You managed to create lithium batteries lasting for 100 years (meaning an iPhone user can scroll for a long time until the individual dies of old age without stressing if the phone will run out of battery). To put it into perspective: Nuclear Submarines can go on without refuelling for at least 50 years, so if you double that lifespan on a lithium battery: how would it shape modern electronics? What would it be like having a battery that can last an entire century?
That would mean iPhone & Android users don’t have to recharge every 10 hours or so (becomes every 876000 hours) meaning let’s say you bought an iPhone whilst in school it’s a full bar, by the time you are at old age living your golden years (it hits 5%) and throughout your entire life you forgotten that phones need to be recharged due to having a device that can last basically forever due to the battery being that powerful & having a long lifespan.
Given the pace of technological progress, I doubt a phone bought today will be all that useful (except as a retro novelty) in 20 years time, let alone 100.
How many people do you think are still daily-driving a Motorola KRZR? It’s not because of the battery life.
I don’t know if you knew this or not, but the KRZRs actually WERE known for having terrible batteries. Every time somebody brought one in with battery issues, we’d pop the battery out, set it down and give it a spin. More times than not, a cell had burst inside and that battery would be swollen to hell.
I thought it was funny that you just happened to pick a phone that people actually DID get rid of just because of the battery!
I did not! I actually had one back in the day and never had battery issues, but pretty funny to hear it was a common complaint.
(Still, I think the broader point stands.)
The point absolutely stands, despite the irony.
I have a friend who had an iPhone 3 until 3g got shut down 18 months ago. You don’t need to buy into the constant update cycle.
That also kind of proves OP’s point though. 3G was shut down, making an iPhone 3 pretty much useless at this point. You can use these things a lot longer than they want or expect you to, sure, but 20 years is a stretch, and 100 years is untenable.
I do not want to be in the same building as a lithium battery containing a century’s worth of energy.
“Now over to Australia where a Note 7 battery exploded this morning. This means that another country has been added to the growing list of regions completely obliterated by a thermonuclear explosion”
It depends on the power density. A battery with the current power density but increased longevity isn’t going to be as useful as you’d think.
A battery that is able to have the same power output as current batteries but last a century is going to be a weapon of mass destruction.
A battery with the current power density but increased longevity
…. Is exactly what we need. People bitch and moan about how difficult it is to replace phone batteries, but this would make it unnecessary. More importantly, all those people who replace their phones every 2-3 years as the battery stops lasting a full day, would no longer have that excuse. If we had increased longevity, there’d be less electronic waste as people keep their devices longer
Or think about things like grid storage - a lot of the high cost is how long they last, so increased longevity is critical for that investment to pay off.
Or v2g. People are finally coming around to trust that EV batteries will last longer than they will own an EV, ut most of us still don’t trust vehicle to grid connections to not unnecessarily age our vehicle battery
But less electronics waste is less profit. If everyone who bought a 2 year phone bought them every 4 years instead, that’s a 50% drop in sales.
There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea. But disregarding those, I don’t think it would change cell phones all that much. So you don’t have to charge your phone. It’s not like that’s a big inconvenience anyway.
It would have a bigger impact on vehicles, transportation, and shipping. Long range trucks don’t need to stop for fuel. Neither do cargo ships. Maybe battery electric airliners become viable.
Doesn’t really make sense even to users. They would shrink the battery to a small fraction of its original side, market it as the world’s lightest and thinnest phone, with 4x the battery life of a normal phone. Then they’d have some other products of a bigger battery version for emergency red phones.
Beyond just companies wanting to turn a buck, there’s other more obvious limitations. The bands to communicate with the tower require physical antennas inside the phone and those frequencies are recycled over time to different protocols or sometimes different uses entirely. It would be useless as a phone before it’s dead.
Also the whole thing about energy density. Current lithium ballpark density is 250 Wh per kg. Taking a modern galaxy 5000mah (19.4wh) battery and multiplying it by your chosen ratio of 10 hours vs a hypothetical 876000 makes it 21,900,000Wh per Kg, still less dense than fusion energy, which is around 24,000,000,000Wh per kg but very close to fission energy density, which is around 24,000,000 Wh. Of the Uranium that actually fissioned during the Little Boy bomb explosion, it only amounted to about 0.8763kg, less energy than a kilogram of your hypothetical battery. I guess luckily batteries only weigh about 50 grams? The factory making them would have more bomb potential than the Beirut explosion if they had more than 47.5 kg of batteries, or enough to make 950 phones.
As an aside, I can’t believe how big the Beirut explosion was, 1GWh. Insane and horrifying.
