Oooh… power! I’m eagerly waiting for these puppies to show up in consumer laptops.
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Selling these could be difficult; the batteries would require a full-scale marketing assault….
All the other Eighties cartoon superheros are making a come-back… maybe Voltron will lead the assault. I can just imagine the booking when the police finally catch him: “Name: Voltron. Charge: battery.” 😉
Something that was barely mentioned in that article is that the nanowire batteries don’t seem to suffer from the degradation over time that current lithium ion batteries do. I just had to replace a very nice Bluetooth mouse that was working perfectly, but that was powered by a lithium ion battery that I couldn’t get a replacement for. It just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. I picked up a cheaper non-Bluetooth wireless mouse that takes two easily-replaceable double-A batteries, so this won’t happen again.
Great, that’s probably the kind of battery that’s in the iPod, which you have to have Apple replace the battery for. I thought that problem had been solved, and with 20 hours of playtime (even according to reviewers) it wouldn’t be a problem I’d encounter.
It probably won’t be, but current lithium ion batteries definitely degrade over time. I had to replace the one on this laptop recently too… after a little more than a year, it could barely hold half the charge that it did when it was new. And I don’t use it all that heavily, either… the computer runs on battery power maybe six to eight hours a week.
I remember reading somewhere to let rechargeable batteries drain a lot before recharging, else they “get used to” needing to be recharged at an earlier period. I don’t know if that’s true of lithium-ion batteries though, it was the old NiCads that were notorious for it.
I don’t do that with the iPod though, a) I need to sync podcasts and b) if the batteries dead, gotta send it to Apple.
That was just for NiCads (and from what I hear, the “memory effect” that that advice was based on was mostly a myth even with those — it started with some orbiting satellite, and the conditions that created it there are all but impossible to reproduce even in a lab, let alone in practice).
Today’s lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from being partially recharged (though the charging circuitry can be overused if the device is left on the charger all the time, because it keeps switching on and then immediately off again). I hear that they can degrade from being completely drained, though I can’t verify it myself — I’d recommend that you try not to do that very often.
Selling these could be difficult; the batteries would require a full-scale marketing assault….
All the other Eighties cartoon superheros are making a come-back… maybe Voltron will lead the assault. I can just imagine the booking when the police finally catch him: “Name: Voltron. Charge: battery.” 😉
Something that was barely mentioned in that article is that the nanowire batteries don’t seem to suffer from the degradation over time that current lithium ion batteries do. I just had to replace a very nice Bluetooth mouse that was working perfectly, but that was powered by a lithium ion battery that I couldn’t get a replacement for. It just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore. I picked up a cheaper non-Bluetooth wireless mouse that takes two easily-replaceable double-A batteries, so this won’t happen again.
Great, that’s probably the kind of battery that’s in the iPod, which you have to have Apple replace the battery for. I thought that problem had been solved, and with 20 hours of playtime (even according to reviewers) it wouldn’t be a problem I’d encounter.
It probably won’t be, but current lithium ion batteries definitely degrade over time. I had to replace the one on this laptop recently too… after a little more than a year, it could barely hold half the charge that it did when it was new. And I don’t use it all that heavily, either… the computer runs on battery power maybe six to eight hours a week.
I remember reading somewhere to let rechargeable batteries drain a lot before recharging, else they “get used to” needing to be recharged at an earlier period. I don’t know if that’s true of lithium-ion batteries though, it was the old NiCads that were notorious for it.
I don’t do that with the iPod though, a) I need to sync podcasts and b) if the batteries dead, gotta send it to Apple.
That was just for NiCads (and from what I hear, the “memory effect” that that advice was based on was mostly a myth even with those — it started with some orbiting satellite, and the conditions that created it there are all but impossible to reproduce even in a lab, let alone in practice).
Today’s lithium-ion batteries don’t suffer from being partially recharged (though the charging circuitry can be overused if the device is left on the charger all the time, because it keeps switching on and then immediately off again). I hear that they can degrade from being completely drained, though I can’t verify it myself — I’d recommend that you try not to do that very often.