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Comment by yeasayer | Hacker News Reader

Where are these new battery technologies that are invented every 6 months, according to the news?

They are in your phone.

10 years ago it was almost impossible to find a phone with a battery of over 1500 mAh. Today the standard size is 3000 mAh.

While the capacity has doubled, the volume of the battery has stayed the same or diminished.

There are phones with 5000, 6000, and even 10000 mAh batteries on the market today.

That's how I know that everyone complaining about thinner phones and reduced battery life is kidding themselves.

Thinphones are the top sellers, thickphones with batteries that last for days are not.

> thickphones with batteries that last for days are not.

Point me to a recent one with a recent build of Android that receives regular security updates from a reputable builder and I'll buy it immediately. I'd line up outside a building like it was Black Friday to buy a Galaxy 8 or Pixel 2 with an integrated 10000mAh battery.

But, alas, this magical unicorn "thickphone" doesn't exist on the market, even if some random Chinese manufacturer that will be gone tomorrow makes one with a four year old SoC and a three year old build of Android with no security updates since the phone's release two years ago...

lg v20 with an aftermarket battery. I regularly go three days without charging.

>That's how I know that everyone complaining about thinner phones and reduced battery life is kidding themselves.

I definitely get worse battery life out of my iPhone 6s than I did with my iPhone 4 which was worse than my feature phones. My Nexus 6p is worse than any listed so far as well.

Putting 8 core processors in phones to (poorly) compensate for a pig of an operating system and app ecosystem doesn't help.

Batteries have gotten a lot better and cheaper over time.

not a lot better mores law does not apply to battery tech no matter how much the electric car evangelists would like it to be so

Compare a Li-Ion battery from 1992 vs now and you are easily talking 2+x recharge cycles that's huge on it's own. But, you also get lower weight, lower volume, increased power, and lower cost. You can even get a vast array of form factors not just little cylinders.

Granted, their are trade-offs and I would love to have 10x the power. Still, 2x energy by weight and 1/3 the cost means I have no problem saying batteries have gotten dramatically better.

Compare the advances in cpu tech or DRAM

How about the advancement in steal or gasoline. Batteries are old tech. CPU advancement is very similar to increases in engine horsepower over the first 80 years which steadily doubled up to rockets and then almost completely stalled out.

Saying it's only they are only 10+x as good in the last 25 years overall is a silly standard. Recharge increase * weight decrease * cost decrease. Remember each of them are independently large improvements.

If you see the same increases happen again electric cars in 25 years would have 1,000+ mile range and charge in ~30 seconds.

Of course not. Moore's law is about the number of transistors per unit area. Battery capacity doesn't have much to do with transistor density.

Your missing the point (ill give you the benefit of the doubt that its in good faith) battery tech advances very slowly but most of the "ambitious" claims for electric cars seem to think that some magic discovery will result in a step change.

I am using its as analogy that anyone familiar with basic technology would understand.

Battery technology is increasing at a steady rate of 8% per year. Everytime you hear of a breakthrough it's at least 10 years away from being production ready.

Just to add 8% a year is doubling every decade. If you hear about something 2x as good that takes 10 years to become mainstream, then that's progress as normal.

They always hit the reality of engineering and scale.

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