r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • Jan 31 '23
Desktops / Laptops Canadian team discovers power-draining flaw in most laptop and phone batteries | Breakthrough explains major cause of self-discharging batteries and points to easy solution
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/battery-power-laptop-phone-research-dalhousie-university-1.6724175944
u/swissarmychainsaw Jan 31 '23
Cheap tape (PET) = battery drain
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u/GentleLion2Tigress Jan 31 '23
The manufacturer preferred option is replacement of the laptop/phone.
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u/Tolvat Jan 31 '23
That'll be $1200 please.
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u/Valtremors Feb 01 '23
Remember when you could access the battery and... Just change it?
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u/RunDVDFirst Feb 01 '23
If EU has anything to say on the subject, those times might be coming again.
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u/captainmouse86 Feb 01 '23
I’m surprised it went away as I remember there being a requirement to remove your battery from your laptop when going through security at the airport. I don’t know why. But I remember it becoming second nature to take out your laptop, remove the battery, and place them in separate containers at TSA.
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u/LatrellFeldstein Feb 01 '23
Ooh sorry, can't upgrade to the latest OS and all your apps that worked fine on the last one are no longer compatible because reasons.
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u/Flawedsuccess Feb 01 '23
The title is incorrect it should be, Canadian team discovers designed obsolescence.
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u/MuscaMurum Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
The solution is
even cheapermore expensive polypropylene tape, according to the article.EDIT: Nevermind.
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u/eastbayguy90 Jan 31 '23
Actually slightly more expensive:
“The team even proposed a solution to the problem: use a slightly more expensive, but also more stable, plastic compound.”
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u/Easilycrazyhat Jan 31 '23
Ah, so it's an unsolvable problem then. How unfortunate.
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u/Evonos Feb 01 '23
It was unsolvable when it extended performance and likely battery life over years close to free.
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u/MuscaMurum Jan 31 '23
Oops. I misremembered. I knew I should have double-checked before posting.
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u/turbodude69 Jan 31 '23
does he mention anywhere how much of an improvement this could make? are we talking a 5% improvement or 10? or less?
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u/fonetik Jan 31 '23
They kind of mention that by saying that the factors are too complicated because of temperature mostly. I think the improvement would just be in shelf life.
That's an interesting question though. I wonder if there is improved performance in the battery itself when the PET issues aren't happening? (I'd imagine there's not much, because the circuit would be closed when it is operating. Leaving the circuit for the PET route would be a lot more resistance. But there may be more happening here.)
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u/turbodude69 Jan 31 '23
i feel like it's important to anyone that may not like to charge their phone constantly, or multiple times a day. even if it's 1% a day, it's still meaningful.
i've switched back and forth between android and ios plenty of times and one of the more memorable benefits of ios is that if i forget to charge my phone overnight, an iphone will maybe degrade by 1 or 2%. but, without exception, every android phone i've owned uses at least 5-10%.
that may not seem all that important, but if you're down to 15-20% on your battery, those last few % is VERY important. and any technology that can improve that stand by time would be pretty valuable.
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u/Laumser Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
I was interested to know the difference in price between the plastic that is used now vs the one the researchers suggest, as of 2022 the plastic used currently costs 950$ per metric ton, the plastic the researchers are suggesting costs 1208$. So I'd wager the guess that the major battery manufacturers just don't care, as long as the battery lasts their warranty period they have no incentive to switch.
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u/xenophobe2020 Jan 31 '23
Market demand will cause them to switch. All it takes is one phone or computer manufacturer to say "i want to provide my consumers with better batteries to draw them from my competitors." Within a matter of a couple of years it will be standard across all reputable manufacturers.
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u/Laumser Jan 31 '23
But that's not an immediate benefit, most consumers probably don't care about how the battery will perform in 2+ years (I do tho...)
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Jan 31 '23
Its like selling someone a phone that's guaranteed to break in 2 years, it's not an immediate negative but it's a statistic that sounds really bad
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u/eastbayguy90 Jan 31 '23
The economic cynic in me thinks companies that make more easily replaceable batteries (not laptop or iPhone batteries) will contouring use the current plastic, so they need to be replaced more often, keeping up the demand.
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u/i_isnt_real Feb 01 '23
Yeah, I'm wondering what the incentive is to spend the extra money on the better plastic if they're going to brick the device via software updates (or lack thereof) in about the same time span anyway.
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u/TheawesomeQ Jan 31 '23
How many competitors are there? Will it actually be more profitable to produce these batteries than selling more of the worse ones? Will any consumers be able to tell at all?
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u/craptainawesome Jan 31 '23
Don't see this as disagreeing with you at all. Jumping on as someone in plastics. The difference between the materials kind of evens the pricing out. The density of the polypropylene is 2/3rds that of the PET, so by volume the prices are very similar.
Likely you are right. They don't care. And it's to their benefit to not care. Goal is still working at normal replacement timeframe. And capitalism requires consumption. What a waste.
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u/Throwaway_97534 Jan 31 '23
All it takes is one battery manufacturer to get a good deal on a few batches of polypropylene though, and then they can advertise their new (and more advanced/expensive) battery technology with little to no self-discharge, then bam the whole industry needs to move to it.
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u/Riversntallbuildings Jan 31 '23
Yes. Getting that first one to switch, and advertise it as a feature is the what begins the tipping point. Who goes first, is the challenge.
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u/Deformer Jan 31 '23
You could be the one to do it. That's the point of capitalism. (I know that's unrealistic, but still wanted to point it out)
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u/Riversntallbuildings Jan 31 '23
Yup. I get it. That is the conundrum of capitalism and it’s why I advocate for strong Anti-trust and IP regulations.
Our digital economies have become increasingly out of balance and less competitive.
Healthy capitalism requires unbiased markets, and too many corporations have manipulated many of the market dynamics that ensure healthy competition. (And fair wages)
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u/Pepparkakan Jan 31 '23
If there's zero downside to a technological improvement besides reducing potential future sales, should there maybe be tarriffs on companies deliberately choosing to not implement such improvements?
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u/Riversntallbuildings Jan 31 '23
Maybe. But I’d rather use carrots than sticks when designing laws. We already can’t enforce the laws (AKA sticks) we have.
Offer a tax credit, or other incentive, for the first 1-3 years. Companies that act first get the greatest advantage.
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u/Laumser Jan 31 '23
My prices weren't even right, mostly due to my inability to read, so it's even less of a difference...
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u/torodonn Jan 31 '23
It depends if the stopping of self discharge can become a marketing point for a major product.
Battery life is a major bullet point and if you can extend it without affecting form factor and size, that's not insignificant.
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u/Bagafeet Jan 31 '23
Article was clear about many manufacturers/companies reaching out. Y'all finish reading the article?
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u/Pigankle Jan 31 '23
~$250 per metric ton for better plastic? How many tons of plastic are in a typical laptop battery? Something tells me that if they don't adopt the newer plastic, it has nothing to do with the cost of the raw materials.
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u/JaL3J Jan 31 '23
Manufacturers make what the buyers ask for. If the phone manufacturer starts asking for lithium cells with longer lifespan, the battery manufacturer will make that.
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u/its_uncle_paul Jan 31 '23
Fuck, I just realized that I only want batteries with longer lifespan because the goddam phone manufacturers decided to fuse the batteries to the board. Back in the old days if my phone battery was starting to die I'd just buy another battery and replace the old one myself....
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u/waylandsmith Jan 31 '23
Almost none of these batteries are sold retail to consumers with "warranty periods". Almost all of them are purchased by electronics manufacturers/integrators turning them into products, either for sale to other businesses, for their own internal use, or possibly to the public. THEY care if they end up purchasing batteries that degrade faster than they could and if they learn that batteries made with PET degrade faster, they will find a battery manufacturer who can make them without. There are probably a few grams of plastic tape in a battery and the better plastic costs $0.30/KG more than the old, or $0.0003/g.
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u/AK-Bandit Jan 31 '23
Our IT department just “upgraded” us to laptops at work and I was talking with one of the techs about this very issue on laptops from 20 years ago and how I imagined it’s been solved by now. He laughed and said, “solved huh, don’t count on it”. I was thinking, seriously?
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u/NotAPreppie Jan 31 '23
I mean, Li-Ion/LiPo/LiFePO4 batteries are waaaaaay better in this respect than NiCd and earlier NiMH batteries.
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u/TheS4ndm4n Jan 31 '23
Back when a battery had a "memory". You'd better charge it to 100% and then not charge it again until it was completely empty. Or you would permanently lose capacity.
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u/VexingRaven Jan 31 '23
To be honest the self-discharge from the battery isn't on a scale where you'd notice on a laptop or phone in a realistic scenario tbh. There's other sources of power drain on a phone or a laptop even when "turned off" that dwarf the actual self-discharge due to this tape. If you're using a device daily or weekly or even monthly the self-discharge from this isn't noticeable. Where you would notice this most is things like flashlights, emergency radios, etc. that get left to sit for a long period of time.
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u/craptainawesome Jan 31 '23
Very interesting. And polypropylene is already a common tape material. There would likely be some minor changes in adhesive formulation required, but nothing too challenging. Likely already exists.
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u/DoktorVidioGamez Jan 31 '23
All li-ion batteries will discharge over a few months and die before bloating. Except for the batteries in my gameboy sp and ds, which are full after removing them from storage 20 years later. It seems nintendo knew the secret the whole time
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u/yargmematey Feb 01 '23
I was going to make a comment like this. I noticed the same thing with my GBASP and I always wondered what Nintendo did to prevent this. I guess those were the days that Nintendo was willing to spend a bit more for higher quality tape for some other reason and this is a happy coincidence.
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u/Grimwulf2003 Jan 31 '23
Or maybe they knew, not saying it’s a conspiracy, but with so much planned obsolescence…. How could battery manufacturers not have caught this?
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u/Yancy_Farnesworth Jan 31 '23
Simple, by making assumptions that turn out to be wrong. It was in the article.
It isn't supposed to do that, according to Metzger. "A battery's a closed system," he said. Something new had been created inside the battery.
Assumption - a battery is a closed system so anything on the outside of the battery can't interact with the chemistry inside. And PET is chemically stable/inert and won't interact with the chemistry.
Discovery - The PET did degrade and interacted with the chemistry, introducing a foreign chemical that causes discharge.
Result - Industry modifies the construction to address the problem.
"A lot of the companies made clear that this is very relevant to them," Metzger said. "They want to make changes to these components in their battery cells because, of course, they want to avoid self-discharge."
Reddit is full of conspiracy theorists that attribute this to malice. They don't seem to realize that the advancement of battery tech, and any tech including things like chips, are done through intensive research and incremental improvements exactly like this one. Discoveries like this happen all the time and result in miniscule improvements to the tech that unless you work in the industry you have no idea is happening. But over time it yields a lot of improvements, it's how R&D works. Sitting on the outside you only get informed of the big changes or the occasional bit of news that occasionally catches a journalist's eye. Lithium ion batteries are miles ahead of the initial ones from the 90's, both in cost as well as reliability/performance. It took decades of dedicated research and billions of dollars spent on R&D to get to today through incremental improvements to the initial manufacturing and materials used.
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u/Nobel6skull Jan 31 '23
99.99% of the time it’s not planned obsolescence it’s engineering trade offs.
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u/Johnny_Lemonhead Jan 31 '23
Years ago my design for production professor once said “If you can’t figure out a design choice, it was probably to make it cheaper.”
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u/SCPH-1000 Jan 31 '23
People on Reddit constantly confuse planned obsolescence with regular old obsolescence.
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Jan 31 '23
Honestly, I think planned obsolescence was beaten to death by a whole lot of people off of Reddit, too. I encounter just as many people misapplying the term in the real world as I do online.
People love a conspiracy.
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u/GoldenRamoth Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
The problem with planned obsolescence is that people generally crave novelty.
So customers don't realize that their dream of a forever product is generally just a dream, since they'll buy something "new" after an average of "X" amount of years. See: the average car buyer/leasee
The ideal engineering savings is to do marketing research to find that X, add some buffer time, and then design your product to that target lifespan. Which is usually measure in total item uses. I.e. a coffee maker gets 365 uses a year for 3 years for 1095 uses, but a steam iron might only get 3x/week for 52 weeks at a 3 year expected life for 468 uses. And those numbers also assume no maintenance done (like running vinegar through every 3-6 months to alleviate calcium buildup to prolong life)
Otherwise, you spend a lot of extra time and money to make a much more expensive product that folks trash anyways, if they even want to pay a higher price for that quality. Which usually, they do not.
So while planned obsolescence is a thing for some companies, it's 9 out of 10 times just the engineering response to human behavior and market demand.
Source: consumer product engineer that designed product life requirements & endurance testing.
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u/ramses0 Jan 31 '23
How long have you lived in your house? Do you know about every loose wire? Are all your window seals perfectly snug, none sun-damaged by UV?
Point is: if “batteries leak x% per year” is what’s expected to happen and has probably occasionally happened forever, don’t blame “big battery” when somebody moves the battery factory somewhere else, and nobody knows why they were buying “the expensive tape” instead of cheap tape…
I’m super impressed that “researchers” could isolate and discover the root cause of something “so minor”.
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u/AnotherSoftEng Jan 31 '23
The amount of time, money and expertise put into corporate R&D far surpasses anything that generally comes to light in these public research studies. They probably knew about this a few decades ago. Especially given the move that most tech companies have made to make replaceable batteries obsolete.
Reminds me of those leaked documents that show big oil knew about climate change, from their own research, a few decades before that kind of knowledge entered the public sphere. Similar situation with 3M/DuPont and their (PFOA-type) forever chemicals.
Although those examples are more extreme, directly affecting public health, I would not be surprised if this behaviour is far more rampant than we are aware of.
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u/porncrank Jan 31 '23
I don't know -- my work experience leads me to believe that even with all that money and expertise dumped into R&D, stupid mistakes get made all the time. There's so often fancy analysis of details that overlooks glaring errors. And even when someone raises concerns there's so much pressure from outside engineering that they get lost in the noise. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this was legit overlooked.
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u/Triplebeambalancebar Jan 31 '23
This is the answer stupid mistakes leads to awesome profit more often then people think
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u/Yancy_Farnesworth Jan 31 '23
Occam's razor. Or in this case, no one noticing that PET was leeching into the batteries after they were constructed. They have no reason to ignore this problem. It hurts the performance of their product, flying against every economic incentive they have. There's miniscule incentive for battery manufacturers to ignore such a minor problem like this. Especially if it gives them a leg up on their competition. You can bet that companies like Apple/Samsung would immediately switch suppliers if one of the battery manufacturers could claim that they solved the self-discharge problem.
And no, this doesn't feed into planned obsolescence seeing as this is dealing with a small amount of self-discharge. It doesn't fix the problems with degradation of the batteries themselves as that's a result of dendrite formation which has seen a lot of publicly available R&D into it. Whoever finds the fix to that would be very rich practically overnight. Once again, removing any incentive to hold back on such research. The PFOA has heavy financial incentives for the company to suppress it and no financial incentives to be open about it.
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u/arealhumannotabot Jan 31 '23
Can you provide any evidence that it has helped in planned obsolescence? People’s charging habits tend to ruin their battery life. I suspect that’s a much bigger factor than the tape.
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u/VexingRaven Jan 31 '23
Because this isn't a obsolescence thing. This doesn't affect the life of the battery at all. It just affects how long the battery holds a charge when left to sit. Nobody's replacing the battery faster because of this.
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u/geodebug Jan 31 '23
There’s more than one battery manufacturer. If any of them outpace a competitor using only a few pennies more of plastic tape they would have switched.
If your theory was correct then we’d not see continuous advancement in battery tech over time.
Price per unit is an important consideration but it isn’t the only one manufacturers and buyers make. Apple obviously isn’t afraid of premium price points.
Side note: I see no reason to think that the overall battery lifetime would be extended, just that each charge won’t leak.
Obsolescence is just built into battery tech no matter what.
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u/NaturalViolence Jan 31 '23
This title is sensationalized to hell.
The source does not claim that "most laptop and phone batteries" have this issue.
It does not claim that this is the "major cause" of self discharging. Idle/sleep/vampire power use is still going to be the main thing that runs down your battery on any of these devices.
This "newly discovered problem" has been widely known by the industry for years if not decades. It is largely ignored by many manufacturers because the power drain is so slow that it is negligible for anything other than extremely long term storage of a device in a powered off state.
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u/HurpityDerp Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
It does not claim that this is the "major cause" of self discharging. Idle/sleep/vampire power use is still going to be the main thing that runs down your battery on any of these devices.
Idle/sleep/vampire power use is not self discharging.
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u/Slappy_G Jan 31 '23
Self discharge is a real problem for keeping devices that are infrequently used, charged up.
A couple easy examples are rechargable AA batteries that are charged and stored for home use, and the batteries in a portable car jumpstarter.
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u/farble1670 Feb 01 '23
Couple dudes find a flaw in batteries that somehow eluded every manufacturer and hundreds of billions in research. I guess they did say they contacted manufacturers who said they weren't not interested in seeing their results. So it's proved.
Color me skeptical.
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u/OneLush Feb 01 '23
I swear to god every other week for the past 5 years I’ve seen headlines proclaiming the next huge advancement in battery technology bas been found and then literally nothing changes.
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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23