Catching up

EU battery regulation, Nintendo, and Microsoft

Welcome back to Multicore for, um, Friday June 23rd.

Apologies for my absence earlier this week. As I mentioned on Substack Notes, I managed to fully dislocate my shoulder playing pickup basketball over the weekend in what I can only describe as a very on-brand injury. I was “driving to the rim” and it ended up looking more like driving into a ditch. I'm okay, but my left arm isn't, so I'm typing this with some degree of difficulty.

But it's been a conveniently slow week for news, which is often the case when there's a US holiday on Monday (in this case Juneteenth). I'll round up some thoughts on a few stories so we're all caught up for now and ideally we can get back to the sweeping epics next week.

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The European Union has overwhelmingly voted to revamp regulations on batteries, with the ultimate goal of reducing e-waste.

Here's the part of most interest to Multicore:

Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance.

A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance.

There's a lot of wiggle room in this wording, and the implementation isn't expected to happen until 2027 at the earliest. Ultimately, though, it could result in the EU mandating user-swappable batteries in devices like smartphones, depending on how hardline a path it takes. Does an iPhone already qualify because you can take it to a repair shop run by an "independent operator" and get its battery replaced? Who can say.

The Fairphone 4, a rare modern phones with a removable battery