The future is batteries with more charge cycles, not replaceable batteries. The solid state battery people are claiming 10,000 charge/discharge cycles. If they can achieve that, it's 27 years of battery life. The case will wear out first.
My 2013 Macbook Pro has just such a battery, rated for 80% capacity after 1000 cycles, and it lasted over 6 years before the battery's internal resistance rose enough that heavy load would cause a brownout and the machine to force sleep.
Yet they are not in widespread use; most devices have prioritized capacity/weight/size over longevity, Apple included. My current M1 has lost 10% of its capacity after just 120 cycles and less than a year of ownership, even using a utility that allows you to set a limited maximum charge level to preserve the battery. And the battery is less accessible, less replaceable.
Battery companies and device manufacturers don't care. There's no incentive for anyone involved and consumers have gotten used to replacing devices every few years.
Solid state batteries with 10k charge/discharge cycles are never going to happen for the same reason incandescent bulbs are purposefully manufactured by every single lightbulb manufacturer to fail when they figured out a hundred years ago how to make them last forever.
We need something like a e-waste import duty, tax, fee, or 'recycling deposit' on devices with non-replaceable lithium ion batteries.
My first phone was NiCad Nokia. Later Nokia monochrome display phones used Li-ion well before smartphones. I use an iPhone now, but if a user-upgradeable Android phone came out with a solid-state battery, I would switch.
Saying that the Dubai Philips LED bulbs really do last a lot longer since they have twice the filaments and run the filaments a lot less hard as a result (as well as being more efficient). It is possible nowadays to make an LED that wont fail anytime soon although LEDs are already much better than incandescents in that regard but there are ones that will likely survive your lifetime available at a higher price but only in Dubai. Most LED bulbs are designed to fail sooner, but they are also cheaper.
Those 10k recharge batteries are absolutely coming and we will have them in a few years time, li-ion as it stands today will simply be obsolete.
Remember that 60W incandescent bulbs costing $0.25 used to be available that met that goal. We've taken huge steps backwards on interior household lighting.
I do remember in the early days of LED bulbs, many were quite unreliable, especially dimmable ones. It was probably more the electronics in them failing more than the LEDs themselves?
But now days LED bulbs seem much more reliable and I very rarely have to replace them. In fact the only bulbs I can recall replacing in the past 18 months living in my current house were some old CFL bulbs that hadn't actually completely failed, but had gradually become a bit too dim.
Certainly, now days, I need to replace bulbs far, far less often than in the old incandescent days where it was a regular chore in any house.
(Also, now days I avoid using old-style dimmer switches, and even removed some in one house I lived in. Better to get a smart bulb with it's own built-in dimming if you want it.)
I'm consistently replacing one or two bulbs a month around the house. I don't know if it's the electronics or the LEDs; I don't really care either.
I started going Cree when I was renting 10 years ago, I've yet to have a single failure of the bulbs that I've drug with me to the place I live now. Have at least 25 bulbs currently in the house that are Cree LEDs. Their reliability actually has me frustrated at the current trend of lighting fixtures with integrated LEDs that I have 0 trust in.
Are you sure your power isn't bad in some way?
If LED bulbs are inherently prone to failure I’m not seeing it.
I do agree they’re more expensive, even if you adjust for inflation, but as far as I can tell they last forever.
They’re Philips Hue bulbs, a mix between LWB010 and LTW001, but even the cheap supermarket bulbs have lasted so long I also couldn’t tell you when I last changed them. Some of them have been in the house longer than I have.
They do sometimes flicker when they're in a traditional dimmer set at an intermediate level, even though the ones I've bought claim to work with a dimmer. That's frustrating.
But I haven't had any outright failures.
If it helps: I bought mostly SANSI bulbs off Amazon.
IME the worst are the ones that get really hot. I've had multiple (rather expensive) LED spotlights like that in my kitchen which never lasted more than a year or so.
Would be much easier instead of embedding an AC/DC converter inside each bulb that we now get standard 12V DC for lighting throughout homes - That would centralize the voltage sensitivity and allow larger circuits / capacitors to regulate this.
That was possible back in 2002. LEDs weren't yet "super bright" and an LED from back then had a lifespan measured in, well, human lifespans.
A simple way to significantly extend battery longevity is to limit charge to 80% (only charging to 100% occasionally when you know you might need it, like a long day travelling).
Unfortunately Apple doesn't yet provide this option on most of it's devices, other than the iPhone 15 line. But you can use third-party apps to do it on Macs.
it has this though: https://www.macinstruct.com/images/2022/optimized-charging.p...
Technology Connections has an interesting video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
If anything, I would have thought that devices are good enough know that people don't exchange them quite so often? Especially laptops.
I can still reasonably comfortably use my 2016 laptop today. In 1993 using computer from 1986 would have been a much bigger downgrade.
Please tell me what that utility is--I've long wanted something like that but have yet to find anything like it.
FWIW, I've been doing something similar with my phone, but manually. I found an unusually low current charger that charges the phone at a rate of ~5% per hour, and I almost always keep the battery level between 25% and 75%. So far the phone is 4 years old and iOS claims that the maximum capacity of the battery is still 92%.
10k cycles (~27y) sounds absurdly good - I think 80% of original capacity by 10y would be more than adequate. Basically you never need to replace the battery throughout the useful life time of a device.