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Batteries Continue To Suck
pvt_medic writes "As technology continues to grow, and we see more and more of a shift to portable electronic devices in our daily life, we are still constricted by one simple thing: Batteries. Newsweek has an interesting article about the lack of development in battery technology. 'Ironically, in our headlong rush to create sophisticated untethered computing, the most problematic technology turns out also to be the oldest: those nondescript metal cylinders that never seemed to be included with our Christmas toys.' And for those of you who would like an extensive overview about batteries, ExtremeTech.com has a nice overview."
Seriously, what about all those great Slashdot battery articles we've seen over the past few years? The amazing advances that were supposed to revolutionize our portable electronics? I've been wondering about them recently. Was manufacturing these theoretical advances just too difficult?
You know, it would be nice if submitters could write their own summary of the article instead of lifting verbatim the first paragraph of the quoted story. Don't they teach anything in school anymore?
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Quit bitching or open-source the laws of physics.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
If only we could harness all of our wasted energy. Like those watches that gain power by your movement. Devices should be looking to get energy from as many sources as possible. Solar, moving etc. Do I have the answer on how to do this? Hell no, I'm just some punk on Slashdot with crazy ideas that are technically impossible. When *they* create wireless power, I'm definitely investing in their business.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
so then,
whenever fellow geeks and I talk about the old batteries are shit problem we get to 2 places:
1) clockwork batteries - you know minaturising Baylis' clockwork radio concept into just a cell
- needs good microdynamo and capacitor
2) Gas powered - same again but micro turbine
Both these suffer from being 'always-on' and so lifespan is unrelated to current drawn.
Don't laugh but nuclear batteries are also feasible mass production artifacts, just no one would want them because they would fuck up the env, so bad idea.
Another angle worth looking at is capacitor technology and finding better electolytes and using nanofibre tech to make monster caps like 10F or more at 5v.
Perhaps improving batteries is simply a more difficult problem. Some problems are genuinely harder than others, and which are harder than others is not always intuitive. While there are certainly industries willing and able to stear technological development for their own benefit, I doubt the battery industry is one of them.
-Hil
power, size, and longetivity: choose any two
filter: +3. Hey, look! all the trolls went away!
Only if you don't give a sh*t about the environment.
Be responsible and use NiMH which can be recharged 1,000 times. They are also a hell of a lot cheaper than "dollar store" batteries over the long run.
All I know is when I got my first mercury alkaline batteries in 1966 to power my Ross 3 inch reel-to-reel tape recorder, they lasted over 2 years with daily use! the second set lasted about 6 weeks. I think batteries are like light bulbs, there's no profit in making them well
Nothing.
In fact, you've illustrated the main point of the article. Your laptop drops in price because it's obsolete and can easily be replaced with a better one for the same price. Your battery, on the other hand, is still pretty much state of the art, and can't be readily improved upon, so it holds its value.
It's possible that batteries have indeed gotten better and more efficient but that the technology that we've been using them in has gotten more and more power hungry?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
It's not batteries that are the constriction, it is slow IO hardware.
Imagine what you could do if your hard disk could read data as fast as your processor could handle it (think RAM-like or cache-like speed)
Two things, first one is used the other is probably new (used batteries aren't much good)
second, they are selling the battery to make a profit. It is common practice for companies to sell maintenance items at a high markup for years after initial production. see the car industry.
I agree they are expensive, sometimes you can get the newest technology laptop batteries for older laptops and get a great increase in usage.
That article in Extreme Tech *looked* interesting until I noticed the date: June 2001.
Just goes to show the poster's point about the lack of truly revolutionary development in the battery field. But *please*, don't describe a two year old article as an "overview."
It's better described as "history."
.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Obviousally the writer is so young as to not remember the evil that is the NiCad battery.
Today's batteries are unbelieveably nice and great compared to the utter crap we had to use just 7 years ago.. NiCad batteries would get a memory effect, last very short times and have abyssimal storage capacity.
batteries have came a long way, and they will continue to improve... how about making processors and displays that dont suck down amps of power?
the problem isn't the batteries, the problem is the horrible inefficency of today's tech!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I'm sure battery vendors can find something to do more or less the same but why should they when they could continue charging you? Salesman: Ok I'm gonna give you this product and dont worry you will never have to see me again! Dream on. Its not in the vendors best interests to do something like that so don't expect anything to come out of their labs for like... ever.
Girls gone g[inset your imagination here]
MoFscker
The public accepts the idea that batteries die and need to be replaced, so therefore, battery companies make money. What would be their incentive to create better batteries? So that the public would have to purchase them less frequently? Then we'd probably just end up paying the difference for the better battery. I doesn't sound like a good business model to take a cut in profits to make everyone's life a little bit easier. I don't really think there's much of a public demand to reform the battery industry, so therefore there's no need to do so for the industry. Just keep up with the technology.
I guess on a side note, my rechargable batteries are a godsend. While you can debate the economics of it all (40$ for a charger and 4 batteries), I just like not having to worry about having batteries for my MP3 player [Nike PSA64]. I use it primarily for working out, I go through a battery every week or two, throw it in the charger, and then replace it. They've lasted all summer and still give me numerous days of life. Prior to purchasing them, I was going through batteries like a mad man, buying a pack every two weeks to keep up with my working out. I think its the best solution for anyone who goes through a lot of batteries...
"In a Democracy, people get the kind of government they deserve." -Winston Churchill
How is it that "batteries don't last as long as I'd like" turns into "there's no development put into batteries" in some people's minds? There's lots of time and money put into developing better batteries because if someone creates the better battery they will make lots of money.
The lack of headway is the chemistry, not the funding or effort. There's a finite limit on the amount of energy you can safely store and retrieve chemically from a given volume. A lot of development is focused on getting higher energy/volume ratios, lithium polymer and methanol fuel cells are good examples of this branch of development.
Looking for better battery chemistries is much more difficult. Between environmental concerns and ridiculous patents trying to market new chemistries isn't a cake walk for any company. There's a lot of materials that can be used in batteries. Not all of them are things you want ending up in land fills or in the hands of complete and utter morons.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
A rechargeable battery that puts out 1.5 volts instead of 1.2 like current NiCds and NiMH batteries. That way you can use them in devices that were designed for alkalines, e.g. boom boxes and portable TVs. Using currently available rechargeables sucks, because you have less useable time with the device because the voltage was low to begin with.
And like what was mentioned in another post, faster charge times. I would drive an electric vehicle everywhere if I could go 200 miles (with no slowing down towards the end) per charge, and a completely full charge only took 10 minutes.
Batteries have never at any time kept up with Moore's law, so I don't get your point.
Moderators, in what way exactly is this "Informative"???
I'm sorry, but cheap alkalines are a good solution if you have a flashlight that you hardly ever use but that's about all they're good for. It does nothing for the case of the laptop or PDA, and they're envinronmentally unfriendly for anything that is used a lot or has a high draw.
Listen up all y'all. It is time to testify.
Maybe the problem isn't the batteries, maybe the problem is what we expect them to do. Sure a laptop that runs Unreal Tournament 2003 at 100 fps is nice, but when was the last time you saw anyone playing it off their battery.
Portable eletronics will always need to be more rugged and less power hungry then their stationary brethern, without exception, no matter how good batteries get. So here is a bright idea.(let me know if this gets too deep for you) How about we stop expecting portable electronics to be as powerful as non-portable electronics?
Sure try to make better batteries, work as hard as you can at it, but keep in mind what Lone Star said to the Druish Princess Vespa: "Take only what you need to survive"
No, and by that I mean zero, laptops need a DVD-R. Almost no laptops need any 3D accelerator. Why, on god's green earth, do cell phones need a camera? Why does a PDA need enough hardware to play videogames? Do you buy a cellphone for a camera? Did you go shopping for a portable video game system and say to yourself, "Hey this GBA is pretty cheap and has really good games, but I am looking for something that is 4 times as much and is hard as hell to play games on?"
Opmization is what must prevail. Making one machine that does everything, will not work. Give the people what they need. No one is buying a phone for its camera. They buy a camera for that. Power saved. No one needs to burn a DVD while flying from New York to LA. Power saved.
I mean look at the Game Boy. The first took 4 AAs and lasted 4-6 hours. The Game Boy Color took 2 AAs and lasted 10 hours. The Game Boy Advance takes 2 AA and lasts 15 hours. Batteries have not gotten that much better, but today's Game Boy users are spending 1/8th as much on them.
Programmers need to care about memory and processor usage again; engineers need to care about power consumption again. Do you really think that an mp3 player really needs to take 20MB of space? Power saved.
Batteries aren't the problem. People are.
SW
Batteries already don't supply any current when they're not in use (this is due to something physicists like to call the conservation of energy): you only use as much power as you draw. Portable devices inevitably leak current, which is the real problem. Batteries do leak charge, but the fundamental physics doesn't require a special on-off switch built into the batteries to turn them "off", and as a practical matter, it doesn't make any more difference than having an external on-off switch.
Seiko has a watch that runs based on your arm motions.
Whatever will they think of next? Now excuse me while I put on my grandfather's watch, which is still ticking away after seventy five years, despite the fact that there is no way to wind it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Batteries may not have been getting any better, but the devices *are* getting more energy-efficient. When I got my first portable CD player, I could get about 3-4 hours out of 2 AA batteries.
My brother's shiny! new portable CD player lasts for hours on end on the same amount of batteries.
Admittedly, greater capacity batteries would be great, but we're not doing too badly!
perl -e 'print "Just another Perl newbie\n";'
There is an entire class of industry that revolves around the fact that their products are disposable.
Batteries, Light Bulbs are two of the oldest members. Neither set of manufacturers have any kind of incentive to make their products last SIGNIFICANTLY longer. Their revenue streams are BASED on the fact that you have to replace them.
The faster you go through them, the cheaper they are.. (carbon batteries are cheap compared to Alkaline, which are cheap compared to NiMH), becase they can make up the different in volume. But they still have to make money.
So, what incentive do they have to make a battery that lasts substantially longer? I shy away from replacing my laptop batteries until the absolute last moment, because they run about $120 each, and most people that have one will tell you that a used laptop battery (charge/discharge, lather rinse repeat) will only last about a year, maybe 2 before your runtime is in fractions of an hour..
It's simple economics.
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.