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The problem is that mAh tells you absolutely nothing about battery capacity. An mAh rating is useful if you're comparing two single-cell batteries using the sam
by crote 2y ago
The problem is that mAh tells you absolutely nothing about battery capacity. An mAh rating is useful if you're comparing two single-cell batteries using the same chemistry - but that's not what we are doing in practice.
For example, a 100Wh battery could be built using a single li-ion cell, which means it would be 27,000mAh. Same battery using an LFP cell? 31.250mAh. But wait, it's a laptop - it's far more efficient to put multiple cells in series. Four li-ion cells in series would mean a capacity of 675mAh, or 540mAh if you use five cells.
The five-cell one is probably more efficient, but if you blindly look at the mAh rating it looks like it has a significantly smaller capacity. Nobody is going to buy that, so the marketing team will convert it back to "single-cell equivalent" and put 27,000mAh on the box while still keeping an 18.5V rating, and people who passed a highschool physics class are going to think it's a 500Wh battery.
It gets even worse with LFP, because now the marketing team is asking you to convert it to "single-sell li-ion equivalent" and the figure is now completely unrelated to what's actually happening! That 520mAh 6-cell LFP battery? Just put a 27,000mAh label on it: who cares, bigger is better.