Why using wireless PowerShare is a bad idea. - planned obsolescence

For anyone who doesn't know, wireless PowerShare discharges a smartphone's battery wirelessly into another another smartphone. The smartphone acts as a wireless charging pad but with its own non-replaceable battery as a power source.

Now, why is that a problem?​

PowerShare turns your shiny gadget into a useless brick even faster.

PowerShare would only make sense for smartphones with a user-replaceable battery, since it wears down the battery at a rapid pace.

Given that only a tiny fraction of smartphones released since the last decade come with a user-replaceable battery, PowerShare should only be reserved for emergencies. The non-replaceable battery already is the one part that limits the operational life expectancy of many smartphones. PowerShare is a sure way to get there even faster.

So long as batteries in mobile phones are not replaceable, PowerShare is a wasteful use of the phone's finite charging cycles.

A battery might be replaceable by a phone repair shop, but even that is being restricted by the serialization of batteries. Serial numbers are associated with the battery to disable some operating system features if an "unauthorized" replacement is detected, of course "to protect the consumer". Yeah, right. Also, there have been reports of privacy invasions by phone repair shops. And it takes hours to go there to and later to pick up your repaired phone, rather than minutes to insert a replacement battery at home.

Limiting performance to prevent loss of performance​

People are already forced into using power saving mode to delay the weardown of their phone batteries. This means they limit the performance of the powerful processors they paid for. People also keep the battery charge between 25 and 75 percents or similar, which artificially halves the useable battery capacity. To delay an actual reduction in capacity, people artificially limit their battery capacity. Isn't that ironical?

Non-replaceable batteries are as insane as non-replaceable oil in a car. They take users' freedom away to use their phone at the full performance without having to worry about irreplaceable parts.

If your phone battery is expired (dead) and your data is on internal storage and not MicroSD, good luck getting access to your data. You might have to resort to creating an FTP server on the phone. Otherwise, have fun bluetooth-sending each file to a different device and lose their date and time stamp in the process.

There is hope.​

It appears the EU is trying to do something against non-replaceable batteries. It might be two decades late, but better than never. If I could have made the law, I would have immediately nipped non-replaceable batteries in the bud before the sunrise of January 10th, 2007, the day after the first iPhone came out.

Or perhaps even earlier.


A replaceable battery is like a battery never wears down.

[I hereby release the text of this post under Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution ShareAlike. The embedded video, "iPod's Dirty Secret", is a work of Casey Neistat.]