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Why are batteries in phones always measured in mAh instead of Wh like for example notebooks?
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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The vast majority of cell phones use a single-cell Li-Ion battery, so their capacities can be directly compared using mAh. Laptops almost always contain multi-cell Li-Ion batteries, so their capacity cannot be directly compared using mAh (e.g. a 4S battery rated for 2500mAh has more energy than a 3S battery rated for 3000mAh).
So why don't we use Wh for phones too? Simply because manufacturers would rather advertise a battery size of five thousand mAh (wow, so much capacity!) instead of 19 Wh.
The same issue happens with portable USB battery packs - they're all advertised in mAh even though they use a wide variety of chemistries and cell configurations internally. What manufacturers do is take the total Wh of the pack and convert it back to the equivalent mAh of a single-cell Li-Ion. It's annoying, and I really wish they would just use Wh directly.
But why not advertise in mWh? 19000 is bigger than 5000
I don't think they know about metric prefixes, Pip.
Imagine if the marketing people discovered that they could advertise that it has 19 million uWh (in Doctor Evil voice). Don't say it too loudly though, someone at Apple might hear.