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EU Parliament Calls For Longer Lifetime For Products (eubusiness.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Europe's Parliament called on the Commission, Member States and producers Tuesday to take measures to ensure consumers can enjoy durable, high-quality products that can be repaired and upgraded. At their plenary session in Strasbourg, MEPs said tangible goods and software should be easier to repair and update, and made a plea to tackle built-in obsolescence and make spare parts affordable. 77 per cent of EU consumers would rather repair their goods than buy new ones, according to a 2014 Eurobarometer survey, but they ultimately have to replace or discard them because they are discouraged by the cost of repairs and the level of service provided. "We must reinstate the reparability of all products put on the market," said Parliament's rapporteur Pascal Durand MEP: "We have to make sure that batteries are no longer glued into a product, but are screwed in so that we do not have to throw away a phone when the battery breaks down. We need to make sure that consumers are aware of how long the products last and how they can be repaired."
Not really 2-3x. The battery example cited is an easy one. A soldered/glued in battery is NOT 1/2 the cost of one that can be unscrewed or unsnapped. The trade off is a small increase in the thickness of the phone, or a small reduction in operating time if the form factor is kept constant.
In a lot of ways we have a race to the bottom, where initial impressions matter a lot, so making a slimmer phone wins compared to a longer lifespan phone that is slightly thicker, or has a larger bezel, so all manufacturers ditch the removable battery or go out of business. Some companies go to bigger extremes, making the phones intentionally irreparable with funky screws (Apple), key locked fingerprint sensors (Apple), and fully glued together stuff (latest MS Surface).
I would also add a mandate for required security updates for web enabled products until less than 10% of the shipped product is still operating in the field, and the same for keeping alive any servers needed to keep major functionality going. We have become awash in orphaned products that are still perfectly hardware functional but often lose support before they even finish shipping their last units.