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.
Anything is possible but it costs more money and makes the product bigger. I don’t see how consumers are going to stomach a wireless ear bud that has removable batteries when the ear buds get large, uncomfortable and expensive. I guess we will see what the market bears.
Airpods could literally just have a little threaded battery with an o-ring, as that stick part. The added expense and engineering challenges are minor. They just don’t do it because they want you to buy new ones every couple of years.
Yeah, this kinda hit me whenever my first pair of AirPods died because I was using them so much. They have such tiny batteries, so a percentage difference in total charging capacity was felt quicker. Additionally, the use-case lends to them being discharged almost completely, which hurts life further. While it’s convenient, I realized I was paying a really sharp subscription service where there’s no service from the manufacturer to continue the use of the parts and ultimately the product is designed to be landfill debris.
I switched to a wire after that.
There are lots of ideas like this when you don’t consider the battery certification process and the tons of safety standards. A stand alone battery like this requires it’s own housing (needs to be thick so you can’t crush the soft battery), certified connector for measuring it’s temperature and getting power out, include it’s PCM circuitry and be perfectly safe for whenever a customer might accidentally do to it. It’s far from from trivial. I do this for a living.
Honest question: is this different than the standards for things with non-removable batteries?
Same standards, and some extras depending on how you do it, but now the burden is on a small accessory part (the removable battery) instead of the complete system. The biggest hurdle here is the EU say it needs to be tool free and done by the customer. That’s a tremendous hurdle. Even today with cell phones that are considered repairable they require tools and don’t meet this bar.