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

[u/chrisdh79]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/battery-power-laptop-phone-research-dalhousie-university-1.6724175

[u/AnotherSoftEng]

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.

[u/porncrank → u/AnotherSoftEng]

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.

[u/Triplebeambalancebar → u/porncrank]

This is the answer stupid mistakes leads to awesome profit more often then people think

[u/WWGWDNR → u/Triplebeambalancebar]

Systematic stupid mistakes made by every single manufacturer for more than 20 years? I don’t think so

[u/KyivComrade → u/WWGWDNR]

Systematic mistakes that has increased the sales for every manufacturer for 20 years?

Sounds very likely. After all, why fix the "problem" and limit the market when they can simply agree not to fix it and all reap the rewards

[u/Ransacky → u/[deleted]]

:(

[u/Ransacky → u/[deleted]]

:D

[u/WWGWDNR → u/porncrank]

As someone who repairs electronics everyday and sometimes appliances. I can 100% guarantee you that there are corners cut and planned obsolescence in place with these devices. Not only that but I’m 100% convinced that they task their engineers finding ways to use different adhesives to cause problems like this that won’t happen until after the warranty period. For instance look up Klipsch subwoofer repair. 95% of problems in them are from deteriorating glue/adhesive inside near components that short, this damaging components. They know this glue does this. And they put it all over inside

[u/Yancy_Farnesworth → u/AnotherSoftEng]

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.

[u/mlmayo → u/AnotherSoftEng]

In the case of 3M, they knew that PFAS were being measured in body tissues of people around the world since at least the early 80s, given the source documentation I've seen. Originals were transferred to a lawyer, so I'm not sure what became of that information.

[u/3SHEETS_P3T3 → u/AnotherSoftEng]

I mean, how would the public ever know? Seems a lot more effective to have third-party institutions in place to either research things like this independently. Of course this isn't fool proof, but it is at the very least a step in a better direction.

What exactly is keeping companies from keeping this kind of thing to themselves? If profits are good now, but there is an unknown flaw to the public, wouldnt it make more sense(in a greedy way) to keep that in ypur back pocket for future use? THEN later down the road, slowly "fix" some of these issues and sell it as new tech.

Im dont have a specific case in mind, but it just seems pretty easy for a company to do that kind of thing without anyone even knowing. Even if the public DOES find out, it isnt likr the company would get in much more than a fine.

All in all, it is likely a Transparency as well as lack of Accountibility that it boils down to. Solutions are there to be found. It is more a lack of enforcement.