It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
They could have been, but they absolutely weren’t. IP ratings weren’t ubiquitous until 2015-2016. You can buy an IP68 with a removable battery right now, but hardly anyone does. It’s not a flagship.
Further, there’s nothing in this bill to suggest that it will force manufacturers to go back to the old days of a removable backplate and plug and play batteries. I’d bet you’d be hard pressed to find a device that runs afoul of the bill’s language right now.
They could have been, though. It’s a shame manufacturers went for sealed in batteries instead because it saves them money and forces people to buy a new device or pay exorbitant fees for a replacement- so it’s a win win for them.
I will never understand why people defend sealed batteries, or other feature removal like removable storage. they have -zero- cons for the consumer and anyone who thinks they do have been duped by Apple-style advertising and marketing. Reminds me of the Onion video about the new MacBook Wheel.
I had a phone with a easily replaceable battery and it was waterproof. You say these weren’t common though they were. It’s often said that not being able to replace the battery is needed for helping things to be waterproof but that’s really not my experience, nor that of many others.
This claim comes up pretty much every single time. On a Dutch site people often give detailed answers on which phones they had that were waterproof and so on.
Apple, Google, LG, Samsung didn’t staple waterproof ratings until ~2016. Even in 2016 it was each of the above’s flagships that were guaranteed to be IP67+.
To say waterproof was common in the removable battery era is just not true. Water resistant wasn’t even that common. You had to go out of your way to get anything that was IP6X rated.
You can go buy a phone that’s IP68 rated with a removal battery right now, Samsung no less. But that’s beside the point. You give a manufacturer additional overheard and they will absolutely use it to justify an increased price that it absolutely unproportional to their cost increase. I’m not trying to make the argument that that’s a good reason against the idea of this. But I am telling you that they will use IP ratings as a price point.
And honestly, I wanna reiterate that as written, every manufacturer already exists comfortably within this law. The tools are easily had and you don’t HAVE to apply thermal energy. You should, but the fact that it CAN be done without is all the manufacturers need to sidestep this.