How often do people use their headphones outdoors? I would be very surprised if the average time outdoor over the lifetime of a headphone to be over 5%.
I freely admit that I am an outlier, but I'm used to people not understanding that a large segment of the popular leads totally different lives with totally different needs than most people.
Pretty sure those exist already, I know Steelseries produce some headphones with that feature.
Didn't know they actually went through with that. I was thinking along the lines of those very old laptops that had dual NiCd banks so you could swap them without shutting down.
Long tail yadda yadda.
Technology has moved on considerably since solar powered calculations were a thing. So I don’t doubt these headphones are possible.
To be honest, I’m really surprised at all the armchair physicists here posting snarky comments. Maybe if Apple had released it people would be more complimentary…?
The point being: it's disappointing just how skeptical everyone is being. I'm not suggesting that the PR hasn't given favorable figures but there might still be a genuinely great product here.
There's no mention in the article of automatic noise cancelling. "noise suppression" is an acoustic design rather than electronic one. Eg the way the hardware cups your ears to dampen external sounds. So noise suppression costs nothing in terms of power draw. Whereas "noise cancelling" is what requires a mic and some onboard computation to inverse the sound wave, which will obviously have a power draw. But noise cancelling isn't an "always on" piece of technology, it's something the wearer can enable or disable. So it might be that when running low battery power and thus more dependent on solar, noise cancelling needs to be disabled (assuming this device even ships with it, not all headphones do) and as a wearer you're more dependent on the acoustic properties of the headphones to reduce external noises.
So we just have bluetooth and an amp left to power. It may well be that to run the device "fully solar" (ie with zero reserve in the battery) the device has to be wired to the music player via a traditional TRS audio jack. This is already a pretty common thing for bluetooth headphones to support when low on power. Thus the solar cells would be designed to charge the battery when the headphones are off and supplement the battery while in heavy usage.
That still seems like a massive win to me because if you use your headphones sporadically or even just have a few hours in the day when you're not using them, you still end up not having to think about recharging your headphones every time you want to use it. And that's exactly how this device is reported by the BBC: not as something that never needs to be charged or is "fully solar" but instead as something that uses solar energy to reduce the need to charge.
(I've built speakers and other audio hardware. So while I'm far from an electrical engineer, I'm also not a total noob in this field)
> The article even explicitly states that these can be charged from indoor light.
These apparently can also gain useful charge from much smaller energy sources than direct sunlight, including typical indoor light levels. Even if it isn't enough to run them indefinitely, it could extend their run-time between plugged-in charges.
Let's be generous again, and completely wrap the bulb in 50% efficient photovoltaic, feed that into a 50% efficient battery charger.
You now have 2.5 Watts.
It just doesn't add up.
You'll note, if you read carefully, that the article only says they can be charged from indoor light, which I don't doubt is true. It doesn't say they can get a useful amount of energy indoors. The only concrete numbers quoted are for direct sunlight, which is several orders of magnitude more intense than ambient indoor lighting.
It seemed so, or that you were ignoring it, from what you write. Perhaps offer more clarity in future to avoid such confusion.
> the article only says they can be charged from indoor light
The article says they can be charged from indoor light. Adding “only” there I think is needlessly negative. The article goes on to describe how this is expected/hoped to be useful, charging between uses even if (unlike direct sunlight) it is not enough to maintain power during prolonged use, which strongly implies a useful amount of energy if thought to be harvestable in typical indoor conditions.
Sorry, I'll be more explicit: I give absolutely no credence to what a manufacturer "expects" or "hopes" or "strongly implies" their product to be able to do in a thinly-veiled press release, especially when they're unwilling to give any concrete facts to back those hopes up.
Feel free to be a cynic, it is often a healthy position IMO, but you'll be less stressed if you try not to let yourself get offended (or just surprised) when others are too, or consider how others might read you incorrectly which can be corrected with a little detail of your PoV (other than it is contrary to another one) up front.
I ONLY wear my headphones outside. I bought them especially for commuting to work on public transport and walking to the shops. That doesn't seem unusual where I'm from. A lot of people wear their headphones outside.
I mean, I also have a headset at my desk for calls, but that's not what these are for.
I, personally, exclusively use headphones and I still use my headphones outside all the time - while walking, working outside, gardening, snow shoveling, etc. Even just relaxing.
It's about half as efficient at converting light into electricity as current best rooftop panels, and these ones are way thinner.
The illumination level in a brightly-lit office is typically on the order of 300 lux, compared to 100,000 lux for direct sunlight. (Residential spaces are often even dimmer.) So if, as they claim, this device can gain 1 hour of charge in 20 minutes in direct sunlight, it would take on the order of 100 hours to collect the same amount of energy indoors.
The statement that "the panels can also create some power from artificial light" is technically true, but "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Depending how frequent and heavy of a user you are, the economics may work out such that they'll be passively charged enough and never require active charging.
Related idea: It'd be cool if cellphones could charge in light whilst powered off. Then when they get old, they'll sit around and always be topped up and ready to go.