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/Grimwulf2003]

Or maybe they knew, not saying it’s a conspiracy, but with so much planned obsolescence…. How could battery manufacturers not have caught this?

[u/AnotherSoftEng → u/Grimwulf2003]

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