Submitted by Sabregold1999
Apple Succumbs To Battery Chemistry
In light of the news that Apple is issuing a dividend with the stock flirting with all-time highs, it might be a good time to assess where Apple is with its two products, the Iphone and the Ipad. There is no arguing with the success of these products, but that is not the real story that needs addressing. The real story for Apple is battery chemistry and much like the automakers it fails.
Apple, like a lot of gadget makers needs new iterations to generate a buzz. If the newest product lacks significant improvements the growth model suffers. For Apple any and all great innovations on the hardware side will be limited, simply because battery chemistry, unlike Moore’s law, moves at a snail’s pace. Here is some evidence to show you the proof.
Let’s examine the latest offering from the IPad3. Apple was able to increase the size of the battery in its device by about 70%. It did this by engineering a more efficient internal set-up. It did NOT increase the energy density of the individual lithium ion cells. Why was all of this done? They did it for two reasons.
4G eats batteries and that new screen hogs power. So, without engineering a better set-up, the IPad 3 would have been much larger, instead of only slightly larger.
Why is this important? If you examine a laptop, there’s a reason why the battery is as large as it is relative to the device. The laptop uses significant power and lithium ion batteries are only capable of packing so much energy density into a defined space. Design engineers at Apple and Samsung know perfectly well, that asking your phone or tablet to replace that of your laptop comes with one big problem that no one has solved; namely, battery chemistry.
For a company like Apple, it truly is constrained on what it can do moving forward with the Ipad and the Iphone franchises. Computing power comes at a price in small packages and with the latest revelation that energy densities did not improve, an investor might conclude that the next iterations will have to contain extraordinary software rather than hardware developments.
Oh and it is for this reason that this author believes Apple is tackling the TV market next. Stay tuned.