batteries

Showing 5 posts tagged batteries

Apple's Proposed Wireless Charging Smart Cover

Mikey Campbell of AppleInsider looks at a newly-unveiled patent filed by Apple:

Instead of sourcing power from a stationary dock, Apple’s invention calls for a tablet case, or more specifically an iPad Smart Cover, to hold the inductive power transmitter. In some embodiments, an internal battery is disposed within the case, basically creating an “on-the-go” wireless charger.

That’s a good idea. Hope it happens.

really-shit:

Imagine a world where your iPhone, car or any electronic device charges fully in 30 seconds to a minute. Well, that world has arrived. 

Scientists at UCLA have accidentally found the future of batteries and its very exciting. Watch this short little clip & be amazed.

Awesome. While everyone has been focusing on extending battery life, these guys may have alleviated the core problem from the other side. If you can charge your phone in a minute and have that charge last for hours, I’m sold.

Also, see: previous post.

"Hard Tech"

Googler Jed Christiansen takes issue with my previous post about battery life. As he writes:

MG comes across as an Silicon-Valley-centric arrogant jerk saying that “battery technology is really ripe for disruption.”  It implies that all he needs to do is call attention to this problem, and two hackers in a garage will start experimenting and build a battery that’s better than anything else on the market.  The reasons improving battery technology is tough is because the chemistry and material science problems are orthogonal; the work isn’t x*2, it’s x^2.  Even once you’ve solved the key problems, manufacturing at the scale required for specific use cases becomes a third problem, since it forces a re-evaluation (and sometimes a complete re-design) of the original chemistry and material science problems.

Ad hominem aside, it’s a fair point. But I also don’t claim to know how to solve the problem, nor am I arrogant enough to think a short post on my blog will lead to a solution. I’m simply pointing out the obvious: that this is a major problem. And it’s going to get worse.

Obviously, a lot of people are working on this problem. And many are doing good work, no doubt. But I still hold out hope that there’s something out there right now that no one has thought of yet that will completely change everything in the space. True disruptions are never obvious. And it’s foolish to brush the possibility aside. Then again, that mentality often opens the door to disruption…

The New iPad Battery

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes:

Between the release of the iPad 2 last year and the announcement of the new iPad yesterday, Apple has nearly doubled the capacity of the battery, taking it from 25Wh to a massive 42Wh. Measured in milliamps this boosts the battery from 6944 mAh to a monstrous 11,666 mAh.

That’s a massive, massive jump in the same basic space (ever-so-slightly bigger). This is perhaps the most significant thing only briefly mentioned yesterday because the ramifications are huge for many other products.

As John Brownlee notes:

That means that Apple’s work in battery density is not only going to open the door to an LTE iPhone 5, but could give us all-day MacBooks sooner rather than later.

During the keynote, I noted that I remembered the days when my laptop battery would give out before an Apple keynote was over. It was only a few years ago. Yesterday, by the end of the event, my MacBook Air was at 65%. What if Apple is close to a 20-hour laptop?