I still maintain that batteries are one of the main things holding back technological innovation. Think how much you could change your lifestyle if your laptop only needed to be charged once a week. Many people could work from the beach. Think how great it would be to go on a vacation and not having to remember to charge your phone the whole time. What if your iPod lasted for more than half a day?
This is a good start, as recharge time has been holding us back, but I still think that batteries are holding us back.
rich says
You don’t know much about technology do you?
The reason your laptop only lasts for a few hours is that it’s running an Pentium which has the same fundamental instruction set as a 8086 from 25 years ago. It has to translate all instructions from this arcane instruction set to a modern RISC instruction set in microcode.
You complain about your iPOD only lasting a 1/2 day when energy efficiency is the primary concern in design of portable devices. Nothing from 1980 could have played music for that long continuously, including a radio unless it had 8 D sized cell batteries which are not rechargeable.
The lack of power drives technology, it doesn’t hinder it. The reason that my cell phone can recharge in less than 1 hour and last for 2 days is because it’s low power. The energy density within the battery is rather amazing.
We could go to fuel cells instead and use acetone to power our devices, but it’s simply not cost effective at the moment because fuel cells require relatively rare (i.e. expensive) metals. You pay for it, it will more than double the cost of your cell phone, easily.
If batteries had the energy density you wanted, your laptop would bake like a toaster, your cell phone would make your head glow at night, and your iPod would be explosive if dropped in a bucket of mercury or salt water.
What is it that people that know the least about anything are the ones to complain about the situation?
Mark says
I may have stated my point poorly. Lack of power doesn’t hold back technological innovation, I should have said that it holds use back from being able to use that technology to its fullest. Consider if you were going into the rain forest to collect data. If you had a laptop battery that could last months, you wouldn’t have to bring a generator or a mountain of disposable batteries.
Lack of unlimited power drives technological innovation to a point. But there will come a time when it is impossible to decrease energy usage any more. When that happens, the only thing that can happen is to increase the amount of energy that can be stored by your portable device. So because nothing can run on no energy, the limiting factor is ultimately going to be the power supply.
Yeah, there are safety issues to consider (a half-dozen cell phones spontaneously explode every year), but once technological innovation has reduced energy usage as much as it can, they can spend as much time as they want on safety issues.
rich says
Here’s a radical idea – bring a solar cell or a dynamo generator.
I can run a computer at 400 Mhz with a PowerPC chip with a flash solid state disk drive that runs on less than 10 watts, not including the display although TFTs are extremely efficient as long as you’re not backlighting them – so 20 watts total.
I’m a professional engineer. I do verification of hardware designs like computer chips. I don’t need a computer over 1 Ghz, barely anybody does really.