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by bjwbell 4014 days ago
"battery gains have been mostly linear for the last 25 years" After a whole paragraph about how Li-ion improves by ~5% per year. Reporters don't understand what exponential means!
2 comments

> After a whole paragraph about how Li-ion improves by ~5% per year. Reporters don't understand what exponential means!

Just think, 20 years ago, there was no battery life at all! :-)

Growth of 5% per year is geometric, not exponential.
What's the difference? Wikipedia says that geometric growth is a special case of exponential growth, so anything that exhibits geometric growth would, by definition, exhibit exponential growth.
I don't think the commenter you're responding to was accounting for the possibility that the growth occurred in discrete jumps once per year.