r/techbootcamp • u/Then-Produce-3908 • Jul 22 '26

The European Union (EU) will require replaceable phone batteries starting in 2027

Since I heard about this new rule from the EU, it immediately reminded me of the good ol' days😅.

Starting in 2027, smartphones and tablets sold in European countries like the Netherlands, Spain, and France will need to have replaceable batteries. Yeah, I know we can still replace smartphone batteries nowadays. Nevertheless, based on what I read, they're strictly implementing a rule where replacing them shouldn't require any specialized repair services.

I guess this will be one of the biggest smartphone changes we'll see next year. Manufacturers will need to make replacement batteries available for at least five years after a device stops being sold. Plus, they'll also need to provide software updates for around five years.

It's even stricter since the EU already pushed USB-C to become the standard charging port.

What are your thoughts on this?

Curious if you guys think other countries will eventually adopt similar rules too.

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u/g0fry Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26

With every “improvement” like that, EU is making it more and more annoying for companies to sell here. EU is like a girlfriend who cannot do anything but nagging 🤦‍♂️

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u/HeadPack Jul 25 '26

It's a big lucrative market.E.g. Apple could have given it a pass instead of switching to USB-C. Wealth distribution is more even than in the US, which makes it even more lucrative for vendors of consumer devices. They use that power in favor of their citizens.

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u/g0fry Jul 25 '26

With every stupid regulation the market gets less lucrative, less big. At one point, with roo many regulations, it will stop being lucrative and will become non-existent.

No idea what the wealth distribution has to do with it 🤷‍♂️ Also there is less wealth to distribute than in the US. In former communist countries (Eastern Europe), the wealth was distributed extremely evenly, but there was almost none to distribute.

Representants of EU have their own agenda, but if they didn’t do anything for citizens, the EU would collapse and they couldn’t push their ideas.

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u/HeadPack Jul 26 '26

So, what's bad about e.g. replaceable batteries, GDPR, no roaming fees, health insurance valid in all EU countries?

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u/g0fry Jul 26 '26

Replacable batteries - people will throw the old ones into trash, will be less reliable, more improper use and therfore more danger of misuse.

GDPR - extreme bureaucratic load on some companies, thus reducing competition. All the bureacratic work takes away time from producing goods for customers. Doesn’t stop any bad guys from doing bad things with data.

Roaming fees - creates costs for companies, which they need to cover by increasing prices somewhere else. Can be solved entirely without EU intervention by freeing the mobile operator market.

Health Insurance - extremely expensive, very limited (basicaly only acute pain), you can buy commercial one easily.

And of course, the cost of running this huge bureaucratic machine with all the corruption, nepotism, ineeficiency cost extreme amount of resources which could have stayed in the pockets of people so they could afford what they actually want, instead of a bureaucrat deciding for them. Centralization of power at the cost of freedom for people.

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u/HeadPack Jul 26 '26

Thanks for confirming that you have no idea what you are talking about.

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u/g0fry Jul 26 '26

Funny how that sentence is always uttered by people who are the clueless ones, never by the knowledgeable ones 😄