Nomad's 'Pod' Battery Provides Four Full Charges for Apple Watch

[dannyyankou]

A $60 accessory is too much for a $400+ device? If so, you should save your money and not buy the watch.

No, money isn't an issue. I'd just rather pay less of it. Anker makes external batteries that have 4x the capacity of Mophie's biggest powerstation, but at half the cost. I think that's worth waiting for if they can do something similar with the watch.

 

[macduke]

It does take time for battery tech to make it to consumer products, but it's not really true to say that we've never seen advancements come to market.

Back in the early 90s, the typical laptop weighed ten pounds and much of that was the huge NiCd battery that allowed it to operate for an hour or two when unplugged.

I was speaking more of the crazy advancements that you read about coming out of MIT or whatever that seemingly poof and go away. I'd argue that battery tech itself hasn't improved significantly in the past 10 years, and most of the advancements we've seen are through:

1. Significantly more power efficient processors, which means not only smaller logic boards but fewer fans which take up space
2. Better software optimizations for power
3. Lower power wireless technologies like BT LE, etc
4. Unibody construction methods that allow for more internal space for batteries

Thanks almost entirely to Jonny Ive (and other people like him) who were obsessively, pathologically, fixated on making devices thinner, while simultaneously increasing their processing power and maintaining or increasing battery life, we have incredible devices that can go most of a day on one charge, while outperforming an old Cray supercomputer and weighing in at a couple of pounds.

I wouldn't go as far as to say entirely Ive and his peers, and I'm a pretty big fan of his work. As I mentioned in my list above, Apple was a significant force behind many of those technologies which have improved battery life. Many engineers at Apple and other companies. Many chip design firms and fabs have contributed a great deal of resources into making things more energy efficient. The fact that we're even talking about 10nm chips in the next generation is just insane when you consider the Pentium III was around 180nm. I consider the people who make processors to be freaking wizards. Just look at one under a microscope and tell me you don't believe in magic, hahaha.

 

[MH01]

Damn, expansive.