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And it's an excellent example. Technology gets better until efficiencies are maxed out and battery cell production can't be an exception. The only big outlier
by usrusr 5y ago
And it's an excellent example. Technology gets better until efficiencies are maxed out and battery cell production can't be an exception. The only big outlier has been computer chips, where slowly shrinking cost per square mm (if it even sank?) was an insignificant footnote compared to the ever increasing ability to pack in more per unit of surface area. Lithium batteries have far more in common with alkaline batteries than with transistors for logical operations.
Power transistors for example I would also consider closer to alkaline cells than to logic, there has surely been a lot of progress in that field which eventually brought us the miracles of HVDC, but on a far more conventional scale.
- jandrese 5y agoMost technology follows an S curve. It starts out slow with initial experimentation until most of the dead ends and pitfalls are eliminated, then there is a period of rapid growth as the tech matures and gains mass market acceptance, then it levels off with all of the easy gains mined out and you see only incremental improvements moving forward. The middle part of the S curve is when you see the dumbest articles about the technology, with people extrapolating the growth linearly and talking about how it will rule the world in a few years.