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.
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.
> 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.
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.