The big news out of MWSF might be the introduction of the first mass-production Silver-Zinc battery for portable computers. These batteries powered the moon missions in the 1960s, and with the recent focus on being “green”, are 95% recyclable, particularly the expensive Silver that can be recycled from one old battery into a new one.
(this post is partially recycled from a post I made to the MacRumors discussion of this topic)
The Silver-Zinc batteries supposedly provided by ZPower (funded by Intel, hint hint) have a high, 200Wh/kg rating. Meaning for every kg (2.2 lbs) of weight, it can store 200Wh. How much is 200Wh? Well the current MBs are shipping with 45Wh battery, and the 15″ MBPs a 50Wh battery. So in a 1 lb internal battery, the ZPower Silver-Zinc could store just under 100Wh. After you factor in the larger screen, (probably) faster CPU, etc, you’d probably see a 60-75% increase in battery life over the 15″ MBP if they were to go this route.
The reason to make it non-removable would be the very high price of the battery, due to the price of silver. By requiring Apple to service the battery when the cycle life expires, Apple can recycle the battery and recover the expensive silver, as well as have a “trade-in” policy to recover some of the price of the new, replacement battery.
ZPower indicates that users can get 200 cycles out of their Silver-Zinc batteries, typically that is a measurement to 80% of original capacity. This means power users who discharge their battery 5 days per week would need to replace their battery every 40 weeks, or 9 months. For users like myself, who uses about 2-3 cycles per week would see the need to replace the battery every 18 months. What also should be factored into the equation is that a battery cycle is defined as a complete discharge and recharge. If the battery in a MacBook Pro 17″ is 7-8 hours on the new Silver-Zinc battery and its only 4 hours on a Li-Ion battery, the 200 cycles in a Silver-Zinc battery provide the same or possibly longer battery only time (200 cycles x 7.5 hours is 62.5 days) when compared to a Li-Ion battery (300 cycles x 4 hours = 50 days). ZPower also touts that recharge times are quicker, though given the larger battery capacity it will probably take the same amount of time to charge a Silver-Zinc battery as a Li-Ion battery, but your runtime will be longer.
I could even see this become part of the normal laptop line-up (if they figure out how to use less silver and get the price down) – that the batteries are non-removable because Apple wants to force people to come back into the store to replace the battery when it wont hold a charge anymore, and Apple can recycle the battery and be more “green”. The next, most obvious target is the MacBook Air because its battery is already not user replaceable, and would allow for a big boost in battery life and pushing the weight down – the MBA could lose a tenth or so of a pound, and still get much longer battery life, perhaps 3.5 hours under intensive use, up from just over 2 hours, and 6-7 hours under basic web/office use.
Intel has pushed hard for “all day computing” for a while now. Every rev of their laptop chips are designed to use less power, from both the chip fabrication process improving as well as the effort devoted to putting the chip in various sleep states to minimize usage when the CPU is idle, between every keystroke you type the chip can go in a deep sleep and save more power. Better batteries are the other side of that equation – putting more power into a smaller form factor.
I’m sure Apple is exploring this for the iPhone as well, though cost considerations become much more important when you’re selling a $400 phone (unsubsidized), and the cost of the battery could be disproportionally higher in a phone than a $2500 laptop. This is why its starting with the 17″ MBP – because the base price of the laptop is so high already, going from a $100 to a $200 battery (with some of that cost recoverable due to recycling) isn’t such a big deal. Even if the battery for the iPhone is a fraction of the size and capacity (4Wh vs 50Wh), the cost difference is still significant over a traditional Li-Ion battery. Though the nerd in me is ecstatic about the idea of a Broadcom 618 3G chipset (65nm fabrication) and a Silver-Zinc battery in the Fall 2009 or Spring 2010 version of the iPhone – 8 hours of 3G talk time, 10 hours of movies and 36 hours of music (enough for the longest plane rides on a 777LR).
Sources: 9to5Mac, ComputerWorld (both by the same author, just different websites)
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