That would be quite utopian, however I feel such a thing would be incredible hard to achieve. Different form factors require different layouts, space is much tighter and should not be wasted. In desktop PC land, you have plenty of room to fit things as you want.
It may not be showstopper, but it’s certainly a challenge. And of course, companies won’t like it :P

It’s the first time I hear about Fairphone. How they embrace repairability is amazing. I hope they’ll expand to North America at one point.

I’ve had this thought in the past, but upon further research, on a smartphone scale it runs into a few issues.

A PC has relatively divorced components because it has the space to accommodate slots, but that already goes out the window for laptops; the best you get is RAM and maybe MXM. People generally want slimmer and more battery-dense products, so motherboards with everything soldered can manage to be absolutely tiny (see: newer macbooks) compared to ones where everything is slotted. Newer smartphones don’t just last longer on battery because they’re bigger; much of the internal volume of a smartphone is now to hold the battery as everything around it shrinks. Modular connectors cost volume and money, for a use case where both are at a premium; most people would generally rather buy a non-modular phone that gets better battery life and offers better water resistance.

As evidenced by the Note 7, batteries also need a decent bit of structural integrity around them to be safe, and the best way to accomplish that is just a 2-part box that’s been glued together. This has the side effect of making water resistance easier and slimming the phone down. Any swappable battery inherently has worse water resistance and volumetric efficiency than a pouch csll in a glued box, and manufacturers value both good battery life and things not blowing up.

Smartphone CPUs (or rather SoCs) contain not only the CPU bit, but important parts of the radio, camera processing, location processing, and GPU. Therefore Android ones come with driver packs from manufacturers that make it all work, but if you’re swapping components around you need to make sure your sensors like cameras have a way to install drivers (and a general compatibility standard); which means at best you’re swapping pretty big chunks of a smartphone at a time.

Even without forced obsolescence, smartphones have a relatively fixed lifespan of ~5-8 years due to software upgrades, how carriers buy up new radio frequencies, physical damage, battery degradation, vibration motor wear, camera focusing mechanism wear (from vibrations) and in the case of AMOLED display wear. This isn’t a knock on standardization, but you can already achieve this lifespan out of a smartphone if you use something like Advanced Charging Controller to limit battery charge to 80%.

If you look at Project Ara (which is the most extreme case of modularity), it failed because of all of the above. The battery life, structural integrity, cost efficiency, compatibility, and waterproofness would all be awful compared to a standard phone.

For real, as an American I’m super grateful.

My last two phones both got slow as their batteries got bad, and were basically like new after replacing them. My current phone doesn’t allow swapping the batteries.

For someone thrifty, being able to replace the battery can extend a phone’s life 2x or more. Even if you don’t want to keep using it, you could still resell it or give it to someone who doesn’t need the newest phones. Non-swappable batteries are a form of planned obsolescence, in addition to just being more compact and probably a little cheaper.

I’ve had my current phone for around 5 years. I’m on the latest LineageOS. I have no speed issues. The battery is starting to show signs of age. My previous phone had a longer life and got through two batteries. It was up to date with LineageOS until it’s last days. It was lack of RAM that did it in. My current phone still has mid level amount of RAM.

EU needs to look at updatablity next. If the vendors no longer provides real updates, they should unlock the bootloader. Really I want phones to like PCs and not require a custom OS each…

Naturally. Just a shame it isn’t a bit earlier :P

Exactly! It bums me so much that the vast majority of the money you spent buying the device and of the money spent making the device is completely thrown out because you can’t replace a little component that was perfectly replaceable 10 years ago… 🙄

Going from Google-Android to LineageOS boosted the battery life of my old Smartphone by a factor 3 roughly. There where some Google-things consuming battery in the background, probably spying on me. Also using simple Apps from F-Droid helps to get a smooth experience.

In general, that’s definitely a problem too. Just look at Windows 11. Now M$ wants you to buy a new laptop such that their OS can run at all. I use a >10y old laptop with Linux. No performance issues for everyday use.

LG had some phones like that in 2016ish, on the G5 the entire bottom of the phone slid out to reveal a big battery slot and on the V20 there was a button that let the metal back of the phone pop off so you could change the battery. I had an external battery charger and a couple of spare batteries for my V20, so I could just pack spare batteries and swap them whenever it got low. I never even bothered to plug my phone in, it was always just faster to pop in a battery that was already fully charged. It didn’t have any water resistance, but it was a pretty small price to pay for endless battery life

It’s a shame that LG’s whole phone division went under, because they were making some of the coolest phones that came out that whole decade

I don’t see an issue, but perhaps nobody ever thought to really try shipping a device with something like that. Specially since the water proofing advent.

@binboupan @tmpod I’d say it’s simply space. To make modern smartphones have enough power for the day, the battery has to be as large as possible. Generally, it’s sandwiched directly between the screen and the backcover.

The reason they’re not removeable anymore is because this way manufacturers don’t need to put the battery in a plastic casing, leaving more space for energy.

I mean, you could also just make the smartphones bigger, but people want them as flat as possible.

They sure will fight it. The main counter-argument I see is water proofing, but I believe I’ve seen a phone with good proofing but still accessible. Don’t remember the brand and model though.

There will be a lot to figure out. The new designs provide features that the old ones couldn’t- and there are very few people who would prioritize a replaceable battery over other features.

They could certainly do better, but they do quite a bit yeah.

This is dramatically the opposite of my experience. I’ve never had a usb-c port die, but the microUSB ports were fragile as heck.

I’ve had cheapo USB-C cables die but that’s because cheap.

How is “water proof” defined in the legislation? Apple carefully says their devices are water resistant. There is a possibility that it will not qualify.

It’s not just Apple. Almost all manufacturers offer water resistant flagship phones (and mid-rangers). ASUS, Xiaomi, Oppo, Huawei, Sony, Samsung, Vivo, Honor…

However, the phones are NOT water-proof. From none of these (neither Apple). They are water-resistant, which is a big difference and they are just required to not be damaged if submerged underwater for 30 minutes, 1.5m, if they want IP68.

Phones and smartwatches are not resistant to condensation or water getting in – water can still get in, as they’re NOT impervious (smartwatches if they have speakers), which is actually required for calling your device truly “water proof”. Water resistant is literally two steps below that.

There has been some marketing claiming water proof devices. This was just wrong.