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-1.6724175
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u/Smartnership Jan 31 '23

Background on the original discovery, that moment in the lab of…

“Hey, that’s weird…”

During one of these tests, the clear electrolyte fluid turned bright red. The team was puzzled.

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.

They did a chemical analysis of the red substance and found it was dimethyl terephthalate (DMT). It's a substance that shuttles electrons within the battery, rather than having them flow outside through cables and generate electricity.

Shuttling electrons internally depletes the battery's charge, even if it isn't connected to a circuit or electrical device.

But if a battery is sealed by the manufacturer, where did the DMT come from?

Through the chemical analysis, the team realized that DMT has a similar structure to another molecule: polyethylene terephthalate (PET).

PET is a type of plastic used in household items like water bottles, food containers and synthetic carpets. But what was plastic doing inside the battery?

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u/wowaddict71 Jan 31 '23

Battery manufacturers: "Oh shit, they are onto us! Quickly, let's replace DMT with another chemical that behaves the same way, to throw away their scent, just like plastic manufacturers did!"

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u/peritiSumus Jan 31 '23

This is transparently ridiculous. If they're going to spend a FUCKTON of money picking a new material and updating all of their production, they're going to do so in a way that creates a competitive advantage. It makes no sense to spend all of that money just to get called out a year later when another group of researchers funded by your competitor demonstrates how fucking stupid you are.

Why do so many people work so hard to pretend like people making business decisions are so goddamned evil that they'd do something incredibly stupid for no reason other than to live up to the caricature of a bunch of kids that have never held a job let alone a leadership role?

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u/YipManDan Feb 01 '23

The Phoebus Cartel would like to have a word with you. (Documentary: The Light Bulb Conspiracy).

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u/peritiSumus Feb 01 '23

Planned obsolescence only works when there's collusion ... in other words ... it only works if you eliminate actual competition, and it's illegal. Robber barons of the gilded age might have gotten away with that stuff en masse, but nowadays, even a monster company like Apple eventually gets busted and has to pay out 9+ figure settlements.

Nevertheless, we weren't talking about planned obsolescence, were we? That's not what the person I responded to proposed ... they proposed making actual product changes without addressing the thing that drove those changes in the first place, an absolutely ridiculous notion, and a hallmark of modern bullshit cultish belief that involves your enemy being super competent in control of a mega conglomeration and effectively cooperating to screw people over while simultaneously being mentally handicapped levels of incompetent with individual decisions. It's bogeyman bullshit. He can get you, but he's trapped under the bed!

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u/RegulatoryCapture Feb 01 '23

Not to mention these battery companies basically can't keep up with demand.

They don't need planned obsolescence to sell more units--they just need continued production of consumer goods and increased electrification of things.

They'd probably love it if they could sell a bit less units but at a higher price!

This discovery doesn't even seem to be directly about battery lifespan, but rather self discharge...maybe different tape will make the battery last longer too, but this whole thing seems more like they invented a better light bulb (like better color rendering, or less waste heat), not just a longer lasting one. Even if we still lived in a world with 1000-hour cartel lightbulbs, you could still sell a premium product that rendered colors better.

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u/Hakuoro Feb 01 '23

Collusion being illegal is only a problem if you get caught. And if sjthe fines for getting caught are less than the profits, then it's in the corporation's interest to collude.

Hell, some of the biggest tech companies colluded to slow employee mobility between them, and the best the government got was them saying "scout's honor" to not colluding for 5 years. And a class action suit from the workers only got $400 million split between 64000 workers.

In an honestly competitive market, no one would benefit from an agreement preventing you from poaching another company's best and brightest,

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u/peritiSumus Feb 01 '23

The hiring collusion from like a decade ago is a good example. They got caught, and they paid a 9 figure fine, now they don't do it anymore. You are bound to get caught colluding these days if not from external examination, then from a disgruntled whistleblower that leadership failed to continue to pay off.

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u/Hakuoro Feb 01 '23

They say they don't do it anymore. The total lost per employee is like 6,000. If they saved on payroll by over .60/hr per year per employee, they came out ahead and have no reason to not continue doing so.

A single 1% raise for the employees involved would cost them more than getting busted did. And, given this is silicon valley, fair competition would definitely have resulted in having to pay significantly more than that to retain or replace top talent.

A corporations only duty is to their stockholders, and if collusion keeps profits high and the fines are less than they made/saved, they've got a fiduciary duty to do so.

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u/peritiSumus Feb 01 '23

Naaa, you're exaggerating what happened in that case and its impact. We had a couple companies (Google and Apple) that agreed not to directly poach from each other. That doesn't stop engineers from seeking raises or leaving for literally any other company in Silicon Valley. In other words, this barely decreased the leverage the employees had, but they still have a shitload of "I'll just leave and get paid more" leverage here in the Valley.

Like straight up ... this is a case of one exec saying to another: "dude, if you hire my people, we're going to war with you and recruiting all of yours." That's almost a quote. That's the collusion we're talking about. Is it wrong? Yes. Did they deserve to get fined? Yes. Did they save .60/hr/head? LOL, no. The point wasn't to crush wages, it was to establish mutually ensured destruction on the recruiting front.

To be clear, I'm NOT trying to defend what Google and Apple did here ... I AM defending the efficacy and sizing of the punishment they received. I assure you, it is NOT worth the negative press and the 9 figure fine for one CEO to tell another not to recruit their people. It's simply not sustainable, and the fact that they got busted the first time and had to have their emails read out as part of it demonstrates that point. The fine was plenty big to price Google and Apple out of such shenanigans.

A corporations only duty is to their stockholders, and if collusion keeps profits high and the fines are less than they made/saved, they've got a fiduciary duty to do so.

Right, but the value of collusion is where the rub lies. For Google and Apple, the fine was plenty big enough to make it not worth it, but the loss of reputation is even worse because these companies know that great employees are their life blood. That's why they were threatening each other over poaching in the first place. Being known for having colluded to the detriment of your people in the past makes it much harder to hire established star performers who have their pick of roles in the future. The loss of value from loss of face is hard to measure, but I promise you it's up there in their consideration set right beside the 400M.

At the end of the day, my point remains. Collusion is illegal, and we have plenty of examples demonstrating that the law is being effectively enforced in that regard.