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Comment by jxf | Hacker News Reader

Batteries are already standardized. AA, AAA, C, etc.

Those are all the wrong voltage to be lithium-ion, and their form factors also aren't good for a lot of devices.

What I mean to say is that there's no fundamental reason a similar approach couldn't be employed.

It would make it difficult to cram as much battery in as they do currently. The iPhone has L shaped batteries so they fit around the pcb.

I’m not convinced standardised batteries are required. The vast majority of people are using only a small number of phones. A battery store could easily stock the batteries for every iPhone model. The real problem is how hard it is for the average person to replace them.

A phone could be designed to handle other voltages. A phone that ran off NiMH AA batteries would actually be quite feasible.

It would be quite a bit thicker than most phones today, but not outrageously so--about as thick as my last pre-iPhone phone (a Palm Treo). We had no trouble carrying such thick phones around back then, and those were the days when we were also carrying our iPods or portable CD players around too.

Here are the battery capacities of various iPhones.

iPhone SE: 6.7 W h

iPhone X: 10.3 W h

iPhone 11: 11.5 W h

iPhone 11 Pro Max: 14.7 W h

Low self-discharge rechargeable AA MiMH batteries are available with capacities of 2.7 W h.

You'd need 3 of them to match an iPhone SE, 4 for an iPhone X, 5 for an 11, and 6 for an 11 Pro Max.

An AA battery is between 14 mm and 15 mm in diameter. That should be an upper limit on how much thicker you would need to make the phone.

Would there be enough people who would like the convenience of using off the shelve rechargeable NiMH AA batteries for such a phone to sell despite 14 mm more thickness?

I have no idea.

But in odder to carry all this, we needed JNCOs

In my area of the US, standard form factor lithium batteries are readily available such as in the grocery store, including the rectangular 9V, AA, and AAA types.

Those are non-rechargeable lithium metal primary batteries, not lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.

TIL. However, it seems like there are attempts at making lithium ion rechargeables to fit standard sizes. If not by well known manufacturers.

https://www.amazon.com/KENTLI-Rechargeable-Battery-Lithium-i...

There's also the standard 18650 size, which is quite common and a lot of Chinese electronics have user-replaceable cells, but the big manufacturers like LG and Sony are vehemently against that and think people can't be trusted with bare cells.

Apple's straw man argument could be that there is no battery standard to allow for a thin iPhone.

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