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Why Is a Laptop's Battery Dearer Than a Lawnmower's?
Barence writes "PC Pro's contributing editor Paul Ockendon has bought a new lawnmower powered by lithium-ion batteries — part of a recent flood of such lithium-ion-powered garden and workshop tools which are taking over from NiCd and NiMH thanks to lighter weight, longer life and lack of the pernicious 'memory effect.' This is pretty much the same battery technology used in laptops, mobile phones and MP3 players, so volume manufacture is already established. Yet laptop manufacturers charge more per Watt-hour than lawnmower makers. This blog investigates whether such a seemingly ludicrous situation can be justified."
Or market economics...turns out a lawnmower purchaser is not willing to pay the same for a battery that a laptop purchaser is or perhaps the lawnmower has cheaper non-lithium competitors it must compete with which drives down it's market price. I guess technically that's greed, charging what you can but without it where would we be?
Unlikely, people don't do things for the heck of it.
Says the user posting for the heck of it, on the site created for the heck of it back in the day...
It is called market segmentation, and in general it is good. Different segments for the same products/technologies have different values for good intrinsic to them.
As an example, Taylor Hobson makes a fine stylus profiler. It is the standard in industry and precision manufacturing for determining shape and surface quality for parts. They charge (hypothetically) $60k for this instrument when they sell it to a manufacturer of metal precision components.
However, the exact same instrument, with a couple of new software features is sold into the Optics production market. The price is ~ 2.5X the price of the same tool sold to the industrial market. They get this premium, because the optics production segment has a different value proposition for the measurements it makes.
Same thing in laptop batteries. Same technology, but the application is different. Squeezing a few extra watt-hours into a smaller space is worth the premium. Also, you use you laptop much more than you use yard implements, so the perceived value of good life and longer cycles between recharging is a higher value.
It is irrelevant that they use the same technology.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress