Off Topic: Tech Companies Should Build Better Batteries
We've reached peak mobile technology, but not peak battery technology.
Welcome to another “Off-Topic Wednesdays” post. These are extra posts where I write about other interests besides public transport — stay tuned for a return to regular content on Friday.
I enjoy technology a lot, which is why I got my degree in Computer Science, and watched so much YouTube growing up that I decided to start a channel about public transportation.
I frequently spend time thinking a lot about just how dramatically technology has changed over the course of my life — the example I often come back to is how the computer I grew up using (from Gateway, which has been dead for almost 20 years!) took long enough to boot that after kicking the giant power button on the front, I could go make breakfast and be back in time for the computer to actually be useable.
These days I work on an M2 MacBook Pro, which boots in seconds, runs on a completely different architecture, and has many times more processing power than that much larger desktop from all those years ago. And yet, some things have not gotten significantly better.
To talk about that, I need to introduce one other electronic device I grew up using — the Game Boy Advance SP. This thing ran on a lithium-ion battery like many modern devices, and you could easily use it for well over 10 hours on a charge. Now, to be fair, the Game Boy Advance was not winning any awards from graphics, and its power draw was low enough that the regular model ran on AA batteries!
The thing is, while so many elements of our devices have improved dramatically over the last twenty years, battery life — while it has improved — has certainly not dramatically improved. If you are doing serious work on a laptop, you generally still don’t want to be far from power even on a modern Mac. In this article I want to talk about why this matters, and how tech companies could address it.
What’s funny is that issues with batteries have given black eyes to some of the biggest players in consumer electronics. Samsung has its disastrous Galaxy Note 7, well known for being banned from flights and likely the impetus for a lot of the more recent caution around phones and flights. And even Apple had its controversy over throttling iPhones due to battery degradation.
It doesn’t help that companies like Apple pretty clearly play some tricks with the “real” versus displayed battery percentage — which you can see from how quickly the battery drains at lower percentages compared to higher ones. There are even tools that exist so you can see the actual battery status of your Apple devices, since you can’t trust them to tell you that.
Now to be clear, batteries degrading is not unreasonable or unexpected, but I am a little disappointed that my first ever laptop in 2011 had a battery rated for a similar number of charge cycles as a modern iPhone — which can rarely get me through a day of heavy use.
What’s extra frustrating is that we’ve long known some of the ways you can extend battery longevity like not charging above 80%. Hilariously though, Apple (who I’m harping on both because they are a bit silly with this kind of thing and because I use their products) will only let you set a charging limit on the newest iPhone even when it would benefit any device (I use Al Dente on my Mac and it’s been decent). What’s worse is that charging controllers are/were supposed to be smart and try and protect your battery, and yet limiting yourself to 80% is something that’s only getting attention in 2023. It seems very un-Apple and unintuitive for me to need to plug and unplug my phone if I don’t want its battery to prematurely degrade.
To some extent, the fact that this is an issue today is actually probably a good sign. Back in the early 2010s it felt like a lot of people were getting a new phone every 2-3 years, and in that case battery degradation was really just a minor annoyance. The reality today is that we’ve pretty clearly hit peak smartphone — innovation is tapering off, and even displays and cameras feel like they are at the point of diminishing returns. This is fine! Modern phones are great, they have tons of features like wireless charging, great cameras, and big brilliant screens — not to mention features I didn’t think we’d get so widely 10 years ago like weather resistance (remember when dropping your phone in some water could be a death sentence?). Even as a phone “power” user who does drain a phone easily in one day, I really am a little tired of “faster” phones year after year: I don’t need more cores and frequency, I need battery life!
I really think the first big thing I would say is — phone manufacturers should pivot from focusing on yearly performance improvements (which few people are likely to benefit from at this point) and instead focus on yearly efficiency improvements.
Moreover, with phones lasting much longer now, and components like the screen and processor likely to be good for a long time, a degrading battery is a big problem.
One way of mitigating the problem is making phones easier to repair: that way you can swap the battery out every few years and the phone itself can hopefully last a decade. It’s not entirely clear to me what the “correct” level of repairability is (I’m generally supportive of course) that makes swapping a battery a process that doesn’t require heat guns and adhesive, but also allows for weather resistance and a sleek build. The correct answer is likely somewhere between a modern iPhone and the LG G5, which let you slide the battery out of the bottom fairly easily (LG’s design is probably overkill for a once every 3-4 year battery replacement.)
The second thing we should be doing is pushing phone manufacturers to make devices more repairable, particularly for purposes of long term battery swapping.
The ultimate solution to the battery problem, and one which to some extent eliminates a lot of the need for a phone design with easy battery swapping and a need to focus on efficiency is just a bigger, better battery. I say bigger because modern phones are very slim and I think having them be slightly thicker would actually be fine — at the same time, a bigger battery can stay in the “healthy” charge zone more of the time, improving longevity while also giving you extra juice when you really need it.
But of course, the bigger thing that needs to be done is just developing far more advanced battery designs and chemistries, which is exactly the type of thing I would be spending the oodles of money Apple has on if I were Tim Cook. A better battery would make the vast majority of Apple’s products (which run on batteries!) better! Fortunately, it appears they might actually be doing that in some form.
Now, the natural inclination when thinking about batteries for mobile devices is that they will inevitably get better because of electric vehicles taking off, but I am less sure of this. A lot of the focus on batteries for EVs is around things like manufacturing at scale, reducing cost, packaging cells into efficient and safe packs as well as materials availability — I’m just not convinced that the batteries in EVs have that much overlap in terms of what they need to provide functionally to have that much of an impact on consumer devices anytime soon. The reality is that a phone battery needs to be lighter, but since it’s smaller, it could also potentially use more expensive chemistries.
That being said, I wouldn’t write off increased investment in batteries completely, if we figure out how to do solid state at scale affordably that would be a very big deal, much less other types of batteries!
Clearly, the most important thing is just better batteries, which avoid having to compromise in other areas to accommodate for a lack of improvement in battery technology.
Ultimately, I am sure better batteries will come, but they can’t come soon enough. I’d love to not get a new phone until the 2030s!
Nicely put. I would certainly favor improved efficiency over enhanced processing power. Actually, I wish the industry would reorient so that “improved performance” would mean higher efficiency, not just enhanced processing power. But they’re so focused on getting you to buy a new phone every other year - and to be fair, perfectly understandable from a business / profit perspective.
Maybe product efficiency standards is an area the EU could focus its regulatory might on - certainly they forced Apple to accept and change to a common USB-C charging standard.
Batteries have always been my biggest gripe with modern phones and computers, and I feel the same about how limiting current battery tech is for electric cars (another reason why electric transportation should be from overhead wires).