Ominbus tech thread

[Dr Strangelove]

Ten months from now, all devices sold within the European Union must have batteries that are easily replaceable by the average user.

This law even includes Apple, which has already begun designing its phones to have replaceable batteries.

Apple quietly doubled iPhone battery cycle life in 2023, from 500 to 1,000, and almost nobody understood why.

They were paying the compliance cost two years before the law existed, to permanently exempt themselves from the user-replaceable battery rule everyone now thinks is coming for them.

The actual EU regulation, Article 11 of 2023/1542 in force Feb 18, 2027, has an exemption baked in. If your battery hits 80% capacity at 1,000 charge cycles plus an IP-rated waterproofing standard, you skip the user-replaceable requirement entirely.

iPhone 14 spec: 500 cycles. iPhone 15 onward: 1,000 cycles. Apple printed the new number in their own spec sheet 18 months before any other major manufacturer caught on. Right to Repair Europe published a public lament in February 2025 calling the exemption a huge opportunity missed because it swallowed the consumer rule for any phone built well enough.

The math on the other side is brutal. A $150 Android with a 500-cycle battery cannot meet 1,000 cycles without a redesign that adds thickness, kills IP68, and lifts BOM cost roughly $20-40. On a $150 device that is the entire margin. Computerworld called it the end of cheap Android.

So the picture in this tweet is upside down. Ursula von der Leyen wrote a law where iPhone keeps its sealed glass sandwich and the Tecno Spark gets killed. Apple saw it coming in 2022 and shipped the workaround in 2023.

The real rule of EU tech regulation: the exemptions are the law. Read those before you read the headline.

[Dr Strangelove]

The global smartphone market is facing a historic decline:

Global smartphone shipments are set to fall -13% YoY in 2026, or -160 million units, to ~1.1 billion, according to IDC.

This marks a sharp drop from a +2% growth in 2025 and +6% in 2024.

The decline is being driven by an unprecedented memory chip shortage that is inflating component costs across the industry.

As a result, smartphone makers are discontinuing unprofitable entry-level models and pushing consumers toward higher-priced devices.

Last year, ~170 million smartphones shipped for under $100, a segment currently uneconomical to maintain.

The shortage is expected to persist into mid-2027, and even when supply returns, memory prices are unlikely to fall back to 2025 levels.

The days of cheap smartphones are over.