I do not want to be in the same building as a lithium battery containing a century's worth of energy.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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"Now over to Australia where a Note 7 battery exploded this morning. Another country has been added to the growing list of regions completely obliterated by a thermonuclear explosion"
Doesn't really make sense even to users. They would shrink the battery to a small fraction of its original side, market it as the world's lightest and thinnest phone, with 4x the battery life of a normal phone. Then they'd have some other products of a bigger battery version for emergency red phones.
Beyond just companies wanting to turn a buck, there's other more obvious limitations. The bands to communicate with the tower require physical antennas inside the phone and those frequencies are recycled over time to different protocols or sometimes different uses entirely. It would be useless as a phone before it's dead.
Also the whole thing about energy density. Current lithium ballpark density is 250 Wh per kg. Taking a modern galaxy 5000mah (19.4wh) battery and multiplying it by your chosen ratio of 10 hours vs a hypothetical 876000 makes it 21,900,000Wh per Kg, still less dense than fusion energy, which is around 24,000,000,000Wh per kg but very close to fission energy density, which is around 24,000,000 Wh. Of the Uranium that actually fissioned during the Little Boy bomb explosion, it only amounted to about 0.8763kg, less energy than a kilogram of your hypothetical battery. I guess luckily batteries only weigh about 50 grams? The factory making them would have more bomb potential than the Beirut explosion if they had more than 47.5 kg of batteries, or enough to make 950 phones.
As an aside, I can't believe how big the Beirut explosion was, 1GWh. Insane and horrifying.
There are a few reasons why this is a bad idea. But disregarding those, I don't think it would change cell phones all that much. So you don't have to charge your phone. It's not like that's a big inconvenience anyway.
It would have a bigger impact on vehicles, transportation, and shipping. Long range trucks don't need to stop for fuel. Neither do cargo ships. Maybe battery electric airliners become viable.
Given the pace of technological progress, I doubt a phone bought today will be all that useful (except as a retro novelty) in 20 years time, let alone 100.
How many people do you think are still daily-driving a Motorola KRZR? It’s not because of the battery life.
I don't know if you knew this or not, but the KRZRs actually WERE known for having terrible batteries. Every time somebody brought one in with battery issues, we'd pop the battery out, set it down and give it a spin. More times than not, a cell had burst inside and that battery would be swollen to hell.
I thought it was funny that you just happened to pick a phone that people actually DID get rid of just because of the battery!
I did not! I actually had one back in the day and never had battery issues, but pretty funny to hear it was a common complaint.
(Still, I think the broader point stands.)
The point absolutely stands, despite the irony.
I have a friend who had an iPhone 3 until 3g got shut down 18 months ago. You don't need to buy into the constant update cycle.
That also kind of proves OP's point though. 3G was shut down, making an iPhone 3 pretty much useless at this point. You can use these things a lot longer than they want or expect you to, sure, but 20 years is a stretch, and 100 years is untenable.
It depends on the power density. A battery with the current power density but increased longevity isn't going to be as useful as you'd think.
A battery that is able to have the same power output as current batteries but last a century is going to be a weapon of mass destruction.
A battery with the current power density but increased longevity
…. Is exactly what we need. People bitch and moan about how difficult it is to replace phone batteries, but this would make it unnecessary. More importantly, all those people who replace their phones every 2-3 years as the battery stops lasting a full day, would no longer have that excuse. If we had increased longevity, there’d be less electronic waste as people keep their devices longer
Or think about things like grid storage - a lot of the high cost is how long they last, so increased longevity is critical for that investment to pay off.
Or v2g. People are finally coming around to trust that EV batteries will last longer than they will own an EV, ut most of us still don’t trust vehicle to grid connections to not unnecessarily age our vehicle battery
But less electronics waste is less profit. If everyone who bought a 2 year phone bought them every 4 years instead, that's a 50% drop in sales.
I think unfortunately this would open the door for bad actors too. Taking old outdated phone batteries and combining them would allow for some crazy things that could do mass harm. Even smoke detectors with Americium can be gathered and dissected to radiate a small neighborhood or inact terrorism. Additional reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
The whole story of why we use Americium in detectors is an interesting one in itself. https://youtu.be/DuAeaIcAXtg one of my favorite long form nerdy youtube channels.
If I created a battery that didn't need charging until 100 years later, I probably would not sell the tech to phone manufacturers like Apple. We have seen some impressive miniaturization with the technology including the batteries in terms of capacity vs. size. That came by iteration; it got better with most new models. It's conceivable that if a battery would store a century of juice we would have maxed out development of the rest of the device. But tbh I don't think that will happen. There will be new modems, new chips, new storage technology. But the battery would stay the same? Apple in particular would hate that. They would also prefer you buy a new device every time or every x years at least. So they'll put a smaller one into the device and sell the wonder battery as a power bank. They will also cater to the hiker and prepper segments of the market.
Also, people born in countries with good healthcare today have a good chance of living well over 100. So they might be utterly confused at 112 when their phone suddenly shuts down.