>Or, more likely, a slight improvement in your phone and much thinner phones. On laptops, we might see the return of more ports. //

Please, no. I don't understand the utility of making something so expensive be so fragile and hard to hold. My phone is 5mm thick, that's already too thin for me.

Does anyone want thinner phones or is it just a marketing thing?

The thinner the phone, the thicker the case I can put on it with the same total thickness. It's incredibly rare to see a case-less phone in the wild these days.

It’s not incredibly rare at all. Phones these days are engineered well and they’re much less susceptible to fall damage. I’ve dropped my case-less iPhone X on the ground half a dozen times and it’s only collected a few dings on the corners.

I always found the older, entirely aluminum iPhones way too slippery to hold onto without a case.

I heard somewhere that in Holland every bicycle + lock weighs 5kg. If you have a cheap 5kg bike no one wants it and you don't have to lock it. If you have an expensive 1.5kg bike you need a lock that weighs 3.5kg to protect it.

In tour de France, bicycles under 6kgs are forbidden. Bicycles under this weight are incredible expensive and dangerous. Using metals like titanium and carbon fiber.

Most light and simple(no suspension) road bicycles weight usually 10 kilos, most mountain bikes do weight 15-20 kgs.

In Holland, most bicycles you see on the street are simple and cheap.

I think seanc probably has the idea of the saying right but with the wrong specific numbers.

It's more like 20% of the bike's cost should be in locks.

And a 1.5kg bike? What kind of bikes are you looking at?

You're off by a large amount. I'd say its closer to 15kg, and bike quality and weight aren't that correlated here. It's a lot more about maintenance and not being rusted to hell w.r.t. how likely a bike is to get stolen.

In general, since we are so flat a country, bike weight doesn't matter much. We'd rather have extra fancy stuff on a bike than have a lighter bike.

Wholly dependent on your environment. I don't see a case very often where I'm at

I don't use a case. If it were meant to be used with a case it would come built in. Iphones could easily double in thickness without making it harder to slip into a (male) pocket.

There are pockets for women's clothing?

The battery life on my oneplus 8 is the best I have ever had on a phone, and the difference it makes is massive. If I am ever faced with the trade-off between thinner phone and bigger battery, I'll take the bigger battery every time.

It would be pretty cool if we could make something like the folding tablets in Westworld.

I think phones and tablets will keep getting thinner, because you can always buy a cover to make it bigger. And it's better if more of the bulk of the phone is protective material rather than sensitive electronics.

I think eventually phones will basically be just a display, with no ports (wireless charging only), no buttons, and then you'll get covers with extra battery, ports, or whatever you want.

I do want a slightly thinner phone, or maybe for some of that extra space to be used for padding / reinforcement. This phone is almost always in my pockets, if it is thinner, it fits better.

I wouldn't mind too much if it meant I could put a case on it and have it be the size it is now.

A phone with a wide screen is hard to hold. I'll begin having issue with thickness only if it starts cutting fingers.

Marketing.

I would like to see phones and batteries decoupled; i.e., phones without batteries. Most people use phone cases anyway; put the battery in the phone case. Replace the case as desired.

Most Android phones used to have swappable batteries. Too convenient and not thin enough, I guess.

With the latest iphones, I already stopped night charging and just top it up whenever I'm close to a charger, i.e., in the car or in the kitchen.

> A 10x speedup of charging?

Not possible with existing infrastructure. The limiting factors are cooling the batteries and feeding them enough power. On small scale like laptops it's possible to speed up charging but not at large scale like cars.

That isn't to say it may be possible in the future but it isn't now.

It increases the charging speed by reducing the heat produced while charging.

If it makes charging more efficient (less energy converted to heat, more stored) then it would improve the charge rate but not by 10x.

Charging rate is typically limited by thermals. If you drop heat by 10x you can bump charge speed by the same.

The main way you can make batteries charge faster is my reducing the heat produced. This is the first limitation you hit anyway

What exactly is an "electric rocket"?

Rockets that use electrical pumps for the fuel and oxygen pumps. Usually rocket engines use some of the fuel and oxygen to run these pumps, which makes them a lot more complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket) Is the big player in the field afaik.

Magic? Non-satirical response, there's companies like Rocket Lab that make electrically powered turbopumps to simplify their rocket engines but that comes with very steep power requirements. The Electron rocket literally has lithium ion packs that drop away from the rocket as they are depleted and the weight of those packs really starts to add up because those turbopumps use absolutely insane amounts of power to keep up with the pressure and fuel flow requirements of the engine.

Not counting turbopumps for chemical engines there is also an electric propulsion when in space.

To expand on this there's these things called ion thrusters that use an electrically generated magnetic field to accelerate gas particles at extremely high velocities out the spacecraft thereby generating thrust. These are stupidly efficient but also very low thrust. Due to the high power usage I don't see much of an application for even incredibly dense batteries as you still need a sufficiently large power source anyway - though I'm no rocket scientist.

Presumably a rocket with a power source separated from its exhaust, and that flings its exhaust material out with an electrically-powered device.

So basically think of a 'reverse railgun'.

I was thinking of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_(rocket) Which uses electric power to pump the fuel and oxygen into the nozzle.

That's an ion thruster. They've been around for a while.

Every railgun is a thruster - or gun for that matter: https://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

A 3x increase in density does approximately nothing to make electric airliners more viable. We need more like a 100x increase before we see an electric 737 or A320.

This is the second time in this discussion someone mentions electric planes being viable and you respond with electric airliners not being viable.

Those are (in most peoples terminology) entirely different things.

Having viable light electric aircraft could revolutionize flight even if every aircraft for more than 20 people would run on kerosene for the next century.

I don’t think anyone is expecting a battery powered 737 any time soon. But a battery powered Cessna 172 with a 30 minute range would be huge.

This. Enhancing drone flight times, or other automated/semi-automated airborne machinery would be an absolutely huge win for industry and commerce as a whole.

I can state from experience that you're mistaken in what you think people expect. I work in a field very closely aligned with electric aircraft, and people who say "electric planes" without further qualification virtually always mean "electric 737s".

I also strongly question your assertion that viable light electric aircraft could "revolutionize flight". What exactly would the revolutionize? 2 seat electric trainers already exist, but the niche they fill is tiny. You're not going to move the needle on aircraft emissions with anything short of electric airliners. The rest of it is just a way to keep the research funded until we get there.

100x increase? Is that based on calculation based on the energy density of fuel vs batteries alone? Because there's a lot of efficiencies to be gained if you make a battery electric plane from scratch. And are you considering only a fully fuelled plane? Because many routes will only use a small fraction of the potential fuel capacity.

Look at the Maxwell X-57 for instance. If you don't have fuel in the wings, and you can use small electric take-off propellers on the wings, you can make the wing much thinner, which reduces drag.

You can potentially fly higher with electric planes, since you no longer have to think about air densitys impact on engine efficiency.

The main challenge with electric airplanes is not really the batteries. You could probably make viable short-haul planes with todays technology. The problem is you're basically starting from scratch, as a plane optimised for electric engines is most likely vastly different from a 737 airframe. It'll take decades to design and optimize radically new airframes.

We might never see planes crossing the pacific ocean with batteries only, but that doesn't mean electric planes aren't viable. By some calculations you can do 500-1000km routes with todays battery tech already, and there's a shitload of those. Maybe you'll have to fly 2-3 smaller planes rather than one huge one to cover the same route, but that can be a good thing. You could use smaller and more local airports. Electric planes are much more quiet after all. Operating costs with electric planes are way lower, so it might not be more expensive either.

With a 3x+ capacity you can start talking about covering most of the routes within a continent. So what if you can't do transcontinental? I think we can make enough biofuel to cover that if most other flights are electric (and/or hydrogen)

An electric airliner would be able to operate at much higher altitudes, and thus much more efficiently.

Looking only at energy density is naive.

Big if true, but I really don't need a thinner phone. Marketing will most likely salivate at an easy to break phone. Therefor I really hope this breakthrough is fake.

I've seen iPhone ads advertising how hard to break they are recently, if that has a basis in reality and isn't purely marketing spin then we're fine.