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

Because amthe manufacturers know that people will tolerate nightly  charging of their phones.

So everything is balanced to make it last a day. Faster CPU, brighter display etc: everything’s gonna draw more power, so all the gains the battery brings, are taken up by putting more energy intensive parts into the phone.

And if there’s still battery capacity to spare, the battery is made smaller. To make the phone thinner and match the current fashion trend for phones.

You could run a first gen iPhone for longer on a modern battery of similar dimensions.

But realistically no one needs a phone where the battery lasts more than a day; plenty of manufacturers have made phones that a twice as thick as the ‚standard‘ phones; with much larger battery sizes, but no one buys them.

The people with money will buy the current status symbol model, those without will buy used or basic Android phones, leaving the high quality high capacity phones to be bought by those few rare people who absolutely need a larger capacity, but can’t carry around a powerbank.

Also phones still use lithium ion batteries, because those are the most well ‚developed‘ battery chemistries for small scale, easy to carry devices, and many of the more efficient battery chemistries have some form of overhead, making them more useful for much larger scale applications, or are more dangerous than lithium ion, or don‘t do so well with charge cycles etc.

Takes a while for new basic physics research to end up as a marketable product anyway.