[poisonborz]

For how important it is to modern society, the somewhat stagnating state of battery technology in comparison is baffling. Obviously there is a lot of $ thrown on this problem (securing the constant flow of such hopeful articles in the since the 2000s) but per feeling most of the gains since the Nokia days comes from improving HW/SW efficiency.

[api]

Batteries haven’t stagnated. Costs have come way down, densities have gone up, and recharge times have gotten faster. It’s just been more incremental than revolutionary.

Totally new battery ideas are in development but usually it takes 10-20 years for them to mature and have the potential to compete with existing tech. The hard parts are usually reliability, safety, and most of all manufacturing.

Manufacturing is the hard part for a lot of things. We can make 1nm and even smaller chip nodes today but not in quantity. The yield is really low, so these are prototypes and would be fabulously expensive if you tried to get some made. The “latest” node is the one we can manufacture with sufficient yield to be economical.

[wffurr]

Hardly stagnating. Improving rapidly, perhaps. Not an exponential curve, but steady linear growth in capacity.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/eternally-five-years...

[wolverine876]

> For how important it is to modern society ...

Many problems important to modern society are unsolved: Cancer, malaria, poverty, politics, Coronavirus, fusion energy, universal language translators, education, etc.