Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Do Phone Batteries Still Suck? 🪫”.
Why, in the year 2024, do I still have to charge my iPhone every night? You would think, given how much cell phones have improved over the last two decades that their batteries would have also gotten better. And yes, there have been some improvements with higher-end phones like the iPhone 15 Pro Max, the pixel 8 Pro or the Galaxy s24 Ultra, but those batteries still won’t. Last more than 2 days tops, and even his phones have gotten better we’re still pretty much using the same Battery tech. Now that we were in the’90s. So when will I finally be able to stop stressing about my phone battery levels? The simple answer is that battery improvements haven’t been able to keep up with how quickly phones have developed, smarter smartphones need more power, but right now the only way to really get more power out of a battery is to make it bigger.
But no one wants to carry around a giant. Brick. Phone makers have found ways to shrink internal components to make space for slightly larger higher capacity batteries, but there’s a limit and at some point the batteries themselves need to evolve and that’s the the tricky part smartphones have used lithium ion batteries since the’90s, and there have Been advancements when it comes to boosting capacity and speeding up charging time, but we’ve pretty much reached the cap on how much power we can get from lithium ion batteries. That means we need a whole new type of battery. Researchers are exploring several new technologies like solid state batteries, while lithium ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte to move charge around solid state batteries, use Ceramics or other solid materials. This has a couple key benefits: one you can pack more energy in less space and two solid state batteries move charge around more quickly, which means faster charging. One type of solid state battery that could show up in your electronics one day is lithium metal. It’S super light and can pack lots of energy. The downside is it’s super expensive and as of right now, pretty unstable companies and researchers haven’t really found a way to commercialize these batteries yet, but they are working on it. One company – that’s touting its lithium metaltech, is quantumscape, which is looking to make the next generation of batteries for electric vehicles. Volkswagen is one of the startup’s main investors and is testing the tech for its future EVS. If that’s successful, you could see the tech pop up in phones someday too, but here’s the ironic bit by the time the next generation of batteries is ready for commercial use.
Smartphones will probably have progressed enough to demand even more powerful batteries, so it might just be this endless cycle where batteries can’t keep up with mobile advancements. In the meantime, there are ways to extend your phone’s battery life like turning on low power mode or disabl. The always on display, if your phone has one and for now at least keep that external battery pack close thanks so much for watching and be sure to give this video a thumbs up and subscribe for more Tech content from zet .