EU to Require Handheld Consoles and Smartphones to Have Replaceable Batteries by 2027 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 August 2023 / 5,001 Views
The European Council on July 10 voted for a new regulation that will require handheld gaming consoles, smartphones, and tablets to have replaceable batteries by 2027.
Manufacturers by 2027 will be required to make batteries accessible to consumers to be replaced and be available to access by using commercially available or specialized tools, as well as providing instructions.
An EU representative told Overkill that "the batteries of gaming handhelds are covered" with this new regulations.
The new regulation by the EU has the goal to "reduce environmental and social impacts throughout the lifecycle of the battery. To that end, the regulation sets tight due diligence rules for operators who must verify the source of raw materials used for batteries placed on the market. The regulation provides for an exemption for SMEs from the due diligence rules."
The EU has two targets in place with producers to collect 63 percent of waste from portable batteries by the end of 2027 and 73 percent by 2030.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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YES, this very nice decision reducing planned obsolescence and improving rights to repair as well as the highlighted pro-environmental benefits. win-win-win.
It's also likely, but not assured, that companies will adopt the same strategy worldwide as a result as the EU is already a huge part of the market.
I hope other jurisdictions will adopt similar requirements.
I hope manufactures don't release a slightly different design in other parts of the world. The main reason I buy a new phone every 4 or so years is because of the battery. Plus not being able to easily replace the battery in the Switch years down the line when it dies will be a pain for many owners.
Some will unfortunately but many probably won't and that's already quite a win.
The Switch battery is not that hard to access and is not soldered but it is secured with glue that makes it hard and dangerous to remove for the consumers. (Tronicsfix videos are my source for this)
Yet the design change required for Nintendo here should be quite trivial to Nintendo. With this requirement, I think it safe to assume Switch 2 would comply at release. This 2017 date though, will probably signal the end of Switch production and commercialization (at least in the EU, if it did not already happened) because then there will be little incentive to revise it beyond this point IMO unless they tackle the issue in advance.
What a fucking win.
Be nice if they add console controllers to the list as well. Other than that though, this is an absolute W for EU, combating the artificial life span of these electronics, phones being the most egregious. I hope it's enough influence to affect the products released in NA.
thats one less way for apple to force you to upgrade
Why just batteries?
Pretty nice, hope it spreads worldwide.
Bye bye iPhone, hello Nokia 😂
Just a note….why did they leave smart watches off the list? I mean if going after all tech then they should add these……oh and my cycling computer too..
I think the benefits are dubious in terms of the environment. The smartphone market is at least 10 times bigger than the portable game console market. A large portion of people replace their phones before they would ever need to replace their battery. Of those that hold on to there phone's longer, many would just live with the degrading batteries, gravitating to chargers everywhere they go. Of the small remaining portion who would replace batteries, a large portion will just throw the old battery in the trash.
I would agree that it seems to be pro-consumer, but not if it adds price and/or reduces the durability of every single device.
Well all of them have replaceable batteries if you are willing to tamper a little =p
Jesus, talk about government overreach.....
Unfortunately we are a minority.
That's a loaded term, so I don't use it. I call myself a hardcore libertarian. But, the dictionary definition of the word is a pretty accurate representation of my position on government. It is one of only two logically consistent positions that one can have with respect to government. The other being support for totalitarianism.
So you oppose laws that protect private property as well?
You're going to have to define the law.
If government is going to exist, laws protecting private property in the way you mention here are the least of our problems. So, sure, in a theoretical sense, I oppose government making any laws. In practice, since government exists and is going to make laws, I'm not particularly worried about things like that.
Do you think theft should be legal or not?
I think theft is completely unacceptable. So if government is going to exist, enforcing laws prohibiting theft is fine.
But if you are against having a government, who gets to decide what is considered private property?
If you want to get really into the theoretical stuff.... the concept of private property that we use today may change. For, it might not change. There's really no way to know how things would end up without government. The concept of government has been so pervasive for most of recorded human history, and basically throughout the development of everything that we would consider modern society, that I don't know how things would look without a government. So I don't really have a way to answer that question.
It's important to keep in mind that when thinking about alternatives to government, just like alternative to anything else, that the standard isn't perfection. The standard is, or at least should be, "is this thing I'm considering better than the status quo?" And I think that if you look objectively, essentially all incidents of widespread human suffering, aside from those directly caused by natural disasters, can be directly attributed to government. Nothing enslaves more people, nothing kills more people, nothing locks more people in cages, nothing unfairly discriminates against more people, nothing stands in the way of human progress more than government. So, I think it would be pretty hard to do worse.
I can't say that for sure though, because I've never been able to study society without government. It's been so long since that way of living has existed that our records of it are not good. Plus, life has changed so much since then, that it is hard to picture how the concepts would apply in 2023.
Government seems inevitable to me. When many sovereign individuals pool together their resources, some sort of government must be there to coordinate those resources. Yes, terrible things have been done by governments but governments have also funded trips to the moon. Funded research that now powers the devices we're using to communicate.
And when I say government, I mean any form of law and order. I can't think of any entity enduring in disorder.
Governments have never funded anything. Governments don't have any money. Governments take resources from other people, by force. Then they squander a bunch of those resources, and sometimes do good things with what's left.
Governments did not exist for the vast majority of human existence. That doesn't mean there were no community structures or things in place. But those are not the same as governments. So, it is not clear to me that government is inevitable, unless you mean that after many thousands of years we will end up back in a place where humans are trying out the idea of government.
They enjoy the protection of said governments, so only natural that they should live up to certain conditions. Especially when those conditions benefit everybody.
Companies should not enjoy protection of said governments. That's problem number one. I'll grant you that once government is in bed with the corporations, as is the case in all of the western world, you get to this scenario that we have now where there is no right answer.
