Gbatteries (YC W14) Launches BatteryBox, A 50Whr Backup Battery For MacBooks | Hacker News Reader

Gbatteries (YC W14) Launches BatteryBox, A 50Whr Backup Battery For MacBooks

techcrunch.com

264 pointstimsher194 comments

They're making some pretty strange claims about capacity and number of cycles.

In electric RC heli circles, batteries come along once in a while claiming to use previously unknown techniques to improve the performance of existing cells and a few gullible people buy them. They never deliver on the promises.

People who make (established) battery management circuits understand very well how to care for the cells, and claiming to beat the numbers published by the battery manufacturers by a wide margin is close to announcing an "Ambient Energy" device.

[Edited to poke fun at idea, not person/company.]

"In electric RC heli circles"

I was around when in order to fly an electric heli you needed to attach a power cord to a wall socket. I'm serious. Back when I started it was gas only (I made it up to 60 size). I remember seeing a demo at a local hobby shop where outback someone had prototyped an electric which was hovering with a 110v power cord plugged in by extension cord.

Yeah, it's obviously snake oil. If you had a technology that increased the charge-cycle lifetime of a battery by any substantial amount, you wouldn't be marketing a stupid plastic box for mactards. You'd be cashing billion-dollar checks twice a day.

It turns out that even the most amazing technologies don't just automatically get you huge checks overnight. You have to build a business, starting with a first product, and grow from there.

Actually no, if this worked it would be a 30-minute meeting.

<Gbatteries> Our patented technology extends the charge-cycle life of standard lithium-ion batteries by at least 200%, and we can prove it. <Panasonic> Great, we will license that. Here's a check for five billion dollars.

A conversation like that means there are other options:

<Gbatteries> Our patented technology extends the charge-cycle life of standard lithium-ion batteries by at least 200%, and we can prove it. <Investor> Great, we will invest, get a product to market and you can IPO in 2 years.

It's why saying "yes" to an acquisition is so hard. There are always other options.

I think you missed a few steps.

<Gbatteries founder 1> We need to patent our technology before we can talk to to anyone, otherwise they can steal our tech.

<Gbatteries founder 2> Great, let me check our startup bank account. We have... uh... $3000.

<Gbatteries founder 1> What? Filling a patent in the US and EU cost $5000 each including agent fees. Even if I use all my personal savings, how do we eat in the 6 months that it takes to get the patent approved?

<Gbatteries founder 2> ...

This is why "Patent Pending" exists. :)

Panasonic would NOT pay additional money in licensing to make less money by having their batteries last longer.

Large companies like this make sure the batteries they use aren't interchangable or standardized. They certainly don't want to make batteries that you wouldn't want to replace.

If you look at profit analysis of almost any product (like a panasonic camera), the profit margins are all in the accessories, like batteries.

Go for Apple then, custom batteries, not user-replaceable, not retailed. They'll sign you a check for $10bn instead.

Fair enough I could see Apple doing this. Although if batteries last as long as indicated here they would have to up the cost nearly twice as much per battery to keep profits steady.

Anecdotally, I see few people replacing their apple device (for an other one) because of battery life, and conversely stories of apple stores replacing batteries/devices because of battery life issues are regular.

All in all, I don't think they'd care. Their biggest business these days is phone & tablet, and battery life (and the failure thereof) is not the primary upgrade driver.

Battery life was one of the big things that OS X 10.9 touted as an improvement. Apple expended significant engineering effort in reducing energy use to squeeze more out of their current batteries[1]. On the mobile side of things, they developed the M7 co-processor to allow access to sensor data without having to wake up the CPU, and famously never supported flash, both in an apparent attempt to save battery life. They seem to me to be very interested in battery life and I think any technology that could increase it by significant margins would be something they would snap up.

The interesting question for Apple buying this is if battery life is a factor in their planned obsolescence. I'm not sure it is at this point.

> Panasonic would NOT pay additional money in licensing to make less money by having their batteries last longer.

> Large companies like this make sure the batteries they use aren't interchangable or standardized

Li-Ion cells are made in a variety of standard sizes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_sizes#Round_lithium-ion.... I happen to own a couple of individual 18650 cells, and Panasonic and a number of other companies supply these cells to battery pack manufacturers wholesale.

Battery packs for consumer electronics are another issue.

if you read the article, you'd see they're working on OEM deals to get the tech into batteries across the board. The Box is just a nice consumer demo so people can get their hands on it now. Actually a pretty smart PR move.

Also, the patent: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013142964A1

The box, judging from that patent, is unlikely to benefit from what they're doing. In fact I can't see how anymobile devices would - a laptop has 6 - 9 Li-Ion cells and needs all of them to run all the time. A cellphone has exactly 1.

The patent is proposing they're going to use capacitors/inductors to do some type of pulsed battery charging/discharging while not connected to AC power. The thing is, there's no room to move on that - you're absolutely at the mercy of the quality of those cells, since you need all of them all the time when you're running on batteries.

Worse, if you have say, 3 strings of 3 like in a laptop, and you shut-off 1 string, then you're increasing your current draw from the remaining cells and losing more power to internal resistance.

If you are using it as an external battery to another device with a battery, you actually can do interesting tricks and cut all power intermittently.

That's a patent application, yes. Are you aware that the USPTO gets so many applications for perpetual motion patents that they have regulations forbidding them? Patent application does not in any way indicate feasibility.

I believe the point was for you, with all of your infinite battery wisdom, to review the patent and possibly even use that to back up your hyperbolic "obviously snake oil" claim, but I'm not holding my breath.

I was just providing the application so people could evaluate the technology, not suggesting it was evidence of anything.

You said

>if you read the article, you'd see they're working on OEM deals

I did read the article and didn't recall that, so I re-read. This is what I saw:

>It’ll take some time for Gbatteries to get its technology embedded with third-party OEMs

Good point - I came away with the inference that they are seeking to embed the tech. But as you've highlighted, they don't explicitly say that.

p.s. It appears pulse-charging lithium batteries has been around since at least 1997, judging by all these patents [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&hl=en&q=Lithium+ion+fa...

How would you know your technology worked? Maybe a good test would be to build a plastic box for mac users.

You would know by testing it.

This company is making an extraordinary claim regarding capacity and cycle-life, and they aren't showing extraordinary proof to back it up.

For what it's worth, they have a graph of a test of a 2 (!) cells at [1]. From a sample of two, it is quite extraordinary, indeed. I find it very hard to believe in the Altair->Microsoft hypothesis. Altair to microsoft was a new practice overlooked by the big guys. Lithium charging is a very concentrated area of research with lots of investment.

For comparison, I found [2] which is a test done of pulse-charging by Electrochem/ENREV and a university. This area of research has been going on for almost two decades. I've found a number of studies on the topic. [3][4][5] I don't have time to analyze them all today, but #5 looks really good at first glance.

[1] http://www.getbatterybox.com/bos.html#highexpl [2] http://www.electrochem.org/dl/ma/197/pdfs/0111.PDF [3] http://www.che.sc.edu/faculty/popov/drbnp/Ramadass/June2002.... [4] http://www.researchgate.net/publication/242110481_The_effect... [5] http://kohl.chbe.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/linked_files...

To be precise, according to that link, their sample size is n = 1. Not even two.

Sad.

I mean, they're letting you buy the damn thing, so once you purchase it, you can see if it holds up.

Yes, snake oil salesmen are usually happy to let you buy some snake oil.

I feel like YC would have enough snake oil radar to detect if this was bogus before backing them. They don't back just anyone after all.

This is a little more difficult when knowledge moves faster than product delivery. "Snake oil salesmen" did their thing because they could move from community to community and stay ahead of the news about a fraud coming through.

I have no idea if this battery thingy is all it's cracked up to be, but the group won't last that long if they don't deliver.

The graph doesn't diverge from the "standard" lithium battery pack for 3-4 years. The buyers won't know if they are "snake oil salesmen" for a relatively long time.

Even if you do accelerated cycles on the battery, it will be a while (1 year? 2 years?) before you can say "snake oil" and it will be around two times longer before you can confirm the claim.

It isn't a halting problem, but in terms of the pace of electronics, it's close in that by the time you can confirm it isn't snake oil, it may well be irrelevant.

Pre-ordering solves that problem. The product is delivered to everybody at once, before any knowledge can spread.

...and two to four years before fraud can be detected.

Here is a classic example of a startup launching an Altair Basic with the potential produce a Microsoft-like giant. Incidentally, I think this is also the first father/son team we've funded.

What is the strategy for when Apple disallows sales based on the Magsafe adapter?

This happened to HyperMac (now HyperJuice) batteries back in 2011. I still have mine, ordered before Apple lawyers went after them. It's wonderful.

Edit: Adding link to Wired article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/hypermac-is-back-with...

I think that it's not about the BatteryBox product per se, but about some technology inside which is supposed to reduce long-term capacity loss. The box itself is basically a demo to sell or license the actual tech to OEMs.

This is straight up not possible. Lithium-ion batteries degrade irreversibly as they're used - the only way to reduce capacity loss is to reduce the depth-of-discharge: add more cells, and discharge them less per cycle.

Unless they're fiddling with the actual chemistry of the cells, it's unlikely they've changed anything.

That reminds me, I stumbled upon some very interesting discussion here while doing some research on lion characteristics a few weeks ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lithium-ion_battery/Archiv...

But real batteries are obviously unaware of these sources because there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional. The data in the article suggests that these batteries would have expired years ago, so something is clearly wrong.

In fact, real world batteries can last 15 years or more. The one thing on that site that I can positively say is false is the claim that batteries degrade if discharged below 30% charge. I can say this because myself and 2 colleagues made this defect up and deliberately planted it for the guy who actually runs BatteryUniversity to find and incorporate into the site (and he did it within 2 weeks). It was about the most harmles thing we could think of, but several manufacturers did incorporate features in their products to warn of impending discharge below 30% charge (and to be fair, probably did it with the best of intentions).

Actually, most lithium-ion cells have excellent shelf lives (10% loss of charge in 8 years, and military cells still delivering full capacity after 20 years of collecting dust

Li-ion batteries are only dead after 2 years if they are abused or their charge/discharge life is used up. Properly cared for real world Li-ion batteries last for 10 years or more (in spite of Isador Buchmann's claim to the contrary).

Note that he explicitly confirms that Li-ion batteries have a limit on the number of charge/discharge cycles they can handle. That's precisely the problem this technology is supposed to fix.

But notice the phrase "properly cared for". Do you think the average consumer properly cares for his/her battery or even knows what "proper care" is? My girlfriend never charges her iPad until it reaches 0%.

> My girlfriend never charges her iPad until it reaches 0%.

Also notice this phrase: there are numerous examples in the wild that have been regularly fully discharged (to 2.8 to 3.0 volts), stored at around 20 °C and kept fully charged in between times. These batteries are over 12 years old and are fully functional.

Did you read the linked article?

> Batteries are typically charged and discharged through a constant stream of power, which causes problems like SEI layer formation that causes the battery to degrade over time. The BatteryOS system, by contrast, takes an active role in managing what’s happening inside a Li-ion battery, which not only lengthens the life of the battery, but also gives it the ability to store 10 percent to 40 percent more power.

Obviously the proof is in the results, but that's what they're claiming.

Active power management is nothing new to lithium ion batteries.

You're right, see for example http://www.qnovocorp.com/

Guess execution is king ;)

I found this useful paper from qnovo that describes the charging process they use. It's very interesting.

http://www.qnovocorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Qnovo-In...

"Guess execution is king ;)"

Always has been, always will be.

if execution is king, then marketing is a dark prince at least!

There is a distinct difference between reversing capacity loss and reducing it. Reduction is very possibly a pro-active stance, where reversal is by nature passive.

In this case, what seems to be claimed is a pro-active method of reducing future loss of capacity. There is certainly a lot of precedent for this without my going into analogies. See the intelligent battery handling on the Tesla Model S. Sure there are many cells there, but I'm thinking there are more cells in this battery box than there is in your 6 or 9-cell laptop. Perhaps not, though. :-)

I have some HyperJuice units that I made cables for. It works OK, but is definitely clunky. I think it could be done in a better way, but it can only be a hack with Apple defending the walls of their garden so militantly.

For this reason I really hope GBatteries have a license to use the connector, and that they build in some cable management similar to what's on the magsafe unit, so the cable can be coiled neatly.

My other feedback is that having a built-in AC adapter would be so very useful. Look at the HyperJuice plug [1]. It's got the AC prongs that just slide out -- no separate wall wart, and no micro-usb cable. People that have only Apple devices won't have many micro USB cables around. It would also prevent someone from plugging the USB cable into their laptop while it's being powered by the external battery. :\

1: http://www.hypershop.com/HyperJuice/Plug/

(note that this model HyperJuice will not charge a laptop)

I don't remember the details, but IIRC they are Apple proof.

Hopefully, but color me skeptical. I don't see how anyone can be X-proof, where X is a company that has over $100 billion in their bank account.

HyperMac literally bought Apple adapters and chopped off the cable. I'm not sure how much more Apple-proof you can get than that. What you need to be is "lawyers on retainers who can keep draining your law funds"-proof.

edit: another comment suggest a MagSafe-MagSafe2 adapter is used. That's an interesting solution that may very well work if they require the customer to buy it themselves, as I believe the Apple patent hinges on using a magnet. Of course, they may want to argue that in court. For years and years.

Apple under Jobs might be different to Apple under Cook. Potentially they have Apple's blessing. Suppose a promising YC company was just going to make it for the newest Samsung laptop otherwise. What would you do if you were Apple? Just speculation, but that's how I imagine "Apple-proof" meaning, especially if there's some agreement that they can't announce yet.

I have a feeling that if it can connect to a MagSafe port and work, Apple has control over it.

The claimed performance would provide a huge competitive advantage. If it worked as advertised and Apple had control over it, they'd integrate the software into their products and this box would never see the light of day as a third party product.

Apparently Apple already has it. Read the section titled "your new notebook" http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

They have something like it. As do almost all makers of modern battery-powered electronics. But no-one else is claiming essentially no loss of capacity after 3000 cycles.

Apple boasts 80% of original capacity after 1000 cycles. Which was industry leading, at least at the time of introduction. But a long way off GBatteries' claim.

And better batteries would further buoy resale price of Apple gear, which buoys their premium pricing for new goods. If they could have this, they would want it. Badly. It would also perfectly fit their MO for acquisitions: an engineering/technology acquisition that provides a competitive advantage to their core business.

Likely they will continue building the product described on their website:

"A battery management system (BMS) that increases battery capacity and cycle count"

I'm sure they can apply this to devices other than the 12% of laptops sold that are made by Apple.

From the pictures, it looks like the strategy is to use a MagSafe-to-MagSafe2 adapter.

Yep; I have the hypermac as well; it is very great. I buy new ones all the time. The magsafe thing is a bit (not much) of a hassle though. Curious as well how that will be handled.

Did you read or think about the comment you are responding to?

It's a battery technology company. This is their first product.

I don't understand the need for snark. It's a valid point. The main selling-point of their first product is that it can power MacBooks but if Apple cracks down on them for using the MagSafe adapter then this product will no longer be useful for its intended purposes.

And the selling point of their first product is a non starter, unless apple changed their MagSafe policies.

What makes you think this? Portable batteries like this are dime a dozen (maybe not for macs, I don't own one). Or the real play is licensing the battery tech which doesn't really seem Microsoft like at all since the company would likely fade into the background as the big battery companies use the technology.

I don't mean to be offensive, just curious why you are so confident this company or product is a industry game changer.

You need to read to the end of the post to understand PG's analogy. There is software that controls the charging rate of the battery that (if the claims are correct) could be fundamentally disruptive to batteries going forward, so the Altair analogy implies a potential software licensing strategy as an upside in this company.

But is this new technology? Have they really figured out something that other battery companies don't know?

This charger takes 2.25 hours to reach 80% or 4.5 hours to reach 100% capacity. Could it simply be that they're charging more slowly?

Maybe other battery makers know about this, but they don't implement it because they (and consumers) don't value using the battery effectively. Hoping for some lithium-charging experts (I know there are people out there with this as their primary research focus) to weigh in.

Since they filed a patent on it, I assume it is new tech. There is new charging tech from time to time, but most of the IP belongs to those big semiconductor companies, like TI. I know TI has an innovative power management module for LiPoly batteries, but it is pretty expensive.

It could be a new tech. While there are quite a few BMS chips available around, from a bunch of companies [ http://liionbms.com/html/BMS_IC_table.html ] it is possible that they did some careful research onto what charging cycles are used in these products and found charging cycles that work even better for particular battery chemistries.

On the other hand, research is tough and it is so much easier to learn about the existence of a few hot words (like BMS), file a provisional patent and smooth-talk an investor or two with 'BatteryOS platform' . Considering that they are comparing their charging cycle with the "conventional" charger and throw words like "Chevy Volt, which only charges its battery to 50 percent capacity" I'm finding this scenario as a more likely one.

Still. It is not like I wouldn't like having more well designed LiIon BMS/charger combos on the market! There aren't many available and it's always nice to have more choice! So good luck!

Looked at it a bit more, I think this story could be a good illustration of confirmation bias in research [1].

They've probably tried their best, but it is really really really easy to make a mistake when you are designing an experiment. Or post-processing your experimental data. Or plotting the results. Or doing your math.

As it was noticed in the comments below, it looks like in that particular case an outcome of an experiment was decided using insufficient (n = 1) number of samples [ http://www.getbatterybox.com/bos.html#highexpl ]. Also there is at least one mistake in the math, a 50Wh battery can not be charged from a discharged state to 80% by 5 Volt 1 Amp power source in 4.5 hours [ http://www.getbatterybox.com/index.html#faq ]. The math is wrong.

[1] As per Wikipedia article: confirmation bias (also called confirmatory bias or myside bias) is the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs or hypotheses. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position.

You'd think that someone on this site would know patent haven't worked like that for a while...

In the paper reference to arxiv, which supposedly explains what this tech does, that is exactly what they are doing. Equation (1) shows that rate of SEI growth is proportional to charge rate (note: this equation given is actually a simplification as their rho should be proportional to how full the pack is) so you can limit SEI growth to whatever you want by just taking a charge time hit. Your users may or may not like this.

I can promise you none of this is new to anyone in the battery industry. The problem is not lack of knowledge. In general, the problem is the lack of desire to pay for a micro controller which can run the software necessary to do the math in the battery pack.

It charges slowly because they are charging over micro usb.

The new YC fascination (recent RFS) appears to be in solving big problems without building the big product right away. You can build an add-on that works you towards some level of driving automation well before you build an entire robotic car, for example.

PG's line there is a reinforcing hint for those that missed the Boosted Boards example previously or weren't too optimistic in response to that RFS. Hopefully it helps more people think about how they could approach big problems in an initially accessible way.

Battery storage will be absolutely huge in a few years. There is so much potential that has gone unexplored, since batteries have traditionally been heavy, low-capacity and short-lived. At least some of the people in this space who are in the right place at the right time today, are going to win big. Someone will have to build all these batteries.

Everything from cars to renewable energy to light aircraft is going to be battery-powered in the future. It will be very exciting to see what happens in this space, and I'm bummed that I'm largely unable to invest in this space myself. Best of luck to the YC-backed companies :)

(Case in point: Tesla Motors have announced that they're building the world's largest Li-ion battery factory, to the tune of $5 billion).

I think it's very unlikely that airplanes will be battery powered in the medium-term future. The chemical energy stored in hydrogen bonds is just so much denser than the electrical energy stored in concentrated lithium ions.

I know that battery-powered planes have been built, but it just seems so uneconomical to me. Do you have evidence that could persuade me otherwise?

Or perhaps am I misunderstanding? By light aircraft do you mean aircraft less than 100 pounds or something?

In short, I strongly believe that you're incorrect. (Note: I'm talking about general/recreational aviation here). dchichkov mentioned the Antares, which is a high-performance electric self-launch sailplane. In this category, there's also the Pipistrel Taurus G4. Lots of other electrically-powered light aircraft exist, and they are all held back by battery weight, volume and cost.

There is a large number of advantages to electric propulsion vs. combustion engines in aircraft: Much lower maintenance costs, simpler maintenance, higher reliability (in gliders, replacing two-stroke engines with electric motors yields a huge safety advantage), lower fuel cost, simpler operation (less possibility for human error), less noise, lower weight (ex batteries), smaller volume per unit power, higher efficiency, lower purchase cost. The only real disadvantages are low energy density and charging time/infrastructure. At some point in the medium-term future (~5 years) we will hit a point where the benefits obviously outweigh the disadvantages for many use cases. In fact, I think the inflection point has already been hit wrt. the battery tech, it's just that it isn't obvious to anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the progress in battery pack cost development. Give it a couple of years.

Even this list of advantages disregards the fact that the mechanical simplicity of electric motors enable aircraft configurations that haven't been tried at scale, for instance gimballed/swerving variable-geometry ducted-fan propellers, etc. Electric motors are also not dependent on high air pressure to get enough oxygen for efficient combustion. There's just a huge new design space that opens up when you have sufficiently powerful battery storage. Super exciting.

Pay attention to the drone aircraft companies, they are the ones in a position to drive this shift.

Thanks for the detailed response! Do you think there's any chance that these electric planes will used for cargo/passengers? (Or do you think they'd mainly fit into the recreation/tourism/short-hop flights? Are there other current/future plane uses that I'm not thinking of?)

I'm agnostic in that regard. Some very smart people (notably, Elon Musk) have said that electric propulsion is the future also for passenger aircraft in the more distant future, but I have not seen any detailed reasoning or numbers to indicate how this would work.

Presumably, there would have to be huge efficiency gains over combustion jet propulsion since the energy density of batteries would in any concievable circumstance be much smaller than hydrocarbon fuels. One possibility would be to fly higher, utilizing the smaller air resistance and the fact that battery-electric propulsion does not have the oxygen limitation with altitude that combustion processes have, but I haven't seen a detailed argument regarding how plausible this is.

If we ever build a "flying car", it will have to be electric and use fixed wings in addition to propellers since this is required for generating energy-efficient lift. In the "short-hop"/low-speed/personal transport category, there will definitely be possibilities.

AFAIK electric airplanes have been around for 10 years or so. Antares 20E came out around 2003. And now there are plenty others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_aircraft#Production_ai...

I have similar battery from APC. It is 5 years old and still holds most of its capacity. That super software is called battery calibration.

I'm curious to know how much work they'd done on the idea ahead of time. If this was conceived during YC, they're definitely a very impressive team.

A few months ago I looked into building this exact product. If you're a DIY kinda person and you don't mind carrying around some extra bulk, it's somewhat easy to cobble something together. If you want a light/small brick w/ self-contained charging and output regulation that just works, it's much more difficult and potentially dangerous -- especially if you want it to charge fast enough that a 1h airport layover is meaningful. Add in more advanced battery management/conditioning schemes, and I'm just all kinds of impressed.

Though, this claim does irk me a little:

> With the same battery, we could charge to a full 100 percent and it won’t degrade

> Never experience loss in capacity again. A Li-ion battery powered by BatteryOS doesn’t degrade in capacity over time, and as a result has a 4x higher cycle life than when controlled by conventional methods.

I think I need a better definition of "capacity degradation" here - if you acknowledge that there's still a charge cycle limit, I'm curious to know what happens once it's reached. Either way, I'm very sceptical of anything which claims to completely eliminate the effects of entropy.

There are 100s of ways to game this cycle spec too. For example, for all we know there is a 100WHr pack inside the box and they only make 50WHr of it available to the user. This way you can make a 50WHr battery that effectively never "degrades". The BatteryOS just manages the "reserve". Then the only thing they are really measuring is the speed at which their algorithm looses calibration. The software for many BMUs (battery management units) actually does this today.

That's not a terrible idea, actually.

When you purchase any NAND flash device like a USB stick or an SSD, essentially the same thing is happening. The raw storage is much higher, but due to a high raw bit error rate (see NAND displacement errors), the need for wear leveling, and the need for reserve blocks to swap into service as the device ages, the claimed capacities are reduced to accommodate MTBF and observed bit error specs.

In cases such as this I think it'd be disingenuous not to drop your claimed specs to reflect the actual usefulness of the device.

Except they explicitly state that they don't do this. They refer to the 50% charge scheme being used in the Chevy Volt and claim they don't do that.

This seems bigger than Altair Basic to me. If this thing works well it's huge already. Battery time is one of the biggest problems for people working out of the office (along with decent internet and peace of mind).

What? its just a powerbank, plenty of those on scambay

they even lie about capacity/charge time just like Chinese

Maybe this feature was a bit underreported: the current line of Lenovo's Ultrabooks, the ThinkPad X240/T440s allows for hot swapping the battery pack while running on a secondary built in battery. Adding up to 23.5 Whr built in plus up to 72Whr per battery pack.

http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t440s...

So they're catching up with my old Pismo. It could even sleep for a few seconds with no battery at all.

Yep. I could do this on my circa 2005 IBM T43.

Without hibernating to disk first?

or via using the Ultrabay as secondary battery? [1]

[1] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_use_Ultrabay_batteries#...

[EDIT] Also I'm not in any way affiliated with IBM/Lenovo. But the always-on USB-port feature is also a handy emergency travel phone charger if you can (or have to) prioritize phone usage over computer usage with no power outlets in reach. Since the Ultrabook is off and doesn't have to use any power itself you could theoretically stay connected for weeks given a charged battery pack.

Ultrabay as secondary battery. I had two batteries in the machine always. One 9-cell in the machine, one 9-cell in my bag and a 3-cell in the ultra bay. I could get 9 hours out of that without too much trouble and both the 9-cell packs were knackered.

Now you can get 22 hours apparently on a X220 with battery base and a 9 cell!

I use my ThinkPad as a charger too. You have to turn it on in the BIOS but it charges literally anything.

Great. So why can't you do it on a MacBook Pro?

Because they valued more the engineering advantage of a built-in battery: thinness, weight, individually connected cells for power management.

Those attributes of design are more appealing to the majority than are interchangeable batteries.

My MBP and MBAir, even with the single built-in battery, gets more runtime than a 1996 laptop with two battery packs.

Because removable batteries would offend the sensibilities of most Apple customers?

I suspect the 100% charging time was miscalculated. USB power is 5volts, so a 1A charger meants 5W of continuous power. Battery charging, especially past 85% is not very efficient, so I suspect total charging time will be more in the neighborhood of 20 hours.

You are right.

Without even taking into account efficiency, “nine hours for 100 percent charge [of a 50 Whr battery] on a [5V USB] 1A power supply” obviously breaks the conservation of energy. The claim “4.5 hours for 80% charge” breaks it even more.

They should make perpetual motion devices, not external batteries.

My guess is those times are assuming a 2A charger, which isn't particularly uncommon nowadays.

They call that out as taking half as long. My guess is they calculated the charge time using 1A but the voltage from the output (17v?)

>nine hours for 100 percent charge on a 1A power supply

They are simply LYING, probably learned from the same Chinese that will build it for them using 5000mAh* Ultrafire 16850 cells ;)

*400mAh when tested

Why Macbooks?

Is Apple friendly towards people who replicate their connector interfaces?

Or are Macs the only popular device out there where people wish "I wish I could carry an extra battery!"?

High end laptops are a good place to start when you are selling a ~$140 accessory.

I would be shocked if they didn't have plans to expand to other products/devices. My guess is that they are betting that Macbook owners are most likely to pay right now. I'm not certain, but I'm willing to bet that Macbooks have a majority chunk of the high end laptop market.

So if I were in their shoes, I'd probably start with macbooks in order to gain a foothold.

The founders probably haven't seen many people using a non-MacBook laptop in a long time, given how prevalent they are in tech these days.

I am guessing they have licensed magsafe from Apple. Pretty sure they would get a call from Apple lawyers otherwise. There are universal chargers and batteries with all sorts of connectors which are not patent encumbered.

Kind of makes me wonder if Apple would cooperate at this stage and then consider buying the company later.

Apple doesn't license MagSafe to anyone.

Fair enough. Obviously pg isn't naive enough to invest in a company that will get sued out of existence by Apple tomorrow. So most likely this product is a proof of concept of the technology and is circumventing the issue by perhaps incorporating Apple's MagSafe2 into their offering. http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD504ZM/A/magsafe-to-magsa...

> Is Apple friendly towards people who replicate their connector interfaces?

The exact opposite: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/hypermac/

For the same reason Tesla built a roadster to start their company. Low volume and high margin is MUCH easier to achieve when you are small than high volume and low margin.

Watch Shark Tank for a while and you'll realize that even if you have a product people want, it's not trivial to scale a physical product business unless you have significant capital. Even if you reinvest the money you make, you are constrained by how quickly you can turn the money over.

If you wanted to cover as much current and future market share as possible (at least in the market they're targeting) I can't think of a better current combination than magsafe2 + usb.

Other than, maybe, a portable power outlet.

Deleted comment

And MagSafe 2 was introduced in 2012.

You surely mean magsafe 2, here.

They can't put an actual wall socket on it, and they already have USB. If they're going to put one laptop port on it, a Mac port is the obvious choice because it's the largest market.

It's niche and there's not generally great support for portable batteries for macbooks. I'm pre-ordering one because the alternative is making my own.

Love it. Actually sitting next to my own "battery box" - a wheeled backpack with a 55 amp-hour AGM (lead acid) battery and inverter. I think I can get 3 work days out of that, but it's a lot bigger than this. Great for taking to the park though.

This has almost nothing at all to do with Apple.

I'm a little sad that folks can't get past the proof-of-concept product.

The game-changer is BatteryOS, not BatteryBox. Who cares about BatteryBox itself?

Think bigger, people, come on.

There's not much to discuss about BatteryOS until it's been verified by third parties. Every 4 months or so we get a news article about some amazing breakthrough in battery technology, and they never ever seem to pan out.

This technology, if legit, is I think a very good example of where software patents can add value. The future of this technology isn't a little $139 backup battery for Macbooks. Rather, its licensing the charging algorithms to every battery charging controller manufacturer on the planet. One can imagine that over time it might be a good idea for a company like this to vertically integrate and start producing its own batteries, but it's going to be a long time before they have the capital to take on the Korean/Japanese companies currently playing in that space. The alternative might be to angle to get bought by an Apple or Samsung, but that's probably not what's best for the industry. There's a lot of value to R&D companies like this that can focus on a specific niche without having to rely on some vertically-integrated conglomerate to get anything done.

My laptop has swapable battery. I can also swap HDD bay from my desktop when I am traveling.

It is really funny to see Mac fans excited about simple external battery. This stuff is around for decades!

What laptop do you have? Macbook Pro's are so thin now even a RJ45 hole is too tall. I can forgive them for not having a replaceable battery for size/weight and noise reduction having everything so tightly integrated.

The ThinkPad x240 is thinner and lighter than a MacBook Pro and still manages to find space for an external battery, an RJ45 jack, and a VGA connector.

Its not thinner. The x240 is 0.8 inches thick [1] and the MacBook Pro is 0.71 inches thick. [2] Not trying to fanboy here having used both of those laptops recently.

[1] http://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/lenovo-thinkpad-x24...

[2] http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs-retina/

Thanks, and sorry about the misinformation. I got my info from http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/, which was the first result for a search for "Macbook Pro dimensions". Didn't realize that was apparently obsolete info.

HP Elitebook something.

I don't think I've seen anyone get excited about it yet.

Wow this seems to be a very clear-cut value add.

Question on how the technology works: I don't really understand what a "battery OS" is. Do they have circuits that somehow manage the battery better or something?

They say they have a patent pending, that should have more details. I would like to read it, can anybody find the filing?

http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/

pretty sure it's this one: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013142964A1

basically the technique involves pulsing the current during (dis)charging, and optimising the length and timing of the pulsing in real-time, because the optimal settings change through the life of the battery.

I'm kind of a battery nut. I've been building various pulse chargers and capacitive current limiting chargers for years. Without fail all of my most promising pulse charge/bleed schemes that yielded faster charges and greater runtimes have done so at the expense of cycle numbers. Usually by a factor of 10 or more. I hope they've outsmarted this, but I have my doubts.

>Wow

and

>I don't really understand

in same post, what are the odds? :) Its a scam. They are tryting to sell 50Whr battery that can be charged in

>nine hours for 100 percent charge on a 1A power supply

from usb (5V), thats maths 101

>Do they have circuits that somehow manage the battery

They are selling product that stores more power than it consumes while being charged. Its snake oil at best, more likely a scam.

Mentioned in passing in child comments below, but worth highlighting - the HyperJuice Battery range of products (eg http://amzn.to/1mqK9ap) already does this, at a similar price point, and is available for purchase today.

In fact they're already onto the second generation of the product, with minor bugs and issues with the first gen already ironed out. I get this GBattery has a new "BatteryOS" management feature but right now that's vaporware and unproven, and unavailable for purchase - thus I don't really understand the excitement vs what you could already buy today.

We bought a HyperJuice 2 for use on trips. It's terrible. It'll charge a 15" rMBP about 10-15% before it's completely dead.

It's not made to charge the laptops. It's made to keep them running. The rmbp will suck any battery dry trying to charge and run at the same time. Keep the rmbp at 100% and plug in the battery and let me know how long it lasts.

It's not designed to charge MacBook Pros, just Airs due to the wattage required. I don't believe that's any difference for the GBattery either.

They claim that their 50 Whr battery can power a MacBook Pro for 6 hours, a MacBook Air for 12 hrs. By my math, that would mean that the MacBook Pro would only be consuming an average of around 8.3 watts an hour, the air only around 4.2 watts an hour.

That seems absurd to me, considering the power supplies that ship with the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air are 85-watt and 45-watt respectively. They are assuming that each only draws about 10% of the power that the official power supplies are rated at. Anyone have a Kill-A-Watt to see the actual draw of their device?

Think of the power supplies as battery chargers.

The 13" MBA has a 54Wh battery, and Apple claims it get 12 hours of "wireless web" use. The 13" MBP has a 72Wh battery and claims 9 hours of "wireless web" or "iTunes movie playback". In practice, people find the Apple claims fairly reasonable.

While that does not prove how precise or accurate their projections are, I don't think they are absurd. Software-based monitors of power consumption on MacBooks show variation between low single digits and low teens under light use, and shoot up dramatically if you are doing something intensive.

It's entirely true, and means I could run my MacBook Air off of USB power at 5 volts and one amp (5 watts), but zero battery charging. Unfortunately Apple doesn't allow this scenario, but the math works out...

The Air has I think a 50 WHr battery and will last 11-12 hours for Wi-Fi surfing. I think the idle load is just a couple of watts. Peak load is of course higher.

Good point, I didn't think to check the capacity of the Air's internal battery.

The difference in power draw between idle and 100% utilization on a modern computer is enormous.

The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100%, but the sort of usage where you get 6-12 hours of use while on battery is very much near idle almost all the time.

I have a 15" MacBook Pro, which has a 95Wh battery. Apple claims 8 hours of battery life on it, and in my experience that's an understatement. It also ships with an 85W power adapter.

> The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100%

Actually it can't; there used to be a support article on Apple's site named HT2332 that details how Macbooks will underclock with the battery removed, because the adapter cannot supply enough power with the system at full load. Other manufacturer's laptops have also been doing this, so Apple is not alone.

That's true, I'm able to drain my MacBook's battery while plugged in if I stress it enough. It's pretty close, though!

I don't suppose you have any idea exactly how they arrive at the power adapter size for these things? It seems to be almost but not quite 100%, but they still try to optimize it where they ship 45W, 65W, or 85W depending on what computer you have.

At least for the Macs I think it's more to do with how fast it can charge the battery while the system is (mostly) idle or off. A larger adapter is inconvenient, but so is a slow-charging battery.

"watts an hour"

FYI, the unit you're looking for is "watts", not "watts per hour".

Would love to see a battery built in to my MBP's power brick. Charge, and provide power, when it's plugged in. Run off the battery when it's not.

Many companies have been trying to produce external Macbook batteries (e.g. http://www.hypershop.com/HyperJuice/External-Battery-for-Mac...), but the major stumbling block has been that Apple does not allow third parties to use the Magsafe interface. Has Gbatteries found a way around this problem?

Come on pg. This isn't real tech. This is just a battery in a box with a $1 microcontroller. We could hack this together in a day in my basement.

It was about time someone optimized charging/discharging of batteries. I didn't know ordinary batteries have such a potential for optimization, I thought that would be the batteries in UPSes. Current UPS batteries die in 3 years, having been used just a dozen times, apparently because the UPS insists to keep them fully charged at all times. Someone fix this, please.

Pre-ordering hardware that makes promises of substantial improvements over the status-quo that will only be testable by the buyer a few years down the line is a recipe for disaster.

Do yourself a favour and hold on to your money until there are actual units that have been tested rigorously (as in, in an independent lab unaffiliated with the company) to see if the promises are delivered on.

Would have been nice if TechCrunch did some testing / reporting, instead of accepting / repeating. Not that I'm surprised, just would have been nice in this area.

Does Apple allow licensing of MagSafe now?

That was my first thought. I remember reading a few years ago that a company actually had to stop making Macbook compatible external batteries because Apple threatened to sue them over use of the MagSafe connector.

EDIT: I found the article, and apparently the company was sued for using actual recycled connectors, not just using the design.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/21/apple_sues_hyperma...

But they used recycled connectors as a way of using the legal argument their product was a "customer modification" of a licensed and paid for product. You sent them YOUR charger and they modified it to work with their device.

They STILL got shut down by Apple because the Mag Safe also used circuitry inside the brick that they "hacked" to make their brick work like.. Basically DRM and DMCA for power bricks shut them down.

I have one of the original cables before they got shut down. It's just a magsafe end with a barrel connector on the other. No DRM voodoo.

DRM voodoo is in the charger, it speaks 1-Wire telling computer its make model and power. Most likely can also be controlled over 1-Wire.

The magsafe connector talks 1-wire, not the charger itself. It provides serial number and version info but no DRM/crypto. The Mac also uses the 1-wire to control the LEDs on the connector. See my teardown for the details: http://www.righto.com/2013/06/teardown-and-exploration-of-ma...

Nice, thanks. What about magsafe2? same deal? DELL also uses serial connection with the charger, with chip inside the charger. Kinda surprising Apple didnt lock it down like they are used to do.

I just took another look at the pictures. They are using the MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converters!

BatteryOS seems to be the most important aspect here. Consumer electronics manufacturers have different goals than this class of product, which may not always align with every consumer. So if they are abstracting all that logic into their own MCU OS, that is pretty smart. I can see an iPhone/Mac app to tune your BatteryBox to charge faster at the cost of life time/cycles(?) (clearly telling you this!) or vice versa...allowing you to tailor the solution to your needs. This is different to what Apple would offer as they need to find a one size fits all solution and that is usually some sweet spot for high cycle count + low charge time and long battery life.

Going one step further, possibility for some ML to learn your use case and charge your MacBook accordingly. Regardless, the battery is irrelevant, the OS is key.

Get a new industrial designer onboard. Yesterday. Seeing the thing, I'm inclined to believe that that "new" in previous sentence is superfluous.

Plugging this into my MacBook Air would make me feel like getting a $20 prostitute. And paying her $200 afterwards nonetheless.

The Air's battery already lasts 12+ hours. How much demand could there possibly be for people to stretch it out even further? HyperJuice (and I would guess others) is already out there and I've never even seen one of those things in the wild.

The latest Air in ideal conditions does 12hrs. My friends couple of year old one managed to run out fairly promptly when using by the swimming pool where there were no sockets. He could be a customer if the gadget's good.

I would love if this had some sort of a universal plug on it so you can power other laptops besides Macs. Then you can plug some sort of adapter in so you can charge Dell, Sony, etc. laptops as well.

This is really exciting, and a real problem solver, than good-for-nothing social apps popping up every other day. I wonder do they ship 'internationally'?

on a second thought, why not make the color of the box, say like mbp body color, or other light grayish colors, when it's intended for apple products. the green color does not seem a right fit for an accessory of apple products.

>and a total of 9 hours for 100% charge

yikes! But i guess it's okay since it's a 'standby' battery.

If this works, it seems pretty strange to build their own devices with it. With a patent on the methods they could make a fortune licensing the technology to Si companies. They would reach the market much quicker too.

However, having worked on BMS systems for lithium batteries this sounds very fishy. Maybe they've hit on something spectacular, but it seriously looks like snake oil based on the info they've provided thus far.

I really like the end of their FAQ. Almost made a call.

http://www.getbatterybox.com/#faq

Pre-ordered. Unfortunately when traveling - device power is a constant pain point for me. very excited about utilizing for both Macbook & phone.

As a product, this doesn't seem to offer all that much over competitors besides the claimed reduction in degradation. Otherwise, something like this seems better and cheaper: http://www.amazon.com/20000mAh-Multi-Voltage-External-Netboo...

How does a YC backed company create a video with audio that's clearly watermarked. Presumably they could afford the $17 license...

I think all laptops can extend the battery life-span significantly with just smarter software. I manually cycle my laptop battery regularly & do not keep it charged at 100% all the time even if the laptop is plugged in (some Thinkpad models allow that). Even after 2 years of daily use, I've got greater than 80-90% battery capacity left.

I do absolutely nothing special to try to prolong the lifetime of my 3-year-old MacBook Pro battery and it's still got 92% capacity.

My experience with Windows laptops is totally different

Somewhat odd to target a computer that already runs for 12hours to run 'another 12 hours' with a big bulky external battery pack. Would make more sense to target something like an iPhone or others that run way too short to last a day. Problem is: battery packs for those are a dime a dozen. I do wish them best of luck though!

Their battery technology sounds great but, honestly, I am a consumer so my point of view is "do I want to buy this for $139?"

Yes, I do want it, mostly so that I can set it next to my Macbook Air (mid-2012) for a full day's worth of power, as is the use case shown so prominently on the web site.

Take away the MagSafe 2 and I don't want it.

This looks like a great idea. We are applying to the upcoming class with a different approach though. Instead of owning batteries (however spectacular they are), we think it's about creating a network to share batteries. Think bike share for batteries.

Would love to chat about using Gbatteries in such a network.

> note it does not charge the internal Macbook battery. Instead BatteryBox feeds power directly to the Mac in an effort to minimize the number of cycles (and stress) on the internal battery.

Is this something that any power adapter does? Is there something in the way they have it connected that does this?

I don't know why many people are focus on Apple or protable battery. With such tech, the potential could be anywhere need an efficient energy solution. The BatterBox might be the first appliance. Are you willing to buy something cost you 10 bucks while it saves you 20 bucks?

How is this different from my HyperJuice? That gives me 50Whr, too, and also has a USB port. It pretty much doubled the life of my Air, and slightly less for my 13" rMBP (Haswell i5, with 16GB).

Their patent I believe: https://www.google.com/patents/WO2013142964A1

Nice though would not a A4 (laptop sized) slab instead of a box be better as could then sit under the laptop and also easily fit inside the laptop case.

Just a thought.

It's a lot more expensive to make custom-shaped cells than to pop a couple of standard cylindrical cells into a square box.

True, though more production of flat cells than round, mobile phones case in point - they are all flat in shape. Actualy not really come across flat LiOn cells personaly in any form. Capacitors - yes.

Curious why they didn't go with Kickstarter for the BatteryBox. The product looks really interesting, and I think I'll order some.

Take my money already! This is going to be a life saver - it's like a mophie juice pack for my MacBook, but smaller and more powerful.

Why the capacity sometimes goes higher on the graph as the battery ages? Can anyone explain, or is this just a marketing crap?

The desk in the Savannah-like setting + shades + call the founder at his cell = Take my money.

Pre-ordered a while ago ... can't wait to live in a jungle and not worry about juice :)

This could be huge...wonder if Tesla/Solar City would be interested in buying them?

For anyone from the metric world too lazy to look it up: 9 ounces equals 255.146 gramms.

Would this be useful for Tesla?

Absolutely. And Apple, and Dell, and anyone else that uses rechargeable batteries that degrade over time. This solves the degradation aspect of batteries, so it would improve the longevity of devices.

But I've read so much about Tesla being really intelligent with charging. Wouldn't they have already thought of this?

(Or at least be doing enough intelligent things already that they wouldn't get much additional improvement?)

Definitelly. Since their magic box consumes 45Whr

>nine hours for 100 percent charge on a 1A power supply over USB

to charge fully into 50Whr battery. Its Perpetuum mobile. Musk would love one of those.

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