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What’s the deal with the batteries that ship with a device last forever but the same brand bought in stores leak after 2 years?
Same brand != same tier of battery.
There are different levels of battery quality. Adding a $1 battery versus $5 battery isn’t a big difference to OEMS who are buying millions to put in their 1000$ widget. Additionally economy of scale, and they want their remote to last a certain time so they pick a battery that will meet that standard.
For retailing sales, users want cheap batteries and aren’t really concerned with the batteries actual longevity or quality.
Check out project farm, I believe he reviewed some batteries a little while ago. You’ll see a massive difference between all of them
For retailing sales, users want cheap batteries and aren’t really concerned with the batteries actual longevity or quality.
Lots of users definitely want quality, issue is that it’s hard to trust that the quality is actually that much better.
You’re right about battery quality / longevity varying a lot, but this makes me wonder if we live in different worlds
Adding a $1 battery versus $5 battery isn’t a big difference to OEMS who are buying millions to put in their 1000$ widget
OEMS absolutely care about these costs. Hell $1 vs $5 is a massive difference, if you sold 1 million devices that’s a $4m difference. Now you may think that the cost difference being only 0.4% of the total sale value (assuming a $1000 widget) wouldn’t matter much, but you need to remember that, to a large degree, every corporation is obsessed with money. Most companies, and certainly big companies, do not care at all about quality, ethics, or any other kind of value except money. Everything else is contingent on making more money. And execs will be more than happy to put the saved 0.4% directly into their own pockets.
Hell if you look at the electronics sector it’s full of choices that save fractions of cents on the BoM. If you multiply those savings over hundreds / thousands of components on a pcb, and millions of units sold, it becomes a tangible difference.
I’m not at all on expert on these things, but even I notice them from time to time, that’s how pervasive this is.
Sorry for the rant, nothing against you, I just wish quality and capability and ethics of products was more often one of the selling points.
THE BATTERY BRAND X COMES IN A PACK OF FOUR! THE BATTERY BRAND X LASTED TWICE AS LONG! VERY IMPRESSIVE! THE BATTERY BRAND X COSTS $17!
WE’RE GONNA TEST THAT!
Project Farm has been my go to before I buy a lot of things. Oil, heaters, automotive, car soaps, stain remover, etc.
My favorite is an old clock I got from an old cottage I was renovating. I broke the glass on it but it still worked so I propped it up on the wall to help me keep time. I worked for months with that clock on the wall, never changed the battery and just thought, I’ll keep it until the battery dies … I thought it was just some old cheap thing that wouldn’t last.
I renovated for two years and the clock kept ticking, I grew to appreciate it decided to keep it. It survived I don’t know how many -40, -50 degree winters frozen solid and it still kept time. In the spring I think I adjusted it for a ten or fifteen minute correction (allowing for daylight saving time).
I finished renos and now the clock is in the living room and I’ll never get rid of it, it’s part of the building now as far as I’m concerned.
20 years later and the clock is still there and I’ve only changed the batteries twice, maybe three times. I changed the batteries so few times, I can’t remember the last time I did.
I went through a few cheap quartz clock because it drain the battery so quick i started to wonder if the battery i bought is bad. Then i decided to get an ikea one, which cost just a little bit more and the same brand of battery still running the clock a year later.
It kinda reminds me of the clock when i was a kid, we didn’t really need to change the battery for two years. Thing nowadays is so cheaply made it’s basically buying plastic and ewaste.
What a pleasant story, good for you and your clock.
I have a samsung tv in the bedroom, awesome little remote that freaks out every time it hits 50%. Which it almost never does, because its got a solar charger on the back as well as a charging port. And it almost never sees sunshine.
Downstairs, I have a Sony remote… That thing goes through batteries quicker than a single woman in her mid 20s…
Solar panels also get a bit of charge from exposure to artificial indoor lights & ambient light.
Well, whatever is going on, Samsung nailed the remote. They nailed the TV too, to be honest. The NeoQled is pretty damn close to OLED but without any of the burn in issues. Just a shame that the software sucks absolute ass.
I am.annoyed at how much power draw the controllers for the Quest use. Had to get rechargeable AAs because it will use up an entire battery in only about 4 hours.
Meanwhile my wireless mouse and keyboard, with RGB lights, are still on the original rando crap brand battery they came with and I always forget to turn them off.
Surely the tracking/accelerometer can’t be using that much power. 🤨
Accelerometers do use a relatively large amount of power.
But if your thing has haptic feedback, it’s safe to say the battery is going all into it.
I do try to turn off vibration where possible, because yeah. Those stupid motors use an absurd amount of power for a feature that is pretty useless (and not just with these controllers).
It’s not just that, it’s the whole system.
The human brain has a perception rate of motion up to 300 frames per second and visual data up to 1000 frames per second. Now it’s non-sensical to think of the human eye and brain like a CMOS image sensor and CPU because they simply do not run on the same principles but for the sake of argument we’ll take the upper limit of 1000 frame per second because the brain relies on an intuitive sense of hand-eye position that needs to be processed unconsciously for it to react fast enough to environmental stimulation.
So that’s 1000 times a second minimum (1kHz) for the whole VR system to measure the change in relative position of the controller to the headset in 3 spacial dimensions, 5 degrees of freedom, the acceleration of that change, packet up these numbers, transmit them via a radio link to the headset, unpack that data in multiple processing threads all waiting for their sprint in a CPU core, get repackaged for other threads a dizzying amount of times, be used in calculations for the game’s physics engine, which then produces graphics data shoved through a HUGE buffer to the GPU before that sends the appropriate electrical signals to 100,000 of nanoscale LED lights to shine into your retinas.
So yeah, it might suck a bit of power and it’s a fucking miracle that GNERATIONS of engineers around the world have contributed incalculable hours of their lives to ensure that your beat saber or goon session last just slightly longer than your stamina!
I had a WMR kit that just tore through rechargeable AAa. Using non-rechargeables lasted soooo much longer, and the rechargeables I have are high end!
Got an index and THOSE controller batteries are fantastic.
My quest 3 controllers aren’t that bad but they do go through AAs like crazy
I just found a Casio watch in my garage that i haven’t used in at least 4 years still on
