So many lithium batteries in my house. Cheap ones are fire hazards. I like that apple is looking out for me so that if I go to any place for apple parts and be reasonably sure they made it hard for them to sell counterfeit parts.
The problem isn't bad batteries. Li-ion batteries have been around long enough now that everyone has gotten pretty good at making them. The problems with Li-ion chemistry are:
It has a relatively flat voltage curve as it discharges. With other battery technologies, the voltage drops suddenly during initial use, flattens out, then drops suddenly when it approaches depletion. This makes it relatively easy to design chargers and discharge circuitry to stop pulling power when the battery is empty, and stop charging it when it's full (keep it within the flat zone). OTOH Li-ion voltage tends to stay flat well past safe discharge state. Couple this with the voltage drop naturally being larger if you're drawing more current, and it's very tricky to determine the current charge state of a Li-ion battery. This wouldn't be that big a deal (you just risk damaging the battery) except...
Li-ion batteries have this nasty tendency to catch fire or explode if over-charged or are charged after being over-discharged. Most other battery chemistries are comparatively benign. If you overcharge them or over-discharge them, you just damage the battery's capacity. But even if you destroy the battery all you're usually left with is a bunch of inert chemicals (exceptions being batteries using acid, and NiMH batteries outgassing hydrogen). But the chemicals in a charged Li-ion battery really want to revert to their low-energy state. So if you damage them (puncture, fire, over-charge, over-discharge), it creates the risk of the batteries catching fire or exploding. They're perfectly good batteries, they've just been abused by poor charging.
To combat this, manufacturers try to keep the battery coupled with the charging circuitry. That's how the problem was addressed when we first had problems with Li-ion phone batteries catching fire in the 2000s. The phone manufacturers tried to be safe and coupled the charging circuitry with the battery. That's why extra batteries were so expensive - they had both the battery and charging circuitry inside the battery pack. But then cheap Chinese knockoffs appeared, manufactured by people who didn't care a whit about safety. To minimize cost, they just put in a battery and rudimentary charging circuitry (or sometimes even no charging circuitry - the battery was being charged any time you plugged in the phone's power cord). The charger wasn't smart enough to keep the Li-ion battery in the safe zone. When you recharged these, they could easily overcharge or over-discharge, causing the battery to catch fire or explode.
To address this problem, phone manufacturers switched to putting the charging circuitry inside the phone. You lose some optimization between small and large capacity batteries since now the same charger has to deal with different battery capacities. But at least you're guaranteed there's always a good, safe charger regulating the battery, even if it's just a cheap Chinese knockoff battery with plain Li-ion cells.
If off-brand batteries placed in Apple products are causing fires, it's because Apple's charging circuitry is too specialized. Makes too many assumptions about the battery that's connected, which can lead to it improperly charging a battery with slightly different specs. This could be an off-brand replacement battery. Or it could be a genuine battery which was slightly damaged or manufactured a bit out of spec. In another phone with a more generalized charger, the battery would not be a problem - you'd just get slightly different battery life. But the Apple device's charger turns it into a fire hazard.
That is not how charging Li-ion batteries works and is not why they explode or catch fire. Li-ion batteries are charged exactly the same as lead-acid batteries are, just with different voltages. The voltage curves look broadly similar, too. Ni-MH batteries are the kind which have the annoyingly flat curve, but this just means that you have to keep charging for a while after it reaches full voltage. You have to charge Ni-MH batteries in constant current mode and monitor the voltage to know when to stop charg
The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
Makes me even more confident when I buy apple (Score:0, Troll)
So many lithium batteries in my house. Cheap ones are fire hazards. I like that apple is looking out for me so that if I go to any place for apple parts and be reasonably sure they made it hard for them to sell counterfeit parts.
Re:Makes me even more confident when I buy apple (Score:3)
To combat this, manufacturers try to keep the battery coupled with the charging circuitry. That's how the problem was addressed when we first had problems with Li-ion phone batteries catching fire in the 2000s. The phone manufacturers tried to be safe and coupled the charging circuitry with the battery. That's why extra batteries were so expensive - they had both the battery and charging circuitry inside the battery pack. But then cheap Chinese knockoffs appeared, manufactured by people who didn't care a whit about safety. To minimize cost, they just put in a battery and rudimentary charging circuitry (or sometimes even no charging circuitry - the battery was being charged any time you plugged in the phone's power cord). The charger wasn't smart enough to keep the Li-ion battery in the safe zone. When you recharged these, they could easily overcharge or over-discharge, causing the battery to catch fire or explode.
To address this problem, phone manufacturers switched to putting the charging circuitry inside the phone. You lose some optimization between small and large capacity batteries since now the same charger has to deal with different battery capacities. But at least you're guaranteed there's always a good, safe charger regulating the battery, even if it's just a cheap Chinese knockoff battery with plain Li-ion cells.
If off-brand batteries placed in Apple products are causing fires, it's because Apple's charging circuitry is too specialized. Makes too many assumptions about the battery that's connected, which can lead to it improperly charging a battery with slightly different specs. This could be an off-brand replacement battery. Or it could be a genuine battery which was slightly damaged or manufactured a bit out of spec. In another phone with a more generalized charger, the battery would not be a problem - you'd just get slightly different battery life. But the Apple device's charger turns it into a fire hazard.
Re: (Score:2)
That is not how charging Li-ion batteries works and is not why they explode or catch fire. Li-ion batteries are charged exactly the same as lead-acid batteries are, just with different voltages. The voltage curves look broadly similar, too. Ni-MH batteries are the kind which have the annoyingly flat curve, but this just means that you have to keep charging for a while after it reaches full voltage. You have to charge Ni-MH batteries in constant current mode and monitor the voltage to know when to stop charg