People like to hate on PHP, but PHP provides you with all the tools you need to write a fully working backend, where as JS provides you with half-assed solutions for writing frontend, which is why we have 1000 frameworks and we still can't agree on how to write frontend code. Seriously, we don't even have a convention for writing a simple reusable component with vanilla JS, everyone makes up their own thing. Web components were supposed to be that, but they're a good example of what I meant by "half-assed", because they're ugly, verbose, clunky, don't really solve the right problems, and nobody likes writing them.
I don't think PHP is any better in solving the backend, than JS is in solving frontend. On the Frontend the situation is not ideal, but we made big leaps every let's say 5 years, going from jQuery to React and from React to later generation frameworks like svelte / solid etc. Yes, the landscape is fragmented and there are maybe too many options, but you make it sound like PHP is universally used as the backend solution, while I see it being used little these days except for legacy systems from 15-20 years ago.
> you make it sound like PHP is universally used as the backend solution, while I see it being used little these days except for legacy systems from 15-20 years ago.
I never said that PHP was universally used, just that it has answers to most problems.
jQuery has become obsolete these days because the problems it solves have largely been solved by additions to JS, but the interactivity of websites has continued to increase and browsers have yet to catch up to that. Frameworks like React actively fight against the browser rather than work with it by maintaining its own DOM state and constantly creating copies of state for every re-render of a component, along with a bunch of other magic. That's a lot of unnecessary loopholes just to make up for JS's lack of features when it comes to writing reactive UI.
Because it's been trendy to introduce a new unintuitive syntax with every new CSS feature.
I am genuinely afraid for the future of CSS as it is becoming increasingly more complex, meanwhile most people haven't been able to properly utilize or understand it for the last decade even without all of that additional complexity.
Remember when we used to be called "web developers"? We then became "software engineers", but forgot the meaning of the word engineer:
> Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to solve technical problems, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve systems.
We don't increase efficiency or improve systems, we just build garbage on top of garbage. Imagine if a structural engineer did the same and built new floors on top of shaky floors. Our buildings would be collapsing on a daily basis.
I get the potential appeal in having a single language do all things, but in practice the front-end and back-end have vastly different jobs and different capabilities, so I see no issue in them being different languages and letting them utilize their strengths. Not to mention the vast amount of complexity you need to involve at some point in order to bring a language to a side it wasn't meant to be in.
I'd love to, but I don't really have a choice at the moment.
Maybe I'm just at the wrong place at the wrong time, but as a software engineer I don't feel like I'm doing any actual engineering and solving meaningful problems, just spaghetti gluing random frameworks, packages and services together. The only problems I get to solve are those caused by the quirks of all these incompatible things being forced to work together. It's draining.
This is the job most of the time, especially at large corporations. You’re mostly fixing legacy decisions and trying to patch together solutions to current problems (instead of fixing tomorrow’s problems). Hang in there.
"Hang in there" implies that the situation is going to improve. It won't. You end up ratcheting your title and pay upwards until you find yourself in the position of doing nothing useful all day for an amount of money that precludes switching to another career without a drastic pay cut. And you're probably hitting your mid-life crisis zenith right around this time too.
"Boo hoo" I know, but it is its own little Dante's Inferno.
> People have a right to build substitutes and replacements -- I believe in the "Let a hundred flowers bloom" philosopy.
It's a blessing and a curse. Look at package managers, they more or less all do the same thing, with one primary job of "go download some binary so I can run it", yet there's so many to choose from. Every time you read some Linux guide they have to list 7 different ways of installing the same package. It's stupid, probably even more so for the maintainers of those packages because they have to distribute their package 7 different ways. At least I'm glad systemd has mostly become the standard, so you don't have to also see 7 different ways of creating a service.
Usually, it's the distributions problem to package software. You as a software developer publish documentation on how to build your application and then simply wait for other people to do the packaging for you. The creation of services is the same, you can maybe create a recommendation, but the service definition is part of the package file and thus not your problem.
In practice, though, the packagers quite liked systemd, because it a) makes service definition easier than any other system, and b) it significantly increases the likelihood that the developer has already written a suitable service file (and developers will like that that is used, because it reduces the chance that a packager makes a mistake and increases their support burden).
And as an end user of multiple distros, I really appreciate it because I also have to make services on occasion and it's nice that there's one way to do it and it's pretty easy to do correctly.
Usually, this is not good enough. I as a software developer often make use of the package manager built into the language of choice and use that to distribute my software. I also commonly make use of package managers of languages that I don't use to install software.
We are overdue to package manager interop and common interfaces.
> `ctx.Value` is an `any -> any` kv store that does not come with any documentation, type checking for which key and value should be available.
On a similar note, this is also why I highly dislike struct tags. They're string magic that should be used sparingly, yet we've integrated them into data parsing, validation, type definitions and who knows what else just to avoid a bit of verbosity.
Most popular languages support annotations of one type or another, they let you do all that in a type safe way. It's Go that's decided to be different for difference sake, and produced a complete mess.
IMO Go is full of stuff like this where they do something different than most similar languages for questionable gains. `iota` instead of enums, implicit interfaces, full strings in imports (not talking about URLS here but them having string literal syntax), capitalization as visibility control come to mind immediately, and I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Not all of these are actively harmful, but for a language that touts "simplicity" as one of its core values, I've always found it odd how many different wheels Go felt the need to reinvent without any obvious benefit over the existing ones.
the second i tried writing go to solve a non-trivial problem the whole language collapsed in on itself. footguns upon footguns hand-waved away with "it's the go way!". i just don't understand. the "the go way" feels more like a mantra that discourages critical thinking about programming language design.
This is one of the best thing I read; I thought I was pretty good at Flexbox (and its tailwindcss building blocks), but this scratched my itch on some theoretical foundations.
This is a step in the right direction but still doesn't address my biggest concern with e-waste - the battery.
Because almost none of the electronics you buy come with a replaceable battery, the second you buy something and use it on a regular basis it's destined to die and be thrown out within the next 4-8ish years due to the battery degrading and becoming increasingly more dangerous to keep around. Something that might be in perfect working condition and could be used for another 10 years has to be thrown out because of one single component.
I understand that batteries come in all shapes, sizes, capacities, yada yada, but imagine if we had standard rechargeable batteries like we have standard non-rechargeable batteries and things were built in a way where you could easily replace batteries like we could on phones a decade ago. You would double or triple the lifespan of a ton of things.
The thing that really annoys me is that batteries in most phones are indeed replaceable, but so many people just trash their phone when the battery life gets bad. Sure, many/most of these phones don't have a user replaceable battery, but even for high-end phones you can get the battery replaced for under $100 (and that's on the high end; for many you can get it done for half that).
I don't know if this is an education problem or what. Maybe manufacturers make it less obvious that you can get batteries replaced, because doing so would hurt sales of new phones. I dunno.
Sure, in an ideal world standardized batteries would be available off the shelf, and regular people could replace theirs with standard or even no tools. But honestly, I don't think the world we live in is that terrible when it comes to this.
And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.
It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.
I think this is changing simply because the rate of change for phones has slowed down like it did for computers. Just like a 2014 computer is a lot closer to a 2024 computer than a 2004 computer was to a 2014 computer in 2014, a five-year-old phone is a lot less outdated than five years ago.
After happily replacing the battery in a ten year old phone, six months later it was obsolete due to the 3G network switch off; the device was no longer capable of one of it's primary functions; making and receiving phone calls.
I could have had someone replace the battery in my Moto G%+ a couple of years ago. But it would have cost at least 800 NOK (about 80 USD). Instead I bought a Moto G30 for 1 200 NOK (about 120 USD) which has a better camera, faster processor, and more storage space.
Mobile phones haven't yet reached the point of diminishing returns on power, cameras, etc., so it doesn't yet make economical sense for an individual to keep the old devices working. I have kept the Moto G5+ and I use it as an internet radio and to listen to podcasts so it isn't a complete waste. Unfortunately the battery is now in such a poor state that I have to keep it on a timer to cut off charging frequently to avoid overheating.
Android could of course make batteries last longer by giving the user control over the charging regime.
I am going to say something that I haven't found anywhere but it has been my experience with every single battery replacement I ir somewhat close had.
The new battery, even if it's Samsung original, it isn't as good as new, it is better than the old one, but not anywhere close as first day phone.
Why? No idea. I imagine that although the battery is new it was built circa when the model was in production and somehow that has affected its capacity.
So you get a phone, you pay 60/80 euros, and you get maybe, two hours more of battery when a new phone would give you 6 or 7.
For a 4-5 year phone "under $100" still might be more than the phone is worth.
And then there is the other problem that an old enough phone is no longer getting software updates, including security updates either.
Yes, it is still probably less than buying a new phone but you don't know how long it will be before another component dies. If replacing the battery gives you another 4-5 years it might be worth it, but if something else is going to break in a couple months, probably not.
>Then we could begin forcing manufacturers to sell security updates regardless of the age of the device.
Who's going to pay for those updates? It's hard for the economics to work out. It makes sense for handset makers to pour engineering resources into developing and maintaining operating systems when there's millions of customers. How are you going to scrape together enough money when there's only a handful of customers?
I thought you had a point but then I remembered how funny it is. If you are dealing with sensitive customer data you shouldn't get to skip security.
It is actually cheap and easy if we change the question: Should you be allowed to run a closed source proprietary platform with insufficient security? After all, if you open it up and let people do what they want it becomes their responsibility.
Bricking the device at a predetermined date isn't very elegant but it would work. Maybe the user should have the option to return it (working or not) and get some money back.
It doesn't have to be that expensive to continue supporting old devices. If all your devices use the same software, and new versions don't add new hardware requirements it wouldn't be that hard to continue supporting old hardware.
But in the current ecosystem every device has its own medley of custom firmware and software that gets abandoned when the maker stops selling that version, and the makers are incentivized to stop updates to drive customers to buy new devices.
I think this is indeed a problem of awareness - and I'm sure you're right that companies wouldn't go out of their way to let users know they can do so - but also one of trustworthiness: I think a lot of people don't trust third-party repair shops because they feel it's sketchy or unsafe in some way. If phone manufacturers were like, "Here's a list of our trusted third-party repair shops and the parts they can fix" I imagine a lot more people would get their stuff repaired.
Yeah, that's surely part of that. There are authorized service centers in major cities, but that's not very accessible for a lot of people. When I got my battery replaced, it meant 2 trips to a 100 km distant city (no same day replacement) which also meant a day without my phone. I could have opted for an unauthorized repair shop, but again there's the problem with trust, these often seem quite sketchy.
Apple have already been taking steps to comply with this, with new “electrically-induced adhesive debonding” glue used to secure the iPhone 16 battery, instead of the problematic "stretch to remove" adhesive strips.
Apparantely this makes it significantly easier to change the battery compared to previous models:
Standardized and widely available batteries would also be a huge step forward. Like the old nokia phone batteries that you could pick up anywhere.
Recently I started buying gadgets that have 18650 batteries, seems about the only standard around, but trying to buy the batteries has been a challenge. I even tried a couple European Amzn stores, but they only seem to have third party suppliers. It put me off from buying the MNT Reform even though I love the concept.
And the 18650 USB torch I bought has some stupid propriety magnetic connector on one end, so I'd say any such legislation should include both ends of these charger cables.
> trying to buy the batteries has been a challenge
Huh? I had no trouble getting 18650 batteries in the EU. They're everywhere, both protected and unprotected cells; lots of brands to choose from, including cheap unbranded ones. You can even get ones with built-in USB-C socket for charging.
That’s not very clear. How easy is ”readily”? I replaced a few and found the biggest obstacle being the glue they use to keep them in place inside (they must sit in compartments larger than the battery since it changes size). But would it be enough to not have glue and instead Velcro there? Would still require plugging and unplugging tiny cables and screwing out 20 tiny screws. Or does ”readily” mean ”hatch”? Not so sure people want hatches…
Huh, I've heard about this for a while but for some reason thought it was strictly regarding phones, maybe because they've been making the biggest headlines about it. Looking forward to it then.
I'm going to assume something got lost in this game of telephone because this otherwise sounds like an oxymoron: Of course a "portable" battery would be removable and replacable.
The battery in my phone is portable (I carry it around) but not removable without specialized tools.
It's REGULATION (EU) 2023/1542 if you want to read it.
> ‘portable battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 5 kg or less, is not designed specifically for industrial use and is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery
> [...]
> A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
I think I see where I got tripped up. Essentially, they're saying all batteries in portable electronics will be portable by 2027 and defined as so-and-so; not that batteries today are portable and will be made compliant as defined so-and-so.
Because I think we can all agree: The battery on an ICOM walkie-talkie is portable, the battery in an Apple iPhone is not portable.
The definition of "portable" that's germane here is the statutory one that was quoted above:
> portable battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 5 kg or less, is not designed specifically for industrial use and is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery;
> ‘portable battery of general use’ means a portable battery, whether or not rechargeable, that is specifically designed to be interoperable and that has one of the following common formats 4,5 Volts (3R12), button cell, D, C, AA, AAA, AAAA, A23, 9 Volts (PP3);
When words are defined statutorily, that supersedes any "common sense" use of the word with respect to the sections governed by that statute.
It further goes on to state:
> Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.
So the goal is for all portable batteries to be removeable. However there's an exemption ("derogation") for devices intended to be used around water or washable. Most high end phones these days are to some extent submersible, which raises the question of whether this will exempt them from the user-replaceable requirement.
No, we cannot all agree. I think your definition of "portable" is not compatible with most people's. You seem to be conflating portable and removable; those are two different properties that do not have to coexist. If the battery in your iPhone was not portable, you would not be able to move your iPhone.
Given no further context, when I hear "portable battery" I think of a battery that is portable in itself. An iPhone is portable, but the battery embedded in it isn't. Contrast the battery pack that something like an ICOM walkie talkie would have, which is portable in itself.
Other ways to see it: An Electron program is portable, a .exe program is not portable; they are both programs. A stick of RAM is portable, soldered RAM on a motherboard or in a CPU is not portable; they are both RAM.
The comment I replied to mentioned "portable batteries" will be required to be "removable/replaceable", which sounds like an oxymoron because the entire point of a portable battery is that it's removable/replaceable.
The proper understanding was that electronics ("appliances") will become required to have portable batteries, because most batteries in them today are not portable.
If I'm still not coming across, let me put it this way: "Portable" in "portable iPhone" is a modifier on "iPhone", it is irrelevant with regards to the iPhone's battery which as of today is decidedly not portable anyway.
If I'm still not coming across: An iPhone being portable does not mean its battery is also portable.
You're coming across just fine. The problem is that you made a sweeping generalization that "I think we can all agree" when it is obvious that we cannot. Your definition does not make sense to me, just as mine does not make sense to you. Neither one matters anyway now that there is a legal definition that must be adhered to.
Removable batteries are a trade-off. They improve repairability and device longevity, but they increase manufacturing costs, reduce the effectiveness of waterproofing, and increase customer support issues. Battery contacts can degrade or become loose, causing phones to power off unexpectedly when handled roughly. Customers buy cheap 3rd party batteries and then complain to the phone manufacturer when battery life is poor. In some cases, 3rd party batteries malfunction and damage the phone (or even cause injury), and the customer blames the phone manufacturer. Samsung and Apple don't want to see news articles about their phones blowing up, even if it's obviously not their fault. And yes, they do tend to sell more phones if they use integrated batteries.
Rather than mandating a specific solution, a better strategy would be to tax electronic waste so that manufacturers have more financial incentive to make phones that last longer. It might also be helpful to limit the liability of anyone who sells phones with removable batteries, or have more standards for battery manufacturers, as most malfunctions will be due to 3rd party batteries.
Most phones don't have battery that is removable. But they are indeed serviceable. The battery alone is generally about 10 to 20 usd. And depends on where you are, add the service fee. Your phone is again good for 2 or 3 years. It's really just a tiny portion of new phone consider high end phones today went up to 1000~1500 usd range.
The official vendor normally have an artificially high service fee because they want you to buy a new one instead which is much more profitable. But servicing it in third party vendors isn't that expensive.
That's true, but it's also true that the inconvenience of paying $50-$100 and not having your phone for a day (and risking it being damaged) is enough to cause quite a few people to buy a new phone.
I've replaced the battery in most of my phones over the past decade, but that's because I don't like the larger form factor of new phones. Right now I'm on the iPhone 13 mini. Before that I had a 2nd gen iPhone SE (the same form factor as the iPhone 5). If I could get the form factor of an iPhone 4 and the specs of a modern phone, I'd probably be willing to pay $1,000. Unfortunately, like the headphone jack enthusiasts, people with my preferences are too small of a market segment to be worth going after.
That doesn’t mean the first phone is waste! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to buy a new phone.
The law won’t reduce smartphone ewaste. It will just satisfy the people who want removable batteries over sleaker design.
The battery is serviceable and it can be done quite easily and cheaply. In fact it’s done billions of times over.
Really just nanny state regulation, which as typical, will not bring any benefit and impose tremendous compliance costs and actually make some products worse.
Before the iPhone came we actually had replaceable batteries on most phones and it worked really well. Battery contacts degrading is definitely not a problem for a phone that has a lifetime of maximum of like 7 years.
Yes waterproofing becomes harder but it is not impossible.
Manufacturing costs are also not an issue since most phones have margins beyond 300%.
Most phones sold have very low and sometimes negative margins, actually. The high-end phones arena which Apple dominates is actually a minority of total phones sold.
Many repair shops will put old or cheap batteries in your phone. Even if they buy an expensive one they don't necessarily know what it is.
There are a lot of waterproof connectors on the market. They pretty much all work but if a standard is chosen it will absolutely be one that works.
I've used a good few battery powered tools, even cloths. If any manufacturer made [say] a drill with a glued battery I wouldn't use it if you paid me for it. You just walk to the charger, swap the battery and get back to whatever you were doing. There is nothing special about phones that deserves special consideration.
I wonder if the battery can be smaller if you can easily bring a few extra. My cameras have very small ones 700mah-ish specially when compared to the size of the camera. It is never a real issue. Just bring more batteries. Say phones have 4-5 times the mah and last 8 to 30 hours. You could slide on a battery with a bump and get 60 hours or a slim one with only 4-15 hours. That will eventually outperform the degrading cell.
I don't know where innovation is at but I imagine we could see new batteries with much better size to power ratio. If you already have the newest phone it would be a no-brainer.
Considering how many people are using cases and even wallet cases, probably very many people. The case/wallet can be attached to the phone as a replacement to the normal backplate, making it much less bulky, just as Samsung did forever ago.
Yet nobody is making high-end plastic phones anymore. Because nobody would buy them (just like no nobody cared about replaceable batteries so all companies stopped making them).
I don’t think that the case situation is necessarily rational but people generally seem to prefer more fancy/expensive/better looking phones these days.
That's just wrong. A port is not necessarily a hole through the case. It may be just a concave area. The water doesn't necessarily get in through ports either - there's lots of water-tight designs there.
well, batteries must be also certified. so yeah if you buy black market discarded faulty batteries on random site, you can expect a problem. of course catching all these sellers of crappy fake certified batteries becomes the responsibility of market regulator, but that is their job as far as i can tell.
> You would double or triple the lifespan of a ton of things.
Until they get dropped in the toilet.
Phones have gotten more waterproof as the batteries have gotten more permanently secured (not to mention induction charging). It's not a spurious correlation.
I am certainly very pro-removable-battery, but I feel like it's a safe bet your diving torch uses a round screw-on battery cover that is easy to get a reliable seal with even pressure across the whole thing compared to a flat rectangular opening like a phone battery. They are not comparable.
Yes, that’s true it’s a round screw on cap on the torch.
However, my casio G-Shock often comes with me and it’s only protected by a flat surface pushing on a gasket through 4 tiny screws.. the battery inside is a coin shape.
I didn't say it was impossible, just that the flashlight comparison is not great because it's not only a much easier design to seal but it's also a lot more tolerant of leaks.
it looks like you thinking about the excuses not the solutions. if you can't solve this problem does not mean that there is no one in the market who can't. and so we as consumers will reward the one who can't solve these new constraints presented by regulations.
That's not relevant. Your phone does not need to work for a long time underwater. The phone can be perfectly waterproof even if there's water between phone and battery.
My phone is a lot more sensitive to water intrusion. Having dropped totally non-waterproof flashlights in pools as a kid they'll generally still work even if totally flooded. Even if they get bad enough to stop working they'll almost certainly work perfectly once dried out.
I'm not denying that there are some trade-offs, but I'm also not strictly speaking about phones here. Think electric toothbrushes, trimmers, Bluetooth speakers and the other endless amounts of electric things with rechargeable batteries that don't have the space constraints of a phone.
It's weird to me that your line of thinking is actually a thing. It is not difficult to make a water-tight battery compartment for an electric toothbrush, but also make it trivial to open up and replace the battery. Hell, I just did a quick search for "electric toothbrush AAA battery", and these things exist and presumably work fine.
I feel like modern phones and the marketing around them (mostly from Apple) has pushed this nonsense that it's difficult to make water-resistant or water-proof electronics that still have a user-replaceable battery. Unfortunately this marketing seems to be working. Worked on you, at least. Gaskets, o-rings, and pressure seals are old, time-tested technology.
Admittedly it isn't as easy to make a water-resistant smartphone as it is to make water-resistant electric toothbrush. But it's far from impossible.
A toothbrush doesn't have the same space constraints, so they can just have relatively large seals, and they seal a relatively small opening (enough to fit a AA battery through).
It might well be possible to do this in a phone, but this sort of reasoning to come to that conclusion seems faulty. Like saying "Phones should be able to blow buildings apart. After all, tanks do it, so it's clearly possible."
It's not my area of expertise so I might just be delusional here, but from my understanding phones are difficult to make waterproof if they had replaceable batteries because they require a massive lid that spans across the entire phone while having a limited amount of thickness to work with and also because they have some expectations about the depth at which they remain waterproof. You don't necessarily have these constraints with a toothbrush. You can have a small opening at the bottom where you insert a tall battery and have plenty of height left to make a waterproof hatch. You're also unlikely to submerge your toothbrush in more than 50cm of water, like in the event of dropping it in the bathtub.
> Also, anecdotally, I’ve never had a sonicare toothbrush battery die. They still last weeks after many many years of use.
Sure, these exist too, though it doesn't reflect the majority of items which cheap out on all components, including batteries.
> Also, anecdotally, I’ve never had a sonicare toothbrush battery die. They still last weeks after many many years of use.
It’s the same for me, the whole toothbrush died two times shortly after warranty ended, with the battery having no issues. Not touching sonicare ever again. The cheap honeywell Chinese whatever brand is far more reliable for a small fraction of the price.
but you don't go diving with your bathroom devices. they need just splash protection which is not that complicated. i bet inventive competitor can come up with how to solve this problem efficiently and be rewarded by market.
I never understood that. Apple claims (for the iPhone Pro Max):
> Rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) under IEC standard 60529
But then, the fine print says:
> iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are splash, water, and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions. Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.
What is the difference here between being water proof and water resistant?
Is it because water proof is permanent and resistant is time based?
Doesn't that mean that nothing is water proof? A submarine then is also only water resistant, because they have depth limits.
Lastly, they're advertising something, but then stating it's not covered under warranty. Doesn't that go against the Warranty of Merchantability?
iPhone and submarines have different limitations. Submarines have a depth limit because they are (mostly) empty shells at very high pressure and the hull implodes, which is not the case of iPhones. For iPhones, being submerged for extended periods of time water will slowly get in at very low rates, but given enough time it will accumulate to significant quantities to do damage.
EU cant deal with single use e-cigarettes!
Just think about how much e-waste they generate, for years nothing has been done about it.
On the contrary: when recently Polish government considered banning them, they have stepped down because it would require notifying the EU(also "lobbying" aka corruption. One person present at the meeting when the matter was discussed couldn't recall on whose behalf he was there, but treated to sue if called a lobbyist).
You have the money. Buy things with replacable batteries. Fairphone 5, Google Pixel, Saksung Galaxy Xcover. These are all good phones. Encourage your friends to get them too. Let's make it the norm. Boycott locked-down unfixable hardware.
Often for me not the hardware was the bottleneck but the software - I had some old phones which became unusable because half of the essential software would not work anymore on the outdated android versions - same with iPhone, it gets updates for some years but if I can’t use e.g my banking app the phone is useless - these ungodly apps are half the reason I am forced to use this machine in the first place…
Wow, sorry for the misinformation. I misremembered. Yes, I'd definitely choose a Fairphone over an Xcover. (I did this time). The Xcover is very repairable compared to most phones but still a pain in the ass (plus locked bootloader) compared to a Fairphone.
The problem is the same as with "compact" phones - there are only few models so the choice is very limited and they are usually "so-so" (or have other issues).
The problem is, as always, with marketing - it's easier to sell "this is newer/better because <x> parameter is higher" [1] so we have gigantic phones with more megapixel cameras and higher waterproof rating though I'd argue that more people would be affected by dying battery than by lack of waterproofing… (no data to back it though). Anecdotally I were changing all my previous phones because the batter was dying and never in 20 years had issue with phone being sumberged...
Those are just dumb trends :/ I would love for a phone that has lumia design - it was polycarbon/rubbery, had easy access to battery and yet was super sturdy and I didn't feel the need to buy yet another cover because, to bump the margins, whole effin world is going "premium".
Same with cars so you have less and less choice for a normal sized city-car and everything has to be "crossover" or "SUV"... ffs...
Which devices don’t have replaceable batteries? No iPhone had a battery that couldn’t be replaced for maybe 10% or the purchase cost or so. Why do people consider a smartphone with a degraded battery ”e-waste”? Just go have the battery replaced?
And it'll continue to get worse because JS devs love coming up with their own abstractions over everything and piling complexity. You don't write JS, you write TS. You don't write HTML, you write JSX. You don't write CSS, you write Tailwind. And of course, React has its own compiler as of recently. Now you have to figure out in what order to run these parsers, bundle everything together including your hundreds of dependencies, minimize, obfuscate, tree shake, and whatever else fairy dust magic you want to sprinkle on top. Meanwhile, the default build tool of choice changes about once every 2 years, and now you also have a choice of runtime - node vs bun vs deno. Can't wait to see what the next revolutionary idea would be to contribute to this madness.
You forgot to mention the 3 or 4 different TypeScript compilers!
I do have to admit at least some of the pain is self-inflicted on my part. I _want_ those nice abstractions, so I will write a damn Rollup or Babel plugin if it means I can use Sass stylesheets in my TypeScript+JSX components that compile to vanilla Custom Elements (so I don't have to depend on a huge framework runtime).
But as nice as the Babel/Rollup/Vite plugin APIs are, when you start doing stuff like that you then have to deal with all the deep-in-the-weeds bullshit that comes with it, like the fact that Webpack and Rollup and Node.js all have subtly different (and mostly poorly documented) module resolution rules and that they all differ wildly from the official ES-module spec that the standards committee finally shipped like 20 years too late, so trying to get your unit-testing framework and your bundle toolchain and your browser to all agree about how to digest the mess you've made becomes this giant clusterfucktastrophe that makes you question every life decision and formative event that led you to the moment you thought this might be a neat idea.
But yeah just like build a React app or whatever and you'll probably be fine.
There are those of us out there that have a beautiful experience with JavaScript. Vanilla JS, web components, a lightweight rendering library like lit-html, class props as reactive state...
NodeJS + express + vanilla web components is the most graceful and productive stack I've ever used in 30+ years of development.
Good luck trying to use these tools with anything other than the blessed path of node on the backend.
The JS ecosystem absolutely has the problem of "too many compilers", and of course as I'm typing this there's someone out there writing a "one compiler to unify them all".
