Longer-lasting battery tech is here, but iPhone owners will need to wait a while

As I mentioned a few days ago, breakthroughs in battery tech always seem to be two years away, but there have been some modest but worthwhile developments.

One of these, silicon-carbon batteries, is already found in some Android brands, and battery-test results clearly illustrate the benefits. But experts say it will be a little while before Apple adopts the new battery chemistry in future iPhones …

There’s an ongoing arms race between battery capabilities and smartphone features. Batteries have been growing more efficient over the years, but at the same time those gains have been swallowed up by the increased power demands of larger and brighter screens, more powerful processors and so on.

While most improvements in battery tech have been incremental, some of the latest Android phones have switched to a new battery chemistry which does demonstrate a step change in capacity. CNET notes that Chinese brands like Honor, Huawei, and Oppo are switching from lithium-ion batteries to silicon-carbon ones, which offer notably higher energy density and faster charging.

Silicon-carbon batteries aren’t an entirely new type of battery, but rather a next-generation version of lithium-ion technology. Put simply, instead of using graphite in the battery’s anode, manufacturers incorporate a silicon-carbon composite. Because silicon can hold more lithium than graphite, this design allows for higher energy density […] In CNET’s lab testing, nearly half of the phones with the best battery life use silicon-carbon tech.

This tech hasn’t yet been adopted by Apple, Samsung or Google, and experts say this is because it’s too new to have the proven reliability demanded by major brands.

Advancements need to be validated across millions of units to avoid unexpected failures, safety concerns and performance issues at scale, says Paul Braun, director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Reliability and longevity are more important in premium smartphones people hold on to for longer periods, and that’s why it may be a year or three down the line before we see silicon carbon batteries powering iPhones.

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