phones (and laptops) out of necessity: batteries in those days just weren’t very good. They didn’t last long, took hours to charge, and wore out relatively quickly. You’d carry a spare battery around and swap over when your first one ran out.

Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!

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vanviegen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I remember early cell phones (not smart phones, mind you) having weeks of standby time, or something like 20 hours of talk time. These had replaceable batteries. I don't recall people carrying spare batteries being a thing..?

	▲	peterfirefly 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Some of my early phones had spare batteries. They most certainly did NOT have weeks of standby time or 20 hours of talk time. We are talking late 90's. Later, as phones and batteries got better, the spare batteries became unnecessary. They still degraded fast enough that there was a market for replacement batteries and they could indeed easily be replaced. We are talking things like the Nokia 3310. Even later, the need for user replaceable batteries pretty much disappeared. These days, it is entirely gone.
	▲	Reason077 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Standby times were indeed great in those days because those phones weren’t doing very much when they were idle. (Weeks may be an exaggeration, though!) You might also be misremembering talk times, unless you had a phone with an exceptionally large battery. A typical device like the Nokia 3210 had 3-4 hours talk time, which is far less than modern smartphones.
	▲	adrianN 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You can in fact still buy those kinds of phones and they still have removable batteries.

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KronisLV an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Now days, there is much less need for that because a charge lasts much longer, and if you do run low you can fast change in 30 minutes or so. Not buying extra spare batteries for every device means less e-waste, not more!

My current iPhone's battery capacity is already starting to decrease and it was never great to begin with (needed it for work). If it was replaceable, I'd do what I used to with Android phones years ago - get a spare, if the old one is really bad or turning into a pillow, then recycle that and keep using the replacement, otherwise could use both side by side and didn't even need a separate charging bank.

Lots of people will look in the direction of getting a new phone altogether, I might have to do that as well, turning the whole phone into e-waste, instead of giving it 5 more years of lifetime.

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makingstuffs 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Mandating removable batteries does not _force_ you to buy a second battery. It _enables_ you to. By proxy this enables you to fix a failing battery yourself, at home. Replacing a battery instead of the whole device would create less e-waste. Just an example.

Further to the above, my Nokia (32|33|51)10's battery lasted a hell of a lot longer than any iPhone I have owned.

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sschueller an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Not true, they may have not been as good but the phones also didn't need so much power. I never had to buy a new battery for all the nokias I owned all the way until Nokia the company died.

The phone that had the worst battery was the first iphone, it wasn't water proof either yet the battery was non removable.

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manuelabeledo an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

A battery being replaceable has little to do with longevity or energy density.