Bring back removable batteries!
Every phone, laptop, and handheld game console should have a removable battery. Anything less is downright criminal.
Android phones. iPhones. Nintendo Switch’s. Nearly every laptop from a major laptop maker.
They all have one, infuriating, thing in common:
Non-Swappable Batteries.
This is an intentional design choice that severely limits the lifespan of our portable computing devices. Because, let’s face it, batteries don’t last forever. Eventually — often sooner rather than later — they’ll need to get replaced.
Likewise, the lack of user-removable batteries limits the usage of our devices in scenarios where we are away from charging stations for significant periods of time. It used to be that we could bring spare batteries with us for our gear.
Heck. Old laptop bags used to have pockets specifically designed for those spare batteries. You could, often, even purchase battery charging stations that could charge multiple laptop batteries at once.
So why don’t companies do this anymore?
Simple: Money. Batteries die. If we could replace our batteries, that would extend the lifespan of our computing gear. And we wouldn’t need to buy new gear as often.
Non-replaceable batteries = More frequent forced hardware upgrades.
“But, Lunduke!” you shout into the abyss of the Internet. “What about making devices thinner!? If you make batteries removable, that might mean that hardware is thicker! That would be the end of the world!”
I’ve never met a single person who has said “You know what? It is so important to me that my laptop or pda or phone is a few millimeters thinner… that I’d be willing to let my hardware lifespan be shortened by decades and be forced to upgrade regularly.” Which means the “thinner hardware” argument for non-swappable batteries is not a real thing.
This really wasn’t a problem in “ye olden times”.
What follows are a number of portable computers with amazing, swappable batteries. Just to make the point that the past was, in so many ways, better than the present.
Apple used to be great at this. The old iBooks? Easy to swap out the batteries. Didn’t require a tool or anything. You could use a coin to turn a battery lock and out pops the battery. Which you could buy replacements for.
Or the Apple Powerbook G3 line? TWO hot swappable batteries. One on each side. No tools required. I quick flip of the lever and out pops the battery. You could have two in there at once for MASSIVE battery life.
Or you could have none in there at all. Your choice!
Man. How Apple has changed, eh? They don’t make a single piece of hardware with a user-replaceable battery now.
Or, check this out for user-serviceable batteries: The HP 200 LX.
An MS-DOS powered palmtop… that runs on two AA batteries.
Seriously.
Battery life? 30+ hours.
Run out of juice? Plug it in. Or pop in two more AA’s.
And cell phones! So many had easy to swap batteries. The Nokia N900 (among nearly all other Nokia phones of the time) had an easy to swap battery that had a shared model with many other phones. Making it easy to find replacement batteries to this day.
Oh! And the Palm Pilots! Most of them had batteries that were either easy to replace (or semi-easy to replace)… and the early ones ran off AAAs! At least up until the Palm m125. After that they moved from quick swappable AAA batteries to rechargeable battery packs. But, even then, they were replaceable in less than a minute or two.
The original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color, and the Game Boy Advance all ran on AA batteries. The Advance SP used a rechargeable battery pack that was replaceable with one screw.
The Nintendo Switch? Swapping that battery out is a 21 step process that can take up to 2 hours. And that’s easier than many pieces of modern gear.
Absolutely preposterous.
I call on all of the computer-y hardware companies of the world: Apple, Dell, Nintendo, Microsoft, Samsung, HP… all of you…
BRING BACK USER REPLACEABLE BATTERIES!
Wrote this while laying in bed, sick with the Covid. Don’t really feel up for much “work”, so this was a stream of consciousness nerd-rant. Didn’t even bother proof reading it. That sounds hard. Because sick.
On that note…
Are you subscribed to The Lunduke Journal yet? You should. It’s great. :)
Another thing, after looking at that HP 200LX: where have all the great netbooks gone? There was a tiny sliver of time when the modern “netbook” was a thing, and then the industry just went, “Nah, laptops or tablets is the way to go.” I want my pocket-sized computer!
…which, with the help of a cheap pocket-sized wireless keyboard with trackpad, I have finally obtained in the form of the Pinephone!
I have a Black Diamond head lamp that uses both rechargeable battery AND AA batteries. You just swap in whichever you want to use, which I think is a nifty, best-of-both-worlds system.