while I love the latter, the former “greener batteries” translates to smaller batteries. that’s something we don’t need.
people are not out there ditching batteries every five months. we are ditching devices that lost software support…
There might not be a need to ditch them if they weren’t so locked down & consumables like batteries needlessly difficult to replace. We’re not ditching the phones “every five months,” either, but the battery life is still forcing retirement much earlier than necessary even without the software support issue.
The concern is whether greener batteries means shorter batteries. If they can last at least nearly as long as standard batteries, I’d say go for it. If not, my concern is that we’re just generating more waste and raising costs.
IMHO it should not really mean shorter batteries. Might we loose 5% capacity or something like that for them to be more repairable? Probably.
But the option to manually replace the battery will - over the life of the device - outweigh that in my opinion.
My phone is now 4 years old - the main reason why I’m considering getting a new one is the battery life degrading. It still has ~80% battery health left - enough to get me through a non-demanding day but not enough for a more regular one.
If I could just replace the battery - I’d have done that already. But also I’ll have to replace it next year anyways as it’ll be EOL on security patches.
my concern is that we’re just generating more waste and raising costs.
I dont think you should worry about that. Having batteries glued in makes for worse recycling than removable batteries. glued Batteries causes a lot of issues in ewaste recycling and loss of rare metals. Easily removable batteries makes for a higher chance of recycling said batteries and actually lithium batteries are highly recyclable, so much so that raw materials made from recycled batteries is of higher quality than mined materials because they are more pure to begin with.
Properly recycling batteries separately is always better than ewasted batteries.
