The EU has recently passed a new regulation that smartphone manufacturers will have to abide by if they want to continue selling in the European market. All new smartphones are going to need to have user-replaceable batteries in them by 2027. Now this was actually a pretty common feature on phones back in the day, at least on every phone but iPhones because they never had removable batteries. But on the Android platform, user-removable batteries were pretty much a standard thing. And this actually used to be one of the big selling points of having an Android phone over an iPhone. Because none of the phones back then really had what you would consider to be an all-day battery life. I mean maybe if your phone was remaining idle for most of the time, you could get through the whole day without it dying. But the idea of using your phone the whole day on a long international flight or letting it idle for several days was out of the picture. Also the phones back then didn't charge nearly as fast. So once you plugged it in you had to sit by the outlet for a while if you wanted to keep using your iPhone. But the Android chads of 10 plus years ago could just take another fully charged battery out of their pocket or out of their backpacks, pop the back off their phone, swap it with the dead one, and then boot their phone back up all in about one minute. And if you think about it, this still blows away the charging capacity of the fast charging phones of today because none of them can give you an additional 2000 or so milliamp hours of battery in 60 seconds like you can get with a battery swap on a Galaxy S3. Today's Android phones have hardware that's almost indistinguishable from the iPhone, especially now that the next gen iPhone 15s are supposed to also have USB-C charging ports. Although that specific change came from another earlier E-regulation that requires all the phones to use the same charging ports by 2024. But this new regulation to require removable batteries could be a real game changer for the smartphone industry. People could start packing multiple internal batteries to use in their phones for long trips. And this would be really handy when people are driving, especially if you have multiple people that are in a car and it's an older car where you can't all charge your phones at once. We could see things like people just pulling over to get gas periodically and then swapping their batteries at that point. And you know one side effect that this is probably going to have is external power banks becoming less popular. Like I'm sure that the larger ones that have high enough wattage to run PCs and power tools off of them will probably still be around because they have a whole lot more utility. But those smaller power banks that just have USB outlets, they're just going to look like a bulkier less efficient alternative to battery swapping. Especially if you have something that can charge multiple smartphone batteries at once, that's something that I would really like to have as someone that occasionally uses multiple phones to film things. And another major change that we'll probably see is people actually keeping their phones for longer periods of time. For several years now, smartphones have had specifications that are really similar to mid-range laptops, aching bytes of RAM, multi-core processors, and high-definition cameras are standard even on cheap phones. And these specifications are perfectly fine for most people that just use their phones for social media, messaging, calling, ride sharing, really about 95% of everything that people do on their phones. And the only real reason that modern smartphones start getting slow, besides software bloat of course, is because their operating systems will start to undervolt the processors in order to prolong the phones on time when it has a degrading battery. And this is why you might have felt like your phone all of a sudden got a lot faster after you took it to a repair center or you mailed it in to have the battery replaced. I think for a lot of people, instead of just buying a new phone every three to five years, people are going to start buying new phones only when they become damaged beyond repair or some major smartphone innovation is made that really makes you want to go out and get a new one. But let's be real, what innovations have even been made to smartphones in the last 10 years or so. The biggest improvements that I've seen have been to the cameras and of course them adding multiple cameras onto the phones. But smartphone image quality is never going to be able to compete with proper mirrorless cameras because they just have much larger sensors. And being able to change the lens on your camera gives you a whole new domain of functionality that these fidget spinner camera arrays that have become standard on smartphones are just an overpriced invitation of. I think we could see a really large erosion to the sales volume of smartphones worldwide because of this because I also doubt that smartphones with removable batteries are just going to be localized to Europe. So Samsung, Apple, the dozen or so Chinese film manufacturers, they're going to start making these phones with removable batteries for all markets. And so if the smartphone can become something that people can actually keep for six years or more, one of the changes I think we might see is a transition to people buying flagship devices more often instead of mid-range phones because you might as well pay twice as much for the phone if you're able to keep it for twice as long. The buy for life mentality can finally be somewhat applied to smartphones because of this. And of course in our society a lot of people see the smartphone as a status symbol. So maybe more people are going to buy into that if they can actually keep the thing for more than five years. But there's likely going to be some downsides to this removable battery transition as well. I believe that greed was the primary motivator for batteries being embedded in our devices in the first place because it lets the manufacturer charge you for a repair service in three years. But of course this isn't the reason that we were given for the new smartphone paradigm. The two excuses that I usually hear for embedded batteries is that sealing the phone up gives it better water resistance and embedded batteries ultimately allow you to put a larger capacity battery in a smaller phone chassis. So if we assume that there is some truth to these claims made by manufacturers we could start seeing a regression in battery life for one battery and the whole idea of water resistant devices just starting to fade out. But honestly I feel like that's a bit of a fair trade off. I mean I could always use a three-part case to make my phone actually waterproof because the phones aren't actually waterproof. They're just water resistant right it's not something you're supposed to be able to drop into pool and let it survive. And even if the battery capacity shrinks by like 20%. I wouldn't care if I could just swap it out for a fresh one in the middle of the day. So I don't know is that a trade off that you guys be willing to make? Like I said I think it sounds pretty good to me. And another change that I just thought of is we might see a reduction in people keeping their phones naked meaning not using a case because depending on how these removable batteries are implemented like I've had a couple of smartphones that had removable backs and removable batteries. And the first one I didn't have a case for I think it was my S3 or my S4 because it was very durable. I mean this was before wireless charging so nobody was making glass and ceramic phones. They were usually made out of plastic and aluminum. So it's not like they shattered when you dropped them but oftentimes the back case would pop off if you dropped your phone and so if you dropped your phone on a sidewalk while it's raining or something like that then your phone would probably be toast. You're good to get water right on the battery or right on the logic board so that might be a bit of an issue we might see. You know it's really going to be interesting seeing the engineering challenge to build a foam that you can take apart without any special tools that's able to maintain a large degree of water resistance and to be able to put a large battery inside of there. Whatever breakthrough is achieved that makes all this possible I think we're going to end up paying a premium for it. I just can't picture a Samsung or Apple keeping the price tag of flagship phones around a thousand dollars and just taking the L and letting us use them for twice as long. Maybe they won't just raise the MSRP by a significant amount because that's too obvious. Maybe we'll see them getting their money back in some other way like getting people to pay for more cloud storage by cutting the onboard storage in half and say it was necessary in order to make the batteries removable but I still have some hope that we are living in the best timeline where the EU is going to continue to pass manufacturing requirements for smartphones that finally make them based again. I really just hope that the next bill that the EU passes simply reads, you will include the headphone jack, you will include the expandable storage, you will not lock down the bootloader to prevent the customization and you will not keep on adding these city cameras to the smartphone, you will be allowed to have only two cameras, one on the front and one on the back and you will comply with these regulations and you will be happy.