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/