Report: Apple Developing Custom Batteries for Launch in 2025

[needsomecoffee]

Anyone who follows "battery breakthrus" knows to wait and see. However if Apple does in fact deliver a breakthru perhaps the world's wealthiest company with extremely high margins and incredible tax-dodges might consider open-sourcing its patents. Apple does not need an exclusive advantage with a "breakthru battery tech". It does extremely well without this. However Mother Earth would be most, MOST pleased with Tim & Lisa if they were to continue providing hardware/software breakthrus delivering shareholder value while helping Her to mitigate the sins of the disposable culture Apple has used to make Tim & Co. hundreds of millions of personal wealth (is it a billion+ now for Tim ??) -- accomplished by forcing some of the worst possible environmental issues on the folks who live near the (primarily) Chinese Lithium processing plants.

Before you hysterically throw up you hands and scream "shareholder value" consider Apple's contribution to this -- and their ability to make amends if they really accomplish a battery breakthru via open sourcing patents. Link:

The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust

Hidden in an unknown corner of China is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan.

www.bbc.com

 

[jimbobb24]

Incredible how everything thinks it shows their sophistication by claiming that batteries haven't improved in 30 years, or that this is impossible.

If you want to say improvements in density have been limited over the last TEN years you'd be closer to accurate. But over the past ten years other features, like safety, lifetime, and fast charging have been a higher priority.

As for improvements, you'd have to be living under a rock not to know that the next buzzword in batteries in LiIon solid state batteries, and that Toyota claims to have achieved stunning results with these (... in the lab..., which is why you can't buy them right now.) https://www.pcmag.com/news/toyota-inks-deal-to-mass-produce-solid-state-ev-batteries-with-932-mile

It certainly is not impossible that Apple could spend the money to commercialize this tech faster, for Apple purposes.
Of course, in true internet fashion, the general response will be fury that Apple batteries cost twice as much while ignoring the benefits/quality you get for that twice as much...

Put the graph of battery density over time next to that and the curve flattens and you see we are in a long period of relative stagnation for batteries. The big jumps with batteries tend to be between new technologies not growth within of technology...but as you show lithium has probably had the most growth of any one battery technology.

 

[magicMac]

Now that Apple have made their own chips so fast, it makes sense they look to the next thing they could engineer themselves for a better outcome.

 

[TracerAnalog]

Regardless of what kind of news is posted here on Macrumors, nowadays it’s always followed by comments full of negativity and complaints about all things Apple, instead of something actually related to the topic.

Hear, hear! I get really tired of all those snarky and negative remarks. ‘Tim Apple’, ‘bean counter mentality’, ‘Steve Jobs would never…’, ‘I’m done with Apple…’, ‘Apple sheep/fanboys…’. Can we please have some discussion that is on topic? My ignore list is growing too fast.

And before some forum members go all ‘this sensitive soul cannot handle criticism’, look up ‘constructive criticism’, which I very much welcome!

On topic: I hope that the race for better batteries is on. So far progress seems slow. Bring on the solid state batteries!

 

[farmboy]

“…adopting a new composition of nickel, cobalt, manganese, and aluminum.”.

All rear earth metals.
And here we have Apple pretending to care about the environment by taking our chargers and headphones away.
Nothing to do with money and greed…mhmm…

Sorry, not all rare earth metals. Aluminum is the most common element in the earth's crust, manganese is abundant, cobalt is not uncommon and is not considered rare earth, and nickel is the fifth most common metal on earth.

 

[vorkosigan1]

True, except all third-party batteries are hot garbage (in my experience).

Enh, it varies. But most are.

 

[jhowarth]

There are three people in the world that care about this, and they are all on this site..

Seriously though, what's the big deal?

BU-808: How to Prolong Lithium-based Batteries

The simple change of defaulting the full charge from 100% to 80% would double the number of charge cycles on iPhones and thus double the length of time before iOS reduces the performance to avoid the battery output from collapsing on users.

 

[Powerbooky]

Lithium-ion batteries have never really been safe, anyone remember the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 disasters?
Tesla's cars "randomly" catching fire? Generally anything with Lithium-ion batteries suddenly starts to smoke/burn?
Don't forget the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner" Lithium-ion batteries that was worldwide disasters waiting to happen.

Apple going back to old but gold Nickel metal hydride batteries and improving those is certainly needed.

if you look at the sheer amount of Li-ion batteries in use, big and small, the amount that does catch fire is very low. Somewhere 1 in 10 million. And of course we only see the horrible stories on the evening news (bad news sells). The majority of those incidents were incorrect handling and/or bad quality (cheap Chinese ripoffs). Unfortunately with more and more battery powered devices in active use, there will be more accidents.

Let's hope that Apple will do intensive and proper research. They should already know that Cobalt is the first element to remove from the battery as it is the one material that when it deteriorates can cause thermal-runaway (aka fire).

 

[z4co]

Cobalt is the first element to remove from the battery as it is the one material that when it deteriorates can cause thermal-runaway (aka fire)

Lithium is the cause of thermal-runaway. Alkali metals (Li, Na, K) are all very reactive with air. Transition metals, like cobalt, do not undergo such rapid exothermic reactions with air; it is mainly being removed because of its questionable sourcing and toxicity.

 

[victorvictoria]

That's cool right there! I've thrown out countless lithium-ion batteries! But I'm sure whenever I get a battery swap from Apple, this is what happens.

Nonetheless, "recyclability" and "recycled" are not even close to the same thing right now. I looked it up, and right now, only abour 5% of lithium-ion batteries are actually recycled.

Lithium ion battery recycling

Learn more about the scientific challenges, emerging technologies, and the financial and environmental implications for recycling lithium ion batteries.

www.cas.org

 

[tyrapea]

Battery tech has been stalled for nearly thirty years now.

yeah, ~100x decrease in price and ~10x increase in cycle life is stalled development. sure buddy

 

[Shirasaki]

(I just hope it doesn't turn into a subscription service at some point...)

Oh believe me they will. There is nothing stopping them from purposefully design the battery to go below 80% health not too long after two years. Worse, change the rule so you cannot replace battery unless it is noticeably bad.

 

[Apple_Gabe]

This has been a long time coming. I'm guessing Apple's ultimate goal is to be 100% self-sufficient on all its materials, maybe one day.

 

[aforty]

This has the potential to be absolutely huge.

 

[JokoWidodo]

I hope it doesn’t explode 🤯🤯🤯🤯

 

[segfaultdotorg]

Sweet! The iBattery will be revolutionary.

 

[Villarrealadrian]

Hopefully they will also release SW that doesn’t drain it so fast….

Telemetry should be illegal

 

[Radeon85]

I hope they can finally move the iPhone up from a 500 cycle rating to at least 1000 like most of their other major products, from the Watch to the Macbook Pro. That was also my hope with the stacked battery rumour that didn't pan out for the 15. It's the only real wear item on the phone and probably the single biggest cause of a lot of waste.

Apples seems to drastically underestimate that cycle count, my mothers 12 PM was at 78% health after about 900 charge cycles, well over Apples estimates.

Even my 14 PM which had about 200 or so after a year was still reporting 100% health, my 13 PM was also at 99% health after recharging it daily every 2 to 3 days for a year somehow.

Phones were always charged to 100%, optimised charging is always off and phones were always charged wirelessly.

Apple need to change that 500 cycle count as its way too low, should be at least in the 750 range.

 

[Tagbert]

Battery tech has been stalled for nearly thirty years now. We’ve been hearing about promising new developments without any follow-through for much of that time. If Apple actually does manage to bring a genuine breakthrough to market, it will be a big deal. Batteries have become the biggest bottleneck in portable tech. Semiconductor and display tech during that same time have made massive leaps in performance and efficiency.

Batteries have been getting better bit by bit during that time. Today’s batteries hold more charge, last longer, and cost less than your thirty year old batteries. If you look at Automotice batteries there are quite a few efforts to use different chemistries, as well. Cathode materials have changed a lot, too.

Changes are happening but you don’t notice because they happen a little all the time.

Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

Under the hood, lithium-ion batteries have gotten better in the last decade.

arstechnica.com

 

[Tagbert]

Wonder if they'll offer the new batteries to older phones when you have a battery replacement done in-store. Most likely Apple will save it for the most recently released model as a new feature and older devices will have to use the old style batteries. Got to keep giving people reasons to upgrade!

Battery of different design and chemistry usually need different controller circuitry to manage them. It would be unlikely that a radically different battery tech could be retrofitted into an older phone.

 

[Tagbert]

If the aim is to replace graphite in the anodes, that is timely. China is suggesting that they may put export controls on graphite and they are the major producer of graphite anodes in the world.

This may also be about solid-state batteries as some have mentioned. That is an area that a lot of companies are exploring in order to get better energy density out of batteries. If they can develop cost effective production processes. That is something that Apple is good at.

 

[Tagbert]

Put the graph of battery density over time next to that and the curve flattens and you see we are in a long period of relative stagnation for batteries. The big jumps with batteries tend to be between new technologies not growth within of technology...but as you show lithium has probably had the most growth of any one battery technology.

There has been continuous improvement in batteries even within the same tech “family”. A lot of the recent work has been on automotive batteries but the next big change that might impact batteries for phones is solid state batteries that promise greater energy density.

Eternally five years away? No, batteries are improving under your nose

Under the hood, lithium-ion batteries have gotten better in the last decade.

arstechnica.com

 

[svish]

Good to hear about the new batteries. Should definitely have some improvements.

 

[yegon]

Here’s hoping they have the technology to make ready the 2030 iPad with 10hrs battery life.

 

[_apple_apple_]

I think this proves once and for all that Apple was/is planning to make a car:

• we know they've been working on self-driving tech for a long time (those employees who tried to steal it away to China)
• we know they have chosen a specific electric motor design (Musk commented on it at some point) and are probably iterating on it
• we now know they are dealing with the battery problem

The three things above are the hardest part of developing an EV; the rest (design, safety, features, regulations, etc) are fairly deterministic if you throw enough people/computers at them. And it's been implied that the car has been fully designed for quite some time.

I think a 2025 reveal date (not production) is actually realistic now. Apple has no qualms about releasing a 0.5 version of a product just to get the market into a frenzy.

I also hope this explains the Vision Pro battery life; that it was supposed to use this new battery tech but it was not ready in time.