EU right to repair updates pass latest hurdle Negotiators from the European Parliament and Council this week began the process of updating EU rules to ensure consumers are better informed about the lifespan and repairability of products before they buy them. There will also be new protections against greenwashing, adding a "black list" to the Unfair Commercial Practices …
Huh?
Not my personal experience with them. Over the years, used Philips shavers bought about anywhere, chargers are compatible, even between US and EU.
Not to say other products from the same manufacturer are exempt of that problem, but not this one IMHExperience
As far as I can tell they are and will have to adapt.
It's not just Apple that was targeted by that EU ruling, but all the companies that makes stuff with a rechargeable battery... so mouses, keyboards, shavers, and more will have to adapt.
( at least that my understanding of all the legalese )
That would be nice.
I'm not particularly fond of USB-C – mechanically it's not much more robust than earlier USB variants, particularly not compared to e.g. dead-simple barrel connector, and bad parts are a concern. (Knowledgeable consumers may make an effort to avoid those, but if we have to rely on knowledgeable consumers, we might as well give up now.) But at least if everyone's using it for everything, that makes charging much easier for consumers.
Yes, our German FDP ridiculed our whole country, again, biding to specific "this big name looks good on the resumé" companies.
Last example was that E-Fuels debacle, which showed up to be Porsche initiated. Porsche runs a small E-Fuels test facility in Chile, running on wind power. This way they COULD scale that up to produce E-Fuels in Chile to greenwash their company, even though the E-Fuel produced there will never ever show up outside Chile since transporting does not make sense and the "include everything" efficiency is below 5% of using batteries in cars (not my number, calculated by people who know, see our German scientists).
Therefore this type of greenwashing should be on the list too.
I think so, in Europe the regulatory oversight of such measures is performed by various government agencies. And if a company doesn't meet the regulatory requirements then it's fined. The fines can be challenged in courts, but it's rare for the courts to reduce the fines levied by the agencies.
"saying the new regs will protect against planned obsolescence "
Which will be a joke unless ~every product has legal minimum age it should last. Current EU minimum for cars is absolute joke of 10 years, as there's no reason for cars not to last 30 years. Anything less than that is planned obsolence.
For a phone? Forever (with replaceable battery, those won't last forever) No moving parts, there's no reason it should stop working. Use 20p connectors instead of 5p and those last decades of use.
Electronic parts can wear out. Capacitor electrolytes can degrade, for example. Conductors and insulators in resistors can degrade due to heat dissipation, changing the resistance. Metals can migrate across bimetalic joints.
Sure, there are plenty of people on Hackaday and the like coaxing old computers to life, but often they refurbish basic electronic components in the process.
And phones have mechanical parts too. They have cases and screens. They have buttons – I've yet to see a phone with no physical buttons at all. There's that USB charging port and its contacts.
Phones won't last forever. Forever is a long time. Personally, if manufacturers were forced to support them even for, say, 5 years, I'd be happy to see it. 10 years would still be reasonable. But "forever" is nonsense.
Then Signal is stupid, because the iPhone 8 is still getting updates. It can't update to iOS 17, but it will get security updates for years (just got one today, in fact)
Apple just released a security update for iOS 15 (covering back to the 6S) last week, and released an update for iOS 12 (covering back to the 5S!) in January - I could see where Signal might not consider iOS 12 as being updated regularly enough to count but not iOS 15 or 16.
I think they just don't want to bother to support multiple versions, and are crying "security" as the false reason.
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