I always hear since 10 years about new amazing batteries being invented, but in the end my iPhone battery today still holds only up for a day, why, where is the innovation getting lost?

Question

I am really wondering. so many technologies that i always used to hear about, but they never end up in new phones and stuff

In: Technology

Answer 1

You don’t really need more battery life than one day. Sure, some people might need to go without access to electricity for longer than that, but for those cases, external power banks are a much better solution than increasing the battery capacity within the phone itself. The average user simply charges their phone every night (or at least, once a day) and wouldn’t want a larger, heavier, or more expensive device in exchange for more battery capacity.

(Excess capacity can be helpful for when the battery degrades and loses some of its capacity over time. But even that only delays the point where the battery life becomes an inconvenience, and the real solution to that is replaceable batteries.)

What this means is that when phones get higher-capacity batteries (and they have, over the years), this isn’t necessarily used to extend battery life – at least not one-to-one. Instead, it’s often used to allow upgrades of other features, such as faster chips or higher screen resolution or refresh rates – all things that cost energy. Things that, with older batteries, would have drained the battery too fast, but which now are possible.

In parallel, charging has also become much faster than it used to be, which further reduces the need for ever larger battery capacity. If you can regain 50% charge in 10 minutes, then that means that there will nearly always be opportunities to quickly top up over the course of your day.

In addition, there isn’t just one type of battery that works for all devices. Not every advance in battery technology is relevant to phones. And also, not every advance is about energy density. Different battery designs have different strengths and weaknesses on other aspects as well, such as safety, life cycle, power output, etc. So (1) not every new battery technology ends up in your phone because your phone doesn’t benefit from every improvement and (2) many improvements *have* ended up in your phone, even if you weren’t aware of them (incl. actual improvements in capacity and density).