💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › lithium-blues.txt captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:25:18.
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Lithium blues ------------- SDF user Yargo wrote recently[1] about his collection of aging smartphones and the economics and practicalities of keeping them alive by buying new batteries, even if they will have to be installed by a technician because certain evil companies design phones with non-user-replacable batteries. In tentatively related news, a little while ago the laudable "FairPhone" project announced that it would be discontinuing support for it's first generation phone due to the difficulty of continuing to source compatible parts which fit in with its ideal of a transparent, sustainable and ethical supply chain[2]. One of the chief difficulties was getting additional batteries made. These things represent one of the biggest problems for me with modern technology. Everything is powered by rechargable Litihium ion or Lithium polymer batteries, and those batteries are almost always custom made device-specific products designed not only to not be replaced by the user, but not be replaced ever. This situation is so bad that I actually refuse to buy any such device unless it is absolutely necessary. This is the reason I don't have a pair of Bluetooth headphones, even though I think I'd get a lot of use and enjoyment out of them. The fact of the matter is that when you buy these things, you are basically buying tomorrow's landfill. Eventually the internal battery is going to stop reliably holding a charge. There is a good chance the first time this happens and practically a guarantee by the second time this happens, that the product has been discontinued, the contract the producer had with the battery manufacturer has expired, the battery factory has retooled their assembly lines and that battery is *never coming back* unless you are a millionaire. Maybe if it is a very popular device there will be some Chinese clones available, and maybe these won't be dangerous and maybe the original device manufacturer won't use some bogus IP claim to shut these down, but you shouldn't count on it. The battery supply will be gone and then your device is pretty much useless, even if you love it and used it every day and it still does everything you want it to do and every component in every circuit is in working order. Somethings, like laptops and to a lesser degree tablets and to a lesser degree phones can still be useful with dead batteries if you keep them permanently plugged in at home. But anything whose value fundamentally derives from its portability - Bluetooth headphones or speakers, smartwatches, fitness trackers, GoPros and similar things - will become useless. This will probably happen in less than five years from the date of purchase if the device is used often. In many parts of the world it is expensive and/or inconvenient to get things like this properly disposed of, hence people will simply throw them out. I'll say this as clearly as I can: the entire "wearables" industry and probably a huge chunk of the "internet of things" industry is literally manufacturing 2023's landfill today. Do you honestly want to support that industry? The worst part of this is that it doesn't seem technically necessary to me. We have gotten by just fine with the standardised system of AA, AAA, CR2032, etc. batteries for decades. This system lets device manufacturers focus on making devices and battery manufacturers focus on making batteries, and lets consumers enjoy a guaranteed steady supply of replacement batteries (rechargable or otherwise) and lets old devices benefit from future improvements in battery efficiency. Now, I understand that these litihum batteries are a hell of a lot more complicated than your garden variety AA and most of them have tiny onboard computers monitoring the voltage and current and temperature etc. to keep things in safe operating areas. I still don't see why a series of standardised pinouts and a common protocol stack couldn't, in principle, be developed for these batteries, so that we had half-a-dozen or so form factors device manufacturers could choose from. It's possible that battery miniaturisation is proceeding fast enough that fixing form factors in standardised stone now would prevent us having smaller devices in the near future, but honestly, aren't our current devices small enough? Is having a *really* small widget in two year's time that needs daily charging that much more appealing a prospect than still having your "just small" widget in two year's time but now it only needs charging every second day? I *do* see why this hasn't actually happened even if it is possible in principle: the device manufacturers must love the current scenario. It provides yet another method for making perfectly good devices obsolete. Short lifespans of custom batteries translate directly into short lifespans of products regardless of any other technical consideration. By investing in proprietary battery R&D, phone manufacturers can bring out a phone which is 10g lighter and 1mm thinner than the other guy's phone, which absolutely *will* get them more revenue in phone sales from the salivating masses, even though phones are already small and light enough that these kinds of additional small gains are essentially pointless. Sadly, the modern hardware world is no less messed up than the modern software world. There's not a lot to get excited about in a world of closed ephemera. Why invest energy in something when you know full well that in five year's time it's pretty likely either the battery won't charge and/or the cloud server will have disappeared? Better to dive backward into retrotech, anything old which is still working now has a good shot at still working further into the future. [1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/yargo/glog/./t17555-obsolescence.txt [2] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2017/07/20/why-we-had-to-stop-supporting-the-fairphone-1/