Re:Boosting teeth’s healing ability by mobilizing stem cells...
by plushpuffin on Thursday February 01, 2018 @01:26PM
(#16284330)
Batteries have seen incremental yearly improvements of a few percent in capacity, recharge time, cost, weight, and number of recharges, which looks impressive over several years. GP is talking about the articles that come out every month or two saying "new battery with nano-particles/graphene/etc has 20x the capacity of LiOn [in the lab]."
Re:Boosting teeth’s healing ability by mobilizing stem cells...
by sambe on Thursday February 01, 2018 @02:20PM
(#16284903)
Most people's primary experience of lithium-ion batteries is in their mobile phone. From that point of view, they were already cheap and commonplace at ~the turn of the millennium. Most people's perception is that in the last 18 years they've got substantially worse. Obviously, the power and capability of the phone has gone up dramatically, but it's pretty obvious where the perception has come from.
I'd think the secondary experience is in laptop batteries, and I'd hazard a guess that there's a similar but less extreme story: perception is similar battery life (perhaps because most life extensions come from low-power modes, so anyone actually using their laptop doesn't reach the claimed numbers for modern laptops?).
Of course, a third major factor is that people tend not to notice incremental improvements as much as step changes, and tend not to "upgrade their battery" in a comparable way.
All told, in relative terms there's probably some truth to it; other technology has progressed faster. But I wholeheartedly agree things have got better.
What?
Batteries have made enormous strides in the past two decades. Surely, you remember the days of almost everything running off AAs, which took hours to recharge (If they were even rechargable), and tended to leak their contents at the slightest provocation.
Or, alternatively, you could shell out large amounts of money for lithium-ion batteries, which wouldn't hold half a charge after ~50 cycles, and which would be at 1/6th their original capacity after ~100 cycles.
If anything, battery technology has been a monumental success story. No, we don't have batteries based on unicorn farts that charge in 20 seconds, and hold more energy then gasoline. But what we do have is pretty damn amazing.