That's the piece of information I wanted to know first. Devices like this can be built, but those can't run on batteries for a reasonable time frame.
Apple made it practical.
I'm curious if it would've been technically feasible to have wireless charging on these instead of replaceable battery. Or would that greatly increase the price?
I had a tile and it most assuredly did not have a replacable battery, I had to mill the thing open: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrhM5ujSU6w
Hopefully AirTag opens up their API so Tile can integrate. I’m just assuming AirTag would be slightly more integrated than Tile.
> Conspicuously absent from the list [of third-party products using the Find My network], of course, is Tile. Given their membership in Epic’s Coalition for App Fairness, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for Apple to promote Tile’s products. And it’s unclear to me whether Tile even wants to be in the Find My app — their spat with Apple is more about their own app competing with Find My, and their accusations that Apple unfairly advantages Find My by not holding it to the same rules as third-party apps that ask for always-on location access. Apple’s solution is this third-party accessory program; Tile’s preferred solution would be Apple allowing Tile’s own app to do everything Find My can do.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/07/find-my-third-p...
More likely because CR batteries don't drop voltage significantly as it discharges. And at full discharge it suddenly drops dead. Which is why it's harder to measure "remaining charge", as that's generally calculated on battery voltage.
> Battery life based on an everyday use of four play sound events and one Precision Finding event per day.
That seems like exceptionally heavy usage to me.
low-cost & low-power & high accuracy, not so much
Now most devices use direct voltage, coloumb counting and battery impedance to keep track, and that’s with known batteries.
For a CR2032 specifically, you get a nice smooth drop over at least the last third to quarter of its charge. There's no difficulty in detecting that.
My battery is 80% charged, and then I go outside where it is 10 degC colder. Suddenly my battery voltage drops by 200mV and my battery looks 20% charged
My battery is 80% charged and then I start playing a video. The increased load drops the battery voltage and suddenly my battery looks 20% charged.
Lithium rechargeable would mean higher price, larger size for equivalent specs, with an added risk of fire!
Anything with non-chargeable batteries is a no go from sustainability perspective
Recall that everything is made out of rearranged earth atoms. So long as you put them back properly, it can be sustainable.
This means that, depending on the circuitry they are not always drop in compatible since the voltages and discharge curves differ
I feel like this gives far too much credit to Apple. Any one company can "think differently" but Apple shouldn't get the blame for all of the other companies following suit.
Remember the ads Samsung ran before axing the headphone jack a year later?
Apple had (and still have) the status and prestige to do anything and make that a standard. If Huawei/Samsung/etc didn't include chargers, didn't use USB or USB C, changed from 3.5 to some proprietary audio jack first, they would have been ridiculed.
But once Apple changed these things (except luckily the USB), these companies could point out that "Apple does this, so it must be an acceptable idea".
The most annoying thing about this is that they are trying to spin these changes as innovation or something for the environment.
The simple reason is that Apple is the only manufacturer in a specific market. The market for MacOS (or in the case of iDevices, iOS) users.
What that means is that Apple can introduce a pretty shitty change and not lose too many customers to other manufacturers because switching from Apple to another manufacturer is much harder than from Dell to HP.
So, for example, if Dell were to introduce those shitty butterfly keyboards, that were nearly unusable and got spoilt so easily, they would have to change back to their old keyboards within months, unlike Apple, which managed to stick to that design for years and generations of devices without suffering too much.
I use that example because it was an unambiguously worse option, so it nicely illustrates how Apple has a lock-in that others don’t. But Apple can use that lock in to then introduce what are potentially more useful changes (USB2) and/or changes that are not fully baked yet (USB-C), and not suffer the consequences other manufacturers would.
If they make the wrong call, they’ll handle it. Or they won’t and you’ll get burned a little bit.
When Apple makes an obvious error, like with the keyboard, or something external is holding back the quality of the product (recent pre-Apple silicon laptops) you do have to sort of pay attention and if possible steer around the problem.
As an example I largely sidelined the weak 2018 MacBook Air and instead invested in maxing out a Mac Mini. That turned out really well for me.
Sometimes, like with the butterfly keyboard, it feels like Apple does not take enough responsibility for screw ups and take greater measures to make customers whole.
This happened recently for me with the iPhone 12 Magsafe Silicon case, which is a good product but flawed in the context of the iPhone upgrade program.
In that way, I think Apple could and should be much more generous about returning value to its customers instead of to shareholders.
If there were any existential threat to Apple, I’d say it’s the need to reward shareholders instead of customers.
Speak for yourself. The butterfly keyboard is the only laptop keyboard I have ever encountered which I can type on for a full day without flaring RSI. Despite having a fully-loaded 16" with the replacement keyboard, I still use the 4.5-year-old butterfly model for almost everything.
I totally get this interpretation, but I genuinely cannot work out how to tell the difference between this explanation and the alternative explanation that this actually just is what the smartphone market prefers and when given the choice they will choose it.
That would also explain why essentially all competitors copy the change one product cycle after the first company makes the change. Unless you’re suggesting that Apple’s competitors are actually colluding with Apple to remove the headphone jack despite strong market opposition, I really don’t see how you can definitively say that Apple and its competitors aren’t simply making products that most people prefer.
A bunch of android phones had wireless charging years ago, including one of the nexus devices IIRC. Great! I'll buy a couple of wireless charging pucks and use them. No more flakey USB ports that give up before the phone does.
Apple didn't pick it up.
Android phones all dropped the feature.
Apple picked it up, hyped it, rolled it out.
Android phones started appearing with it again.
It's like Apple has to lead the way, and even useful features can't survive in the android ecosystem without Apple's blessing.
The motorola Nexus 6 had Qi charging in 2014, then that manufacturer seemed to back away from it. Huawei only picked the feature up in 2019 AFAICT, my P20 pro didn't have it.
But yes, it does look like the galaxy phones have had it all along. I wonder why I discounted those?
And when Apple did this, they were able to pack more wattage on their MacBooks, making them last substantially longer on a charge than competitors. Competitors had to do same to eventually catch up.
Friends and jumping off bridges and all that.
I get that Apple has immense sway in these marketplaces but I've never gotten a good explanation for why it's Apple's fault when another company makes that same anti-consumer decision. Headphone jacks being the most prominent example.
And not even all the things I listed really annoy me, I have listed examples for things where Apple had to be the first from the established manufacturers. For example the audio jack, I basically never used wired headphones in the last 6 (?) years (since the first time I bought Beats with Bluetooth), so I don't even care.
Well sure nothing “could have happened” without the first company doing it and then the rest of the companies also doing it. But you can’t blame just Apple for an industry wide change. Sure they where the first major company to push a single button mouse, but you can’t blame them for there being no two or three button mice on the market today. That’s not something they made happen, that was an entire industry adopting their practice, and the consumers backing that decision.
They solved the waterproof phone with a headphone jack many years ago, went with with the craziness of removing it for no reason reason like Samsung and apple, and have since put it back in all of their phones as there hasn't been any noticable improvement in phones that have removed it, but now you have to make sure your headphones are charged.
It's not about blame - Apple has repeatedly changed the landscape of computing for decades. Mac, modern laptops, iPhone. Downplay their influence if you will, but they have been the harbinger so often before...
Apple was the first to put a trackball in a laptop (though that laptop was, in the rest of its design, at least five years out of date – hardly modern), invented the laptop palm rest, and – much later – was the first to put an Ethernet port in.
I really like the look of this over the tile products personally and it’s “rightly sized” to me. I definitely will see myself owning a few of these air tags
Newer ones, I don't know. It does look like Apple is starting to move in truth toward the hostility to DIY repair they've always been claimed, in the past often falsely, to display.
It's a shame. I really like the idea of that purple 12 mini - it'd go so well with my fountain pen! But if I can't fix it myself when it needs fixing, that's a much knottier problem.
I suppose if you can't lift 80lbs out of an awkward spot, it's also not user replaceable? The line has to be drawn somewhere.
I guess it depends on what you think of as innovation. Their marketing pointed to "scalloped" batteries instead of square so they can take up more empty space (plus the space that would have been used by covering the battery and a fatter connector).
In my experience, their batteries went from 200 charge cycles, about ~4 of battery life, and often failing before reaching it's end of life to 1000 charge cycles, about 8-10hrs of battery life, and rarely getting "service" warnings suggesting replacement. At least last time I needed to swap batteries I just needed a small screwdriver.
I was very concerned when they ditched removable batteries because that was one part I constantly had problems with. Since those issues were address I'm very glad they went that way.
I'm confused, are these standard CR2032 batteries or not? Do I have to buy some special Apple battery?
Funnily, the time for replaceable batteries in phones seems to have arrived, but users are now trained not to expect it.
Sending your phone in for a manufacturer battery replacement after 2 years of use to get a further 2 is a good compromise in my view. My last replacement was about $50.
I have a small one on me always that can charge my phone twice over
Because the obvious issue is that most people won’t.
Supporting 5-10 amps requires very small pins. It's a tiny percentage of the battery size.
> Then there’s the plastic lined battery well, as well as the plastic battery case. It’s not as simple as throwing plastic around a battery and calling it a day.
Yes, those are the layers of plastic I was talking about.
I didn't say you could slap something together in half an hour, I said it would cost close to zero dollars when talking about the per-phone price.
That very last phrase you said a millimeter. None of this will fit in one millimeter, which was my counter.
For the layers of plastic, the battery already has a wrapping, and the phone already has a back. You just have to reinforce the wrapping on the battery. How much thickness do you think that needs? It's definitely not five millimeters.
“It’s two lines of code, how hard can it be?”
More seriously, the cost of designing a battery pack goes way beyond that, just like in software there’s a world of difference between an internal and an external interface. Adding ESD protection for instance can be a headache.
It's absolutely bonkers to suggest a 20-30% increase in total cost that would be driven by design costs; that's more than doubling the entire design budget!
Just as an example, modern batteries require keeping track of a lot of parameters and metrics, and require keeping control of things like cell balancing. Making a battery removable means having to move all this into the pack, which then implies having exposed critical interfaces.
As an example check this device by Texas Instruments: BQ40Z50-R2. This gives you a lot of the functionality to the point that Apple keeps variants of them in current laptops, even if they're not removable anymore.
To make a software equivalent, imagine building an enterprise product that connects to a database, and then being asked to have this link exposed through public APIs. Now you need to consider delightful things like authentication, or being vulnerable to DDoS.
1. That just moves from phone to battery, doesn't it? That's not a cost increase for the bundle.
2. You don't need fancy things like cell balancing for a phone battery.
3. Even with this chip it's $4 BoM for small batches and significantly less in bulk. So that could be a 1% cost increase. So we have that, a thin plastic shell, and a tiny connector. How are we hitting 20-30% increases, hundreds of dollars?
2. You need a lot of fancy things, just not cell balancing. That “battery health indicator” all iphones have, guess where that’s from.
You can take it from someone who has built several devices with replaceable batteries, or we can just keep debating until I’ve fully explain to you how you actually build one of these.
The thing is, I don’t want to waste more time on this, you can do your research on your own, or just keep your preconceptions, whatever floats your boat.
Every phone needs new subassemblies and procedures. For the PCB, you end up with an extra one that's tiny true.
> 2. You need a lot of fancy things, just not cell balancing. That “battery health indicator” all iphones have, guess where that’s from.
Sure, okay.
> You can take it from someone who has built several devices with replaceable batteries, or we can just keep debating until I’ve fully explain to you how you actually build one of these.
> The thing is, I don’t want to waste more time on this, you can do your research on your own, or just keep your preconceptions, whatever floats your boat.
Where would I look?
I'm trying to follow your logic. But you mostly keep naming things phones already have. They already have all this engineering work. They already have the battery chip, it just changes location. And that chip is less than $3.
Could you please give me a couple sentence explanation of how you arrived at 20-30% for a phone that's designed from the start to have a removable battery? You keep nitpicking me for not understanding an argument that you never explained!
My understanding goes something like this: Posit a $600 phone of which $50 is the battery pouch. Remove battery pouch and chip from phone, replace with a connector, phone now costs $550? Add plastic shell and $3 chip and connector and tiny PCB onto the battery pouch. For the total price to rise 20%, doing that has to cost more than $100 and leave you with a battery that costs more than $150. How?
And phones didn't get massively cheaper when they stopped letting you remove batteries...
I do like having a thin phone, but the utility of a replaceable battery has been sorely downplayed over the years.
Yeah it's not free, but it's really nice if you underestimated your battery life since you're not tied to a single spot while charging it.
I realise that capacity is theoretically orthogonal to swappability, but functionally it's relevant because battery casings, compartments, connectors and chassis strengthening elements all take up space that could otherwise go to a larger battery pack.
I swore Tile off when I found out the hard way that the battery gives out a year from time of sale, not from when you activate it.
> What if my battery dies early?
> We do not control the lifespan of your Tile; the battery is guaranteed to last a full year (or 3 years for Sticker and Slim) from your purchase date. Your Tiles are covered for 12 months by our worry-free warranty! If your Tile’s battery dies before a year has passed from the time of purchase, we’ll replace it free of charge. Our Customer Care team would be happy to help you!
Not only price, but size/weight too. It seems that currently the thing is 99% battery/case/PCB and is designed around the battery. While technically wireless charging is off-the-shelf, incorporating that may have been seen as "too expensive" and/or "too large".
I've been using them for at least the last 2 years.
It is an agonising death over a period of days/weeks for the child and horrible for the parents to witness. Many times both the parents and medical professionals don't realise what is actually happening to the child until it is too late. There is growing support for much tighter regulations of these batteries and limiting there use overall.
Apple is certainly not the only company who are using them, not by a long shot. But they are not some holy grail of replaceable batteries and it surprising Apple would decide to use them now.
If you are interested ABC in Australia did a rather big report into the increasing incidents of button battery related deaths and injuries, telling the story of families who's lives were turned upside down by them. It is incredibly difficult reading.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-15/button-batteries-land...
I hate the trite “oh, you'll know when you're a parent!” stuff as much as the next person, but… have you met a one-year-old? So curious, and so quick to eat new things: a bad combo if I've ever seen one.
If you were a parent you would know that time is not available to you, that you cant sit and stare at the kids from morning to night. Rent/mortgages need to be paid, cleaning done, food prepared all the things that any person who is a parent is already well aware of. You do your best to protect them, but you are not innately gifted with the ability to see every perceived threat like some robot on the day a child is born.
The fact that it's a recurring problem should be clearly evident that it is not common knowledge, that the warnings are not there to inform parents. People on this thread who I can assume are reasonably smart and don't neglect their children didn't know the danger. So enough already, you're out of your depth on this topic.
So there are no such things as play pens in which you can create a secure and safe area while you are distracted with life?
And my point remains, if you need a warning that eating batteries is dangerous, perhaps wait a few years. The fact that this keeps reoccurring means people aren’t using their brain.
This is your logic. You already failed the test before becoming a parent. You would be a ‘bad parent’ in your own words.
We should adjust our behaves to accomodate companies unsafe products, that’s using your brain.
Source: me, aged nine. (I didn't have the “eat everything” instincts, but I still wanted to know what batteries taste like. Given how much time I spent with my tongue on a battery, I would probably have swallowed a button cell had I had access to one – and that's with warnings about “batteries will burn a hole through your insides” from my parents. Your average one-year-old doesn't stand a chance.)
They don’t realise the danger because there are no warnings, they assume a device is safe as is. Have you not figured that out yet?
The fact is, kids face many dangers and as a parent you cannot be aware of all of them. So if you’re introduced to a new danger and your reaction is “I didn’t know this, but now that I do I’m immediately making changes to prevent impact of this danger on my kid” that deserves praise. Not cheeky low effort guilt tripping.
I would be curious to see how Apple protects the battery compartment of the AirTag, I'm sure they thought about this.
eg, my car key fob needs to be forcefully pulled apart into three pieces before it even hints there's a battery inside.
This. I personally know a parent who lost a child this way. The worst scenario imaginable: the child swallowed a magnet, and then another one a day later. The magnets brought together two sections of their intestine. By the time the problem was serious enough to warrant a visit to the hospital, it was too late.
Be very, very careful with small magnets.
Children can easily ingest objects 2cm in diameter, and batteries that size can be especially dangerous because of how they lodge in the esophagus.
Citing Eck, Langham says, "Clinical outcomes can be determined by assessing the diameter of the button battery, as 90% of all major or fatal outcomes are associated with lithium batteries of 20 to 25 mm in diameter"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7536469/
'RESULTS: All 3 data sets signal worsening outcomes, with a 6.7-fold increase in the percentage of button battery ingestions with major or fatal outcomes from 1985 to 2009 (National Poison Data System). Ingestions of 20- to 25-mm-diameter cells increased from 1% to 18% of ingested button batteries (1990–2008), paralleling the rise in lithium-cell ingestions (1.3% to 24%). Outcomes were significantly worse for large-diameter lithium cells (≥20 mm) and children who were younger than 4 years. The 20-mm lithium cell was implicated in most severe outcomes.'
[1]: https://www.homesafety.se/produkter/ovriga-produkter/smadels...
[1] https://www.kidsafevic.com.au/product-safety/button-batterie...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-15/button-batteries-land...
https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-welcomes-safety-a...
That ABC article I linked describes a family watching their 14-month old daughter dying over 19 days as the battery literally burns her insides while doctors continue to misdiagnose the problem until its too late. This is not a tragic one off incident, it is occurring repeatedly and will continue to do so if things stay as they are.
Excluding the issue of misdiagnosis, if every case was found by medical practitioner at first sight, there are still major complications and possible surgical intervention required to remove the battery.
These numbers are from a country with a population of 25 million. Im sure the numbers of injuries and deaths are much higher in countries like the US.
Parents should be doing that.
There's a tradeoff in form factor
maybe in the tile slim ones though
Say that to someone traveling for work.
There is so much innovation in science that it never materializes because it is not commercially viable for companies.
Almost any coin.
Apple did not invent device trackers with replaceable batteries. Tile has been doing that since 2018 on some of their devices (Basically all except the smallest ones), and I imagine someone else did it before then.
As Drake once said: "it ain't about who did it first/ It's about who did it right."
There's nothing wrong with being a fanboy, but don't pretend like you're not fanboying.
I don't have one so I can't conclusively say either way, but it seems like the only "innovation" Apple can probably claim over Tile is that every iPhone should support the network out of the box (I assume) rather than having to rely only on people who already have the app.
Integration into the Apple ecosystem is another huge one that Tile refused.
Did anyone say Apple was the first to do this? No, no they did not.
So are you saying that nobody is allowed to be praised if it’s been done before? Because that’s what it looks like to me, please correct me if I’m mistaken. Thanks.
The disadvantage is that homebrew don’t get the network effects of a bunch of users who just happen to pass by when you dropped it in the park.
So the trade off is real and depends on how and when you tend to lose things.
They can easily be built for a few bucks. Good profits, and I expect many people will have 5-10 devices, because they're so cheap
Any object moved around by normal use would generate more than enough energy to charge a CR2032's worth in an entire year.
That would make it truly practical by never needing a battery change.
Apple didn't make anything significantly better than the Tile IMO, which also needs batteries to be replaced every year.
$100 for 4 of them sets you back a good amount... especially if you would have otherwise had to toss them after their internal batteries died
Regardless, though, I don't like the idea of a device that's designed to be landfilled every year; replaceable batteries are the right way to go here.
I have a fairly good set of in-ear 'phones that I can wear pretty much indefinitely on the ground, but I usually can't get keep them in for more than a couple hours while I'm on a plane. I've tried using different tips for them while on a plane, but nothing works.
This device will be used like find my phone - a removable battery will make it trivial for thieves to disable the tracking.
"An AirTag that has been separated from its owner for a long period of time will make an audible noise when it’s moved, as part of a privacy feature to let you know there’s a tag present."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/04/20/moren-fine-prin...
At that point, I think making them $25 and having them broadcast every 30 seconds so that they can be found anywhere in the world if someone walks by them with an iPhone is an obviously better solution.
Of course there are wacky solutions, such as using autonomous drones as mobile base stations to find fully passive RFID tags as a home inventory solution. But that introduces a whole host of issues.
Ofcourse. User replaceable battery sold seperately made practical by Apple Inc.
Yes the batteries are replaceable now, for some models, but I even declined to interview there a couple times based on the obtuseness of this product decision. And partnering with HP... not my idea of cool.