[Cthulhu_]

Dear battery technology claimant,

Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:

[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.

[ ] it will be too expensive for users.

[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.

[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.

[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.

[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.

[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.

[ ] its charge rate is too slow.

[ ] its materials are too toxic.

[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.

[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.

[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.

[ ] by this time it ships li-ion advances will match it.

[ ] your claims are lies.

credit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26633630

[__s]

You didn't x off any of the reasons. This list of common pitfalls is nice, but without marking which pitfalls apply you've added nothing to the conversation

The earliest instance of it _did_ offer this, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26353853

But it seems afterwards people have done the easy part, pasting the list, & not the hard part, reviewing the article closely enough to share with others what hard problems the tech still faces (of course, even that case received a "Yet another example of a glib response..." comment)

[twoslide]

The press release is naturally all positive spin, but hints at:

[X] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.

They mention 200 cycles, whereas 1000+ is common for li-ion.

[regularfry]

It's a longer lifetime though. 6x the capacity for 1/5 the recharges is a 20% win in total delivered charge.

[snazz]

In theory that would be fine if devices continued using the same amount of energy. Instead of charging my phone every night, if I charged it every six nights, it doesn’t need to last for as many charge cycles either.

[UncleMeat]

A lot of compute on devices is currently battery limited. Manufacturers try hard to keep a charge at one day but don't really care beyond that. If we instantly replaced batteries with ones that lasted 5x longer and lasted 1/5th the cycles, I'd expect phones to instead use 5x the power in a single day since all of the metrics that currently resist waste right now would not longer be launch blockers for power-hungry features.

[twoslide]

They also mention a rapid drop-off in capacity after the first cycle in the article itself (3600 mAh to 1200 mAh). The main point the authors are making is that the discharge process is rechargeable rather than a single discharge. The press release uses this finding to make rather ambitious claims.

[kyriakos]

Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?

[IgorPartola]

Will it? If I found a way to build a legitimately better battery then I would just answer these questions. Some batteries also have very specialized uses where they optimize for different things. I don’t need crazy numbers of recharge cycles or high current draw in, say, a smoke detector, but longevity is nice.

[colechristensen]

No.

When you can read several “breakthrough” articles any a topic a month, every month for decades they stop being interesting. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, today’s cure for cancer and 10x density battery are no different than any other: almost certainly nothing. People handing out money to researchers and new tech businesses need to be skeptical too.

The public just needs to be exposed to these things much later when they have a higher chance of becoming real.

[mdip]

> Definitely most cases are what you describe but doesn't being pessimistic about every announcement kill innovation in the long run?

Perhaps. That, however, is probably not a solvable problem. It's trivial to come up with a list of reasons that something will not work/cannot be made to work. And there are many cases of inventors creating something that many other previous inventors failed to create.

If it can be done and it's worth being done, someone will ignore the pessimists and do it. Maybe the pessimists will reduce the amount of competition that their life-changing creation has to contend with, and maybe it'll turn out to really be a life-changing invention. That'll be life changing for the inventor and possibly the pessimist who now gets to benefit from this impossible creation.

All of that, aside, for us -- the consumer -- it's nice to know how likely a product like this is to actually become a reality in the next few years, and I specifically came to HN to find out why the press release was trash, frankly. To the inventor, it's sometimes helpful to not be aware of what is impossible so that you can accidentally discover it isn't... or maybe it is, but exploring that more deeply reveals something about a "possible" design that is an improvement.

[davedx]

Luckily, snarky comments by HN user Cthulhu_ do not generally tend to decrease investment by VC firms or Wall Street into potential new technology companies.

[kyriakos]

I'm referring to the mentality of dismissing any potential breakthrough because previous announcements didn't work out.

[minikites]

Does boundless optimism about every announcement drive innovation in the long run?