For a while, it seemed like every major fight between Apple and Europe ended the same way. Regulators drew a line, Apple pushed back, and eventually the company changed its products.
USB-C replaced Lightning. Alternative app stores arrived on the iPhone. Interoperability rules chipped away at Apple’s famously closed ecosystem.
If you followed the company closely, you could almost predict the ending before the story began. However, this one is different.
The European Commission has adopted an exemption to its Batteries Regulation that covers products such as the Apple Watch and AirPods, allowing them to retain their sealed-battery designs if the measure survives its remaining procedural review.
After years of predictions that Europe would force every gadget toward user-replaceable batteries, regulators ended up carving out an exception for some of Apple’s most tightly engineered products.
That’s not because Apple suddenly won the political argument. It’s because physics proved harder to negotiate with than legislation.
Also: Apple just avoided a major Apple Watch shake-up, and millions of owners will probably be glad it did
Take apart an Apple Watch, and you’ll immediately see the problem. There isn’t a removable battery door hiding somewhere under the band.
The entire device is built around squeezing a display, sensors, antennas, haptics, and a battery into a case that’s expected to survive swimming pools, rainstorms, gym sessions, and years strapped to your wrist. Every fraction of a millimeter matters.
Apple has leaned on that explanation for years. Repair advocates often heard it as another excuse from a company that has never been enthusiastic about letting customers fix their own devices.
That criticism isn’t without merit. Apple has earned plenty of skepticism through its long history of resisting independent repair.
But skepticism isn’t the same thing as disproving the engineering.
Read the Commission’s reasoning, and it sounds remarkably familiar. Opening compact waterproof wearables can compromise safety, damage structural integrity, and make reliable resealing difficult.
Those aren’t Apple’s talking points anymore. They’re now part of Europe’s own justification for the exemption.
That doesn’t suddenly settle the right-to-repair debate. Plenty of larger products can still be designed for easier battery replacement, and regulators continue to push manufacturers in that direction.
Nintendo, for example, has already committed to a user-replaceable battery for the European version of the Switch 2.
The bigger surprise is what this says about Apple’s relationship with Europe. For years, the assumption was that regulators would keep forcing Cupertino to redraw its product roadmap.
This time, they studied the same engineering constraints Apple had been pointing to all along and decided the rules needed to bend instead.
That’s a rare outcome. It also makes future predictions about Europe, “forcing Apple” to redesign every sealed product, look a little less certain than they did yesterday.
Do you think Europe finally got this one right, or should Apple still have been forced to make Apple Watch and AirPods batteries user-replaceable? Let us know in the comments.
