kenyatta: shortformblog: “We’re allowing the present to conspire against the past in the
kenyatta: shortformblog: “We’re allowing the present to conspire against the past in the name of the future.” Over at Tedium this week, I laid out a serious problem with planned obsolescence and preservation, which has caused serious long-term problems which will only worsen as technological changes lead to increasingly obsolete gadgets. Not everyone will agree with me on this, but it’s a debate worth having. This is good and I agree: I have a lot of old gadgets floating around my house these days, partly out of personal interest in testing things out, out of hope of writing stories about the things that I find. Some of this stuff is on loan and requires extra research that simply takes time due to the huge amount of complexity involved. Other times, it’s just an artifact that I think allows for telling an interesting story. I still make my weekly trips to Goodwill hoping to find the next interesting story in a random piece of what some might call junk. But one issue keeps cropping up that I think is going to become even more prevalent in the years to come: Non-functional batteries. Battery technology and the circuitry that connects to it varies wildly, and it creates issues that prevent gadgets from living their best lives, in a huge part due to the slow decay of lithium-ion batteries. A prominent example of this, of course, are AirPods, highly attractive and functional tools that will slowly become less useful over time as their batteries go through hundreds of cycles and start to lose steam. But at the same time, AirPods are just a prominent example of what is destined to happen to basically every set of Bluetooth headphones over time: The lithium-ion batteries driving them will slowly decay and turn a once-useful product into an object that must be continually replaced because a single part, the battery, cannot be replaced. Older devices I’ve been testing out have batteries so old that I cannot find replacements for them. (You’ve not lived until you’ve typed in a serial code for an old battery and found out that the only search result for that serial code goes to a museum’s website.) But newer batteries, despite being reliant on basically the same technology year after year, can’t be easily replaced, leading these old batteries to decay with little room for user recourse. -- source link
Tumblr Blog : shortformblog.com
#batteries#lithium-ion