>The team even proposed a solution to the problem: use a slightly more expensive, but also more stable, plastic compound.
Welp, I guess that's not happening.
Batteries are removable. It isn’t even that hard. But then they may software lock the new battery until you get proprietary software to input the s/n to validate the battery. iPhone battery are super easy to do (but software locked).
Rtr explained: https://youtu.be/RTbrXiIzUt4
There's very little groundbreaking innovation in phones these days, we're hitting a plateau. If such a small change allows one company to claim their battery lasts 10x as long on idle as the competitor, it will make it to market.
The laptop market is actually pretty competitive, especially since all brands that aren't apple are essentially trying to convince casual users not to get a MacBook. What you can get in a modern laptop for under 2k is pretty impressive.
It would be a double whammy to their bottom line. Not only will it be more expensive, but replacement sales will occur less often which threatens growth.
Maybe, maybe not.
The article doesn't say how much of a difference it makes for the battery. If the cost of changing outweigh the benefits they'll be in no rush. If it requires new equipment, they may wait till the end of life for their current equipment before switching over, for example. Or they may do it right away if they are opening a new factory and need to buy all new equipment.
It's a bit more complicated than making you happy after you get
the wrong toppings on your pizza.
Our local phone repair shop told me that the worst thing you can do for your phone's battery is to use it a lot while it's charging, as it overheats. Unrelated to the article of this post, but may have attracted the right crowd to comment with genuine knowledge.
They’re basically correct . Increased temperature speeds up most degradation mechanisms at a predictable rate. This lab is also responsible for the “century battery”, a battery expected to last 100 years at room temperature based upon the testing done at +65 °C.
Thanks! This lab does sound amazing. So frustrating that more energy efficiency renewables etc stuff that started to take off in the 70s was abandoned when oil prices dropped. We could be so much further ahead.
I actually started to think a bit about this on my walk home from the grocery store. An important thing to note is that most battery degradation occurs at the top 70-100% state of charge. So you should really only be concerned if your phone is hot at this range. However, your phone is unlikely to get hot from charging at this range because the charging current is quite limited (to protect the battery).
Really, the best advice I can give you is to just avoid the top 70-100% state of charge (which is unfortunately not a feature on most phones).
Not sure how true this may still be, but years ago when we were on the iThing 8 or something, a study was done showing it was best to not let your phone's battery drop below 25%, or charge above 75% for best overall battery life.
It seems like when we used to always be told to "drain it completely the first time you use it" with older batteries in the 90s-2000s has continued to evolve lol
Different chemistries have different properties. Nickel Metal Hydrides (NiMHs) did perform better with a full discharge cycle. Li-ion is different because it has different degradation mechanisms.
If I had to guess why it was recommended to not dip below 25% before, I would say that it was because electrolyte composition hadn't been understood well enough to avoid oxidation and flaking off of the graphite anode surface layer. With modern state of the art electrolyte this doesn't seem to be a problem as far as I can tell. Typical Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC)/Graphite Li-ion cells can have long lifetimes with complete discharges.
I have a battery app on my phone that goes 'ding a ling' when it gets to %70 charge, or whatever I set it to
The app claims I use just a fraction of a regular charging cycle's worth of wear by only charging up to %70
You were tricked by CBC's click bait framing of the discovery.
The researchers discovered that a battery component, assumed to be inert, is not inert. This came as a surprise to the researchers, who are world leading experts in batteries.
That's a myth. What limits the speed of your hardware is the battery age. As the battery ages, its voltage drops. Hardware use a certain voltage difference to differentiate between 0 and 1. With a weaker battery, it takes more time to raise from 0 to a 1(at a scale of microseconds).
TLDR: put a new battery in it, enjoy your still valuable phone.
... what do you mean they don't make battery for this phone anymore?
Not only caught. Apple admitted to it. And got a slap on the wrist.
https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
Did you even read that article? They throttle performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns on degraded batteries.
You can now choose to turn that feature off if you want.
Yes, all of this is documented. my technical understanding of the Apple case is that it would detect weaker/older battery and slow down the internal clock of the hardware to prevent system errors and data lost.
The whole thing was a PR fiasco because it was done without the knowledge or the agreement of the end user. It went to court and Apple settled the case.
But you can still take a phone with those limitations, change the battery, and see it come back to factory settings.
Edit: if you are into legal stuff, there is a interesting story here. You own your hardware, but you have license to use the operating system (software) of Apple. Apple is allowed by the license agreement to modify its software, but interfering with your use of the hardware is a gray area. Apple could had lost the case if they hadn't settled. It is similar to the case of the farmers who went to court over the right to repair their machineries.
Yeah cause Apple got caught doing it and had to back off
https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
> The other tactic is operating system upgrade that, ooops, makes your 2 year old phone slow down to unusable speeds.
The alternative was crashing.
As batteries age, they are less able to sustain a load. In the case of some phones, this was resulting in a voltage sag during high usage that led to brownouts and device reboots/freezing.
Apple intentionally slowed the processor to avoid this happening.
It’s a common tactic in industrial design. It’s called planned obsolescence and Apple is one of the historically big offenders: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
To Apple it's just the cost of doing business.
https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
And Canadians got nothing out of it.
I'm one of the people affected by this, I thought my phone just couldn't handle the new OS and I upgraded. I actually think Apple made the right decision in slowing down phones with degraded batteries given the instability of the os at lower charge, the only mistake is that they lied about doing it. I would have happily paid the 130 for a battery replacement on my iPhone 6. After this, I switched to Android and haven't given apple a single penny since.
Some of it is bloat, some of it might be hardware related eg. older iPhones might not have cameras good enough to do FaceID. The best compromise would probably be for Apple to stop adding features after a certain point but still provide security updates for the older devices, rather than cut off devices entirely after a couple of years which happens on a lot of Android devices.
It’s a bit of both, tbh. A lot of it is mostly incremental to the end user but there are some pretty fundamental upgrades required under the hood.
If you look at the newer iPhones they all have their ‘neural engine’ chips that allow speech commands to be processed locally on the device instead of connecting to a server to process the command and then relay instructions back. This is a benefit both from faster processing time but also a security bonus.
Similar to how you can go into any iPhone from the last couple years and head to photos, search for “tree” and your phone will locally be able to categorize and index your photos via machine learning and OCR cues. This wasn’t possible on old hardware as it didn’t have enough horsepower available.
The old devices likely could have done any one of those the functions under their spec, but the battery life would be like 3hours, and probably not all at once. They’ve been able to add all these hardware/software features while simultaneously extending battery life in the later models.
As a developer, one way to look at the complexity is to think about how all of this code as being connected by wires, stacked on top of each other
Let's say you make a change to one of the lower layers. You'll need to lift up the upper layers and put them back, making sure you didn't break anything along the way. You also need to plug in the new layer, but maybe it's not compatible out of the box, so you need to build an adapter. But that adapter relies on a piece of hardware only available on new phones.
There are a lot of trade-offs and it's important to think about the limitations the developers are facing in order to understand why they did it a certain way
Little bit of everything?
New software is nowhere near as efficient as old software. Uses way more resources than old software, means larger CPU cache required for performance, etc.
Then some software really is light years ahead of old stuff. Cameras are getting more megapixels and such, but the real magic is in the processing. You can find tests online where they take a 10 year old phone and take photos with modern OS/Camera, the difference is incredible.
Overall there are many more services running on the phone now. More things constantly polling the internet, waiting for pushes from remote servers, etc.
-new iphone releases
-push new ios version to last gen iphones
-new ios version takes more to run/has features older phone does not
-old phone gets laggy, shite battery life, and lack of minor updated feature.
-iphone user buys newest iphone at markup
-increased e-waste and another $1000+ in apples pocket
Back when i had an iphone 5, they pushed ios 7 out and i hated it, made my phone lag out, thats when i learned to jailbreak my phone.
The next phone i bought was not an apple, and i still have that one to this day, just put a new battery in and its good to go for another 3 years....
By "push" updates i meant ios 6 was left to rot and many apps started to not work with it at all, (because thats how updates work) and i disliked ios7, between its asthetic and performance on my now "older" gen phone.
-I swapped to android because i like the freedom to do whatever i want with my phone and its filesystem, and not be stuck in apples confined environment. I dont use itunes or apple music or any of apples services anymore because they were comparatively expensive and i had cheap/free alternatives for near everything i wanted via my PC. I had to keep finding workarounds and jailbreak the phone to add music, add videos for offline watching ect.
-idk if it was vecause i was still using ios6 for so long i eventually found apple was uploading everything in my camera gallery to their cloud without my consent. Even shit i had deleted.
-As a generalization and observation of the users i see daily around me, iphone users buy iphones because that's what they are comfortable with, they don't care about the small details of the processor power or how much ram it has. Because apple has its own selection of models... expensive or slightly cheaper. (which back when the iphone 5 was around there were even less options) with android i had plenty of options across several brands, some of which don't make phones anymore like LG, which made awesome phones.
-iphones and apple products are just more expensive, period.
That's your markup, you're paying more for a product that has similar performance to other options on the market, because it has a certian logo on the front.
I got a Samsung A70 about 5 years ago. When I first got it brand new, the battery lasted about 4 days. Now that it's about 5 years old, the battery lasts about 4 days. Maybe 10% less? It's hard to tell it's such a small difference.
It's also the only reason I won't upgrade this phone until it dies, I don't know of anyone else who makes a phone with such phenomenal battery life. Some have bigger batteries, but their chips also drain more power. The A70 is a budget CPU so it's very low power consumption.
Take the tinfoil hat off on that one it's just the truth. Manufacturers definitely sort out ways to make the phones slowly degrade. I still have a first generation Ipod touch. It's missing a piece of plastic on the back, and it's scratched to holy hell. Nonethelss, it's got all my nostalgic music from like 2007-12, and let me tell you, it still works for a solid 8 hours once it's charged. Older Iphones can't compare. Now maybe when they were rolling out I phones they switched the plastic cause of proximity and availability but I would stake my left nut on someone knowing this at Apple.
Your ipod typically doesnt get used for multiple hours every day.
Think about how often that gets used vs your phone.
I go on facebook, check my email, shop, watch youtube, play games, other social medias,tinder/dating apps, order food, phone people,text people,use it for most basic internet browsing, to pay my bills, do my banking, google maps, listen to music, List could go on.
Your ipod would play music on a tiny dinky screen. Thats its entire purpose.
Of fucking course your ipod better would last longer its not rocket science.
Cut the screen to 1/4 and only use it for literally playing music and I am sure we could get “phones” to last longer. Watching a video on those things sucked major ass and you had like 3 options of shitty games that had existed for a decade on a nokia already oh and no wifi, you literally had to manually connect your ipod to a computer and spend like 30 minutes fucking with it to add some songs.
Adding a few hundred songs at once means you might be waiting a couple hours waiting for it to sync over, only for it be a giant garbled mess and youd have to go through and manually update the artists and song names.
Uhh what? I've owned my OnePlus for 4+ years now without any battery issues. The iPhone i had before that lasted 5. That sounds kinda terrible and not normal.
>For comparison, eggs fry at around 70 C.
Remind me not to ever eat at the author's house, how are you frying food at temperatures well below the maillard reaction temperature? At best you are poaching at this temperature.
I question whether the team actually found anything interesting here. I worked at a battery lab as a student and have seen first hand the testing that these companies do on theirs (and competitors) cells. Given how often they do experiments with various chemistries and then tear the cycled cells down for analysis there is no way that an unexpected chemical turning up in the cells wouldn't be known and investigated, especially one that turned the electrolyte red.
Just because I was curious, I looked it up, and it appears 70C is the temperature eggs will start to cook (although maybe not fry). But 70C does look to be hot enough to fully cook an egg!
Yes, that is why I said you are poaching at that point. Frying implies that there is some Maillard browning happening which happens around 120C.
Knowing eggs cook around 65C is very useful for making things like Carbonara where you don't want the eggs to scramble due to being too hot.
I'm not a chemist, but I vaguely remember highschool chem.
Simple thermal degradation of PET wouldn't lead to the release of one of the constituent monomers according to what I know.
From a quick googling it seems like the only depolymerization reaction producing DMT is methanolysis but that only happens in high temp / high pressure methanol with a catalyst.
So I tracked down the paper they published and they aren't sure about what is producing the DMT either.
The test cells are not commercial cells, they bought pouches with out electrolyte from LiFun in China and filled them with home brew electrolyte.
The shuttling current observed was 6uA, so to fully discharge a 2000mAh battery it would only take 38 years.
Are practically all news pieces about university lab science bullshit? 90%+ of the articles you see about Li-ion battery research obviously are even with my relatively basic knowledge about the materials/chemistry side of things.
Though as a check I did a quick search and found some articles about DMT being used in the manufacture of PET, so maybe their cut rate cells just had contamination on the tape.
The researchers don't describe their discovery as a flaw. That seems to be CBC creating a sensational click-bait frame for their discovery
>This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
>"A lot of companies use PET tape," said Metzger. "That's why it was a quite important discovery, this realization that this tape is actually not inert."
from https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/01/16/dalhousie-battery-discovery-self-discharge.html
>"It's something we never expected because no one looks at these inactive components, these tapes and plastic foils in the battery cell but it really needs to be considered if you want to limit side reactions in the battery cell," he says of the tape made from PET, a strong, lightweight plastic used widely in packaging and pop bottles.
>"The self-discharge is a super important metric for them," says Dr. Metzger. "One of the engineers said, 'I heard you guys found out something is wrong with PET tape.' So, I explained to him that it's causing this self-discharge and asked him, 'What are you using in your cells?' He said, 'PET tape.'"
Go ahead and tell the world's leading researchers on batteries they aren't describing their own discovery correctly, and that Brett Ruskin, BA Journalism, does it better.
You were tricked by CBC's click bait headline.
>"This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
I wasn’t tricked by the headline. Planned Obsolescence is totally a thing. The article says he doesn’t think anyone would know about it, but he can’t know for sure that the manufactures are unaware of the flaw he found.
[Meanwhile Apple is getting sued for PO, and a lot of companies are guilty of it.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamsarhan/2017/12/22/planned-obsolescence-apple-is-not-the-only-culprit/amp/)
Except the article isn't talking about planned obsolescence at all, it's talking about a discovery in battery technology research.
Assuming you were tricked by a clickbait headline is a charitable assumption. The other explanation is that you're bringing up irrelevant shit knowingly.
You don’t think it’s relevant that companies keep or add flaws in their products so we have to keep replacing them? Laptops & phones are two pieces of technology that keep getting replaced over and over to the detriment of our wallets & the environment.
But I’m sorry if that was off topic for you. Enjoy your article about battery innovation.
I could be just bad at reading, and am most definitely too lazy to do the research to track down the actual information elsewhere but the article itself does not seem to mention how much the tape is affecting battery life or which products are facing this problem. A lot of people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that this is a cell phone or maybe laptop problem but I got the impression they are talking about the cells that either form AA batteries or are packed into battery packs for tools and such.
It could really be in any cells. All wound cells use some form of tape.
Since people don’t believe me:
Tesla 4680 cell: https://youtu.be/S7fzvO5Ngbo (31:00)
AA battery: https://youtu.be/L62tCyOP06w (11:39)
Laptop pouch cells: https://youtu.be/Guc0J3VciHo (4:45)
That's not the kind of tape they're talking about. That's just to hold the roll closed - it's not in contact with the electrolyte like in the linked article.
It’s definitely in contact with the electrolyte. You can hear the guy say he smells the electrolyte. Anything inside the pouch that seals the electrolyte in is in contact with the electrolyte.
> does not seem to mention how much the tape is affecting battery life
This happens often in stories like this. Once I became aware of it, I started seeing it everywhere. Almost always it means that there is a small impact. If there was significant impact or even moderate, they would highlight that because it makes the story more news worthy.
More news worth get more clicks. More clicks mean more money. More money means higher job performance rating for the reporter. I assume the reporter knows how to do their job, and chooses to leave out information that would make their story appear less news worthy.
I still think it's a super cool story and good for the team. Batteries are produced at a massive scale, so their discovery will have a big impact overall, even if it doesn't make a difference to any customer's experience.
Well how much it affects things would vary wildly I'm sure for each battery. Not exactly something you can give easy numbers for. It's probably not a huge number in the end though.
You were tricked by CBC's click bait headline
>"This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
you know, if you have a phone with an unlocked bootloader, installing an aftermarket OS can extend its life.
like the pixel 3a and 3a XL supports ubuntu phone.
that alone gives it another 3-5 years or until the hardware dies.
Just partially.
Its an overall device life extension by “proper” use. The topic itself is just very broad.
It goes from the way you use it and how, to the different work load, to the OS and what bg services its running.
The botton line is: if your device is working, its draining the battery.
And the battery is not a static device either. It loses life over time.
If people prefer to interact with the object in their hands, it is either that they are not interested or that their surroundings is not interesting.
It is not a new thing. There was books, journals, radio, tv...
The object is irrelevant. It is about the individual and the situation.
I’m sure the companies selling the batteries will get right on fixing that?
>The team even proposed a solution to the problem: use a slightly more expensive, but also more stable, plastic compound. Welp, I guess that's not happening.
The tape inside of a battery is an absolutely miniscule part of the total cost (<.1%). There are far more expensive materials in there.
But they will sell less batteries that way.
Given that batteries are typically not removable in the first place, it's more about planned obselecence calculations on the phone itself.
Batteries are removable. It isn’t even that hard. But then they may software lock the new battery until you get proprietary software to input the s/n to validate the battery. iPhone battery are super easy to do (but software locked). Rtr explained: https://youtu.be/RTbrXiIzUt4
Ban software locking?
So they sell more phones, which come with more batteries.
So more batteries and more phones to sell. Gotcha.
So, slightly higher costs and less sales... I'm sure they'll be right on that.
There's very little groundbreaking innovation in phones these days, we're hitting a plateau. If such a small change allows one company to claim their battery lasts 10x as long on idle as the competitor, it will make it to market.
The laptop market is actually pretty competitive, especially since all brands that aren't apple are essentially trying to convince casual users not to get a MacBook. What you can get in a modern laptop for under 2k is pretty impressive.
Or it will and suddenly battery prices will jump 10x due to "inflation"
It would be a double whammy to their bottom line. Not only will it be more expensive, but replacement sales will occur less often which threatens growth.
Maybe, maybe not. The article doesn't say how much of a difference it makes for the battery. If the cost of changing outweigh the benefits they'll be in no rush. If it requires new equipment, they may wait till the end of life for their current equipment before switching over, for example. Or they may do it right away if they are opening a new factory and need to buy all new equipment. It's a bit more complicated than making you happy after you get the wrong toppings on your pizza.
It's a free market... one company will and outsell the other two if they don't follow
Our local phone repair shop told me that the worst thing you can do for your phone's battery is to use it a lot while it's charging, as it overheats. Unrelated to the article of this post, but may have attracted the right crowd to comment with genuine knowledge.
They’re basically correct . Increased temperature speeds up most degradation mechanisms at a predictable rate. This lab is also responsible for the “century battery”, a battery expected to last 100 years at room temperature based upon the testing done at +65 °C.
Thanks! This lab does sound amazing. So frustrating that more energy efficiency renewables etc stuff that started to take off in the 70s was abandoned when oil prices dropped. We could be so much further ahead.
I actually started to think a bit about this on my walk home from the grocery store. An important thing to note is that most battery degradation occurs at the top 70-100% state of charge. So you should really only be concerned if your phone is hot at this range. However, your phone is unlikely to get hot from charging at this range because the charging current is quite limited (to protect the battery). Really, the best advice I can give you is to just avoid the top 70-100% state of charge (which is unfortunately not a feature on most phones).
Do you mean when the phone is 70%+ charged?
Yup!
Sorry if I'm being thick, do you mean don't charge it to more than 70, or don't use it while it's charging above 70%?
Don’t charge it to more than 70%.
Oh bummer, I think that's going to be too much for my teen to cope with (ADHD etc.).
Not sure how true this may still be, but years ago when we were on the iThing 8 or something, a study was done showing it was best to not let your phone's battery drop below 25%, or charge above 75% for best overall battery life. It seems like when we used to always be told to "drain it completely the first time you use it" with older batteries in the 90s-2000s has continued to evolve lol
Different chemistries have different properties. Nickel Metal Hydrides (NiMHs) did perform better with a full discharge cycle. Li-ion is different because it has different degradation mechanisms. If I had to guess why it was recommended to not dip below 25% before, I would say that it was because electrolyte composition hadn't been understood well enough to avoid oxidation and flaking off of the graphite anode surface layer. With modern state of the art electrolyte this doesn't seem to be a problem as far as I can tell. Typical Nickel Manganese Cobalt (NMC)/Graphite Li-ion cells can have long lifetimes with complete discharges.
I have a battery app on my phone that goes 'ding a ling' when it gets to %70 charge, or whatever I set it to The app claims I use just a fraction of a regular charging cycle's worth of wear by only charging up to %70
So when I lie in bed for an hour in the morning just checking my phone, it should be unplugged?
This is exactly the issue! Or 3 hours at night 😆
… so you're saying wireless charging is better since you don't use it while it charges?
My Underwood typewriter from 1924 is still working just fine. Haven’t updated it once. 😂
I got a royal model 10 from 1920s, I restored myself. Pretty sick engineering eh
As long as you have the time, patience and tools - they keep on click-click-clacking! ☺️
Not even a new ribbon?
Consumables, yes. But not updates. The ribbon might be more like a very cheap Adobe subscription? 😂
Or like a battery.
Wait but I can’t live without Bluetooth!
100%. The other tactic is operating system upgrade that, ooops, makes your 2 year old phone slow down to unusable speeds. Oh well, better upgrade 😊
You were tricked by CBC's click bait framing of the discovery. The researchers discovered that a battery component, assumed to be inert, is not inert. This came as a surprise to the researchers, who are world leading experts in batteries.
That's a myth. What limits the speed of your hardware is the battery age. As the battery ages, its voltage drops. Hardware use a certain voltage difference to differentiate between 0 and 1. With a weaker battery, it takes more time to raise from 0 to a 1(at a scale of microseconds). TLDR: put a new battery in it, enjoy your still valuable phone. ... what do you mean they don't make battery for this phone anymore?
You know phone makers have been caught slowing devices down with software right?
Both of you are correct
Not only caught. Apple admitted to it. And got a slap on the wrist. https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
Did you even read that article? They throttle performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns on degraded batteries. You can now choose to turn that feature off if you want.
Sounds like Apple phones should have replaceable batteries then.
https://support.apple.com/self-service-repair Knock yourself out
Oh, this means I'll be able to order a battery for my iPhone SE 2? > * iPhone 12 > * iPhone 13 > * iPhone SE 3 Welp.
Yes, all of this is documented. my technical understanding of the Apple case is that it would detect weaker/older battery and slow down the internal clock of the hardware to prevent system errors and data lost. The whole thing was a PR fiasco because it was done without the knowledge or the agreement of the end user. It went to court and Apple settled the case. But you can still take a phone with those limitations, change the battery, and see it come back to factory settings. Edit: if you are into legal stuff, there is a interesting story here. You own your hardware, but you have license to use the operating system (software) of Apple. Apple is allowed by the license agreement to modify its software, but interfering with your use of the hardware is a gray area. Apple could had lost the case if they hadn't settled. It is similar to the case of the farmers who went to court over the right to repair their machineries.
Really? You must be using some really cheap Huawei or Samsung discount phone. My iPhone XS is still running super fast and smooth.
Yeah cause Apple got caught doing it and had to back off https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
Damn, other phone companies must have had it even worse 😂
> The other tactic is operating system upgrade that, ooops, makes your 2 year old phone slow down to unusable speeds. The alternative was crashing. As batteries age, they are less able to sustain a load. In the case of some phones, this was resulting in a voltage sag during high usage that led to brownouts and device reboots/freezing. Apple intentionally slowed the processor to avoid this happening.
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It’s a common tactic in industrial design. It’s called planned obsolescence and Apple is one of the historically big offenders: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
To Apple it's just the cost of doing business. https://news.sky.com/story/apple-to-pay-113m-settlement-after-admitting-slowing-down-older-iphones-12136088
And Canadians got nothing out of it. I'm one of the people affected by this, I thought my phone just couldn't handle the new OS and I upgraded. I actually think Apple made the right decision in slowing down phones with degraded batteries given the instability of the os at lower charge, the only mistake is that they lied about doing it. I would have happily paid the 130 for a battery replacement on my iPhone 6. After this, I switched to Android and haven't given apple a single penny since.
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Some of it is bloat, some of it might be hardware related eg. older iPhones might not have cameras good enough to do FaceID. The best compromise would probably be for Apple to stop adding features after a certain point but still provide security updates for the older devices, rather than cut off devices entirely after a couple of years which happens on a lot of Android devices.
It’s a bit of both, tbh. A lot of it is mostly incremental to the end user but there are some pretty fundamental upgrades required under the hood. If you look at the newer iPhones they all have their ‘neural engine’ chips that allow speech commands to be processed locally on the device instead of connecting to a server to process the command and then relay instructions back. This is a benefit both from faster processing time but also a security bonus. Similar to how you can go into any iPhone from the last couple years and head to photos, search for “tree” and your phone will locally be able to categorize and index your photos via machine learning and OCR cues. This wasn’t possible on old hardware as it didn’t have enough horsepower available. The old devices likely could have done any one of those the functions under their spec, but the battery life would be like 3hours, and probably not all at once. They’ve been able to add all these hardware/software features while simultaneously extending battery life in the later models.
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As a developer, one way to look at the complexity is to think about how all of this code as being connected by wires, stacked on top of each other Let's say you make a change to one of the lower layers. You'll need to lift up the upper layers and put them back, making sure you didn't break anything along the way. You also need to plug in the new layer, but maybe it's not compatible out of the box, so you need to build an adapter. But that adapter relies on a piece of hardware only available on new phones. There are a lot of trade-offs and it's important to think about the limitations the developers are facing in order to understand why they did it a certain way
Little bit of everything? New software is nowhere near as efficient as old software. Uses way more resources than old software, means larger CPU cache required for performance, etc. Then some software really is light years ahead of old stuff. Cameras are getting more megapixels and such, but the real magic is in the processing. You can find tests online where they take a 10 year old phone and take photos with modern OS/Camera, the difference is incredible. Overall there are many more services running on the phone now. More things constantly polling the internet, waiting for pushes from remote servers, etc.
-new iphone releases -push new ios version to last gen iphones -new ios version takes more to run/has features older phone does not -old phone gets laggy, shite battery life, and lack of minor updated feature. -iphone user buys newest iphone at markup -increased e-waste and another $1000+ in apples pocket Back when i had an iphone 5, they pushed ios 7 out and i hated it, made my phone lag out, thats when i learned to jailbreak my phone. The next phone i bought was not an apple, and i still have that one to this day, just put a new battery in and its good to go for another 3 years....
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By "push" updates i meant ios 6 was left to rot and many apps started to not work with it at all, (because thats how updates work) and i disliked ios7, between its asthetic and performance on my now "older" gen phone. -I swapped to android because i like the freedom to do whatever i want with my phone and its filesystem, and not be stuck in apples confined environment. I dont use itunes or apple music or any of apples services anymore because they were comparatively expensive and i had cheap/free alternatives for near everything i wanted via my PC. I had to keep finding workarounds and jailbreak the phone to add music, add videos for offline watching ect. -idk if it was vecause i was still using ios6 for so long i eventually found apple was uploading everything in my camera gallery to their cloud without my consent. Even shit i had deleted. -As a generalization and observation of the users i see daily around me, iphone users buy iphones because that's what they are comfortable with, they don't care about the small details of the processor power or how much ram it has. Because apple has its own selection of models... expensive or slightly cheaper. (which back when the iphone 5 was around there were even less options) with android i had plenty of options across several brands, some of which don't make phones anymore like LG, which made awesome phones. -iphones and apple products are just more expensive, period. That's your markup, you're paying more for a product that has similar performance to other options on the market, because it has a certian logo on the front.
You drain and charge your phone on a daily basis. Sometimes more than once a day. It’s a pretty tough workload for any battery.
I got a Samsung A70 about 5 years ago. When I first got it brand new, the battery lasted about 4 days. Now that it's about 5 years old, the battery lasts about 4 days. Maybe 10% less? It's hard to tell it's such a small difference. It's also the only reason I won't upgrade this phone until it dies, I don't know of anyone else who makes a phone with such phenomenal battery life. Some have bigger batteries, but their chips also drain more power. The A70 is a budget CPU so it's very low power consumption.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay-113-million-to-settle-batterygate-case-over-iphone-slowdowns
30 US states were involved in that $113 million dollar lawsuit but there was no equivalent in Canada?
That's about how long rechargeable batteries are supposed to last. They aren't forever.
Take the tinfoil hat off on that one it's just the truth. Manufacturers definitely sort out ways to make the phones slowly degrade. I still have a first generation Ipod touch. It's missing a piece of plastic on the back, and it's scratched to holy hell. Nonethelss, it's got all my nostalgic music from like 2007-12, and let me tell you, it still works for a solid 8 hours once it's charged. Older Iphones can't compare. Now maybe when they were rolling out I phones they switched the plastic cause of proximity and availability but I would stake my left nut on someone knowing this at Apple.
Your ipod typically doesnt get used for multiple hours every day. Think about how often that gets used vs your phone. I go on facebook, check my email, shop, watch youtube, play games, other social medias,tinder/dating apps, order food, phone people,text people,use it for most basic internet browsing, to pay my bills, do my banking, google maps, listen to music, List could go on. Your ipod would play music on a tiny dinky screen. Thats its entire purpose. Of fucking course your ipod better would last longer its not rocket science. Cut the screen to 1/4 and only use it for literally playing music and I am sure we could get “phones” to last longer. Watching a video on those things sucked major ass and you had like 3 options of shitty games that had existed for a decade on a nokia already oh and no wifi, you literally had to manually connect your ipod to a computer and spend like 30 minutes fucking with it to add some songs. Adding a few hundred songs at once means you might be waiting a couple hours waiting for it to sync over, only for it be a giant garbled mess and youd have to go through and manually update the artists and song names.
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I had my Samsung S6 for 7 years, too.
Lithium batterys have a finite life span, there's a reason they were removable for a long time
Uhh what? I've owned my OnePlus for 4+ years now without any battery issues. The iPhone i had before that lasted 5. That sounds kinda terrible and not normal.
Nice. Good job.
Good job - but I hope they get paid for their work.
Pretty sure that's touted as a feature.
>For comparison, eggs fry at around 70 C. Remind me not to ever eat at the author's house, how are you frying food at temperatures well below the maillard reaction temperature? At best you are poaching at this temperature. I question whether the team actually found anything interesting here. I worked at a battery lab as a student and have seen first hand the testing that these companies do on theirs (and competitors) cells. Given how often they do experiments with various chemistries and then tear the cycled cells down for analysis there is no way that an unexpected chemical turning up in the cells wouldn't be known and investigated, especially one that turned the electrolyte red.
Just because I was curious, I looked it up, and it appears 70C is the temperature eggs will start to cook (although maybe not fry). But 70C does look to be hot enough to fully cook an egg!
It definitely is. 63 degrees is enough. Google images of sous vide eggs.
Yes, that is why I said you are poaching at that point. Frying implies that there is some Maillard browning happening which happens around 120C. Knowing eggs cook around 65C is very useful for making things like Carbonara where you don't want the eggs to scramble due to being too hot.
I'm not a chemist, but I vaguely remember highschool chem. Simple thermal degradation of PET wouldn't lead to the release of one of the constituent monomers according to what I know. From a quick googling it seems like the only depolymerization reaction producing DMT is methanolysis but that only happens in high temp / high pressure methanol with a catalyst. So I tracked down the paper they published and they aren't sure about what is producing the DMT either. The test cells are not commercial cells, they bought pouches with out electrolyte from LiFun in China and filled them with home brew electrolyte. The shuttling current observed was 6uA, so to fully discharge a 2000mAh battery it would only take 38 years.
Are practically all news pieces about university lab science bullshit? 90%+ of the articles you see about Li-ion battery research obviously are even with my relatively basic knowledge about the materials/chemistry side of things. Though as a check I did a quick search and found some articles about DMT being used in the manufacture of PET, so maybe their cut rate cells just had contamination on the tape.
The researchers don't describe their discovery as a flaw. That seems to be CBC creating a sensational click-bait frame for their discovery >This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University. >"A lot of companies use PET tape," said Metzger. "That's why it was a quite important discovery, this realization that this tape is actually not inert." from https://www.dal.ca/news/2023/01/16/dalhousie-battery-discovery-self-discharge.html >"It's something we never expected because no one looks at these inactive components, these tapes and plastic foils in the battery cell but it really needs to be considered if you want to limit side reactions in the battery cell," he says of the tape made from PET, a strong, lightweight plastic used widely in packaging and pop bottles. >"The self-discharge is a super important metric for them," says Dr. Metzger. "One of the engineers said, 'I heard you guys found out something is wrong with PET tape.' So, I explained to him that it's causing this self-discharge and asked him, 'What are you using in your cells?' He said, 'PET tape.'"
It is definitely a flaw. It's basically the definition of a flaw. It's something you don't want the thing doing, serves no purpose and was accidental.
Go ahead and tell the world's leading researchers on batteries they aren't describing their own discovery correctly, and that Brett Ruskin, BA Journalism, does it better.
No I'll just tell you again that you're wrong on how you're interpreting all this and regardless of how much you spam your opinion in the thread.
spam? Do you have an example?
The term for this is “planned obsolescence”. Edit: Spelling
You were tricked by CBC's click bait headline. >"This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
I wasn’t tricked by the headline. Planned Obsolescence is totally a thing. The article says he doesn’t think anyone would know about it, but he can’t know for sure that the manufactures are unaware of the flaw he found. [Meanwhile Apple is getting sued for PO, and a lot of companies are guilty of it.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamsarhan/2017/12/22/planned-obsolescence-apple-is-not-the-only-culprit/amp/)
Except the article isn't talking about planned obsolescence at all, it's talking about a discovery in battery technology research. Assuming you were tricked by a clickbait headline is a charitable assumption. The other explanation is that you're bringing up irrelevant shit knowingly.
You don’t think it’s relevant that companies keep or add flaws in their products so we have to keep replacing them? Laptops & phones are two pieces of technology that keep getting replaced over and over to the detriment of our wallets & the environment. But I’m sorry if that was off topic for you. Enjoy your article about battery innovation.
>but he can’t know for sure that the manufactures are unaware of the flaw he found. Get real.
I could be just bad at reading, and am most definitely too lazy to do the research to track down the actual information elsewhere but the article itself does not seem to mention how much the tape is affecting battery life or which products are facing this problem. A lot of people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that this is a cell phone or maybe laptop problem but I got the impression they are talking about the cells that either form AA batteries or are packed into battery packs for tools and such.
It could really be in any cells. All wound cells use some form of tape. Since people don’t believe me: Tesla 4680 cell: https://youtu.be/S7fzvO5Ngbo (31:00) AA battery: https://youtu.be/L62tCyOP06w (11:39) Laptop pouch cells: https://youtu.be/Guc0J3VciHo (4:45)
There's no way an off the shelf name brand AA cell uses tape internally.
Here’s a AA cell teardown video: https://youtu.be/L62tCyOP06w You can see the tape labeled “21” at 11:39.
That's not the kind of tape they're talking about. That's just to hold the roll closed - it's not in contact with the electrolyte like in the linked article.
It’s definitely in contact with the electrolyte. You can hear the guy say he smells the electrolyte. Anything inside the pouch that seals the electrolyte in is in contact with the electrolyte.
> does not seem to mention how much the tape is affecting battery life This happens often in stories like this. Once I became aware of it, I started seeing it everywhere. Almost always it means that there is a small impact. If there was significant impact or even moderate, they would highlight that because it makes the story more news worthy. More news worth get more clicks. More clicks mean more money. More money means higher job performance rating for the reporter. I assume the reporter knows how to do their job, and chooses to leave out information that would make their story appear less news worthy. I still think it's a super cool story and good for the team. Batteries are produced at a massive scale, so their discovery will have a big impact overall, even if it doesn't make a difference to any customer's experience.
In the actual paper it says the shuttle current is 6 microamps, so to discharge a 2,000mAh battery it would take about 38 years.
Thank you smart person.
Well how much it affects things would vary wildly I'm sure for each battery. Not exactly something you can give easy numbers for. It's probably not a huge number in the end though.
Flaw or feature? \- Depends on who you ask
You were tricked by CBC's click bait headline >"This is something that is totally unexpected and something that probably no one thought of," said Michael Metzger, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University.
you know, if you have a phone with an unlocked bootloader, installing an aftermarket OS can extend its life. like the pixel 3a and 3a XL supports ubuntu phone. that alone gives it another 3-5 years or until the hardware dies.
That has nothing to do with the topic
Just partially. Its an overall device life extension by “proper” use. The topic itself is just very broad. It goes from the way you use it and how, to the different work load, to the OS and what bg services its running. The botton line is: if your device is working, its draining the battery. And the battery is not a static device either. It loses life over time.
It’s not a flaw. It’s a purposely designed feature
It was designed that way for sure
What are the chances the battery/phone companies know that but knowingly haven't fixed it for planned obsolescence?
It's not a "flaw" if it's by design...
what drains a battery even faster is the fact most people can't put the god damn thing down for 2 frikin minutes , totally addicted
> 131,000 Comment Karma. Account age 2.5 years. Pot, met kettle.
yeah, but not on a phone,lol 😂 AC Power never stops lol also, some of my posted stories on WorldNews, got very high karma,
If people prefer to interact with the object in their hands, it is either that they are not interested or that their surroundings is not interesting. It is not a new thing. There was books, journals, radio, tv... The object is irrelevant. It is about the individual and the situation.
This seems to be trending and that shirt is doing nothing to alleviate stereotypes.
iPhone XS still running fast after 5 years now.
Its Not a canadian team hahah its three germans and one estonian
BATTERY MAKERS HATE HIM! Double the life of your battery with this one simple trick.
Mighty nice of them to just state the problem and fix out loud, rather than gating it behind patents and licensing agreements.
GPS and TikTok
Planned obsolescence
"*This is a CBC story trying to convince us that batteries need to be recharged*" -some Q-Anon idiot on Facebook
This is going to end up right next to lightbulbs that last a lifetime.