They're making some pretty strange claims about capacity and number of cycles.
In electric RC heli circles, batteries come along once in a while claiming to use previously unknown techniques to improve the performance of existing cells and a few gullible people buy them. They never deliver on the promises.
People who make (established) battery management circuits understand very well how to care for the cells, and claiming to beat the numbers published by the battery manufacturers by a wide margin is close to announcing an "Ambient Energy" device.
I was around when in order to fly an electric heli you needed to attach a power cord to a wall socket. I'm serious. Back when I started it was gas only (I made it up to 60 size). I remember seeing a demo at a local hobby shop where outback someone had prototyped an electric which was hovering with a 110v power cord plugged in by extension cord.
Yeah, it's obviously snake oil. If you had a technology that increased the charge-cycle lifetime of a battery by any substantial amount, you wouldn't be marketing a stupid plastic box for mactards. You'd be cashing billion-dollar checks twice a day.
Here is a classic example of a startup launching an Altair Basic with the potential produce a Microsoft-like giant. Incidentally, I think this is also the first father/son team we've funded.
What makes you think this? Portable batteries like this are dime a dozen (maybe not for macs, I don't own one). Or the real play is licensing the battery tech which doesn't really seem Microsoft like at all since the company would likely fade into the background as the big battery companies use the technology.
I don't mean to be offensive, just curious why you are so confident this company or product is a industry game changer.
Battery storage will be absolutely huge in a few years. There is so much potential that has gone unexplored, since batteries have traditionally been heavy, low-capacity and short-lived. At least some of the people in this space who are in the right place at the right time today, are going to win big. Someone will have to build all these batteries.
Everything from cars to renewable energy to light aircraft is going to be battery-powered in the future. It will be very exciting to see what happens in this space, and I'm bummed that I'm largely unable to invest in this space myself. Best of luck to the YC-backed companies :)
(Case in point: Tesla Motors have announced that they're building the world's largest Li-ion battery factory, to the tune of $5 billion).
I'm curious to know how much work they'd done on the idea ahead of time. If this was conceived during YC, they're definitely a very impressive team.
A few months ago I looked into building this exact product. If you're a DIY kinda person and you don't mind carrying around some extra bulk, it's somewhat easy to cobble something together. If you want a light/small brick w/ self-contained charging and output regulation that just works, it's much more difficult and potentially dangerous -- especially if you want it to charge fast enough that a 1h airport layover is meaningful. Add in more advanced battery management/conditioning schemes, and I'm just all kinds of impressed.
Though, this claim does irk me a little:
> With the same battery, we could charge to a full 100 percent and it won’t degrade
> Never experience loss in capacity again. A Li-ion battery powered by BatteryOS doesn’t degrade in capacity over time, and as a result has a 4x higher cycle life than when controlled by conventional methods.
I think I need a better definition of "capacity degradation" here - if you acknowledge that there's still a charge cycle limit, I'm curious to know what happens once it's reached. Either way, I'm very sceptical of anything which claims to completely eliminate the effects of entropy.
This seems bigger than Altair Basic to me. If this thing works well it's huge already. Battery time is one of the biggest problems for people working out of the office (along with decent internet and peace of mind).
Maybe this feature was a bit underreported: the current line of Lenovo's Ultrabooks, the ThinkPad X240/T440s allows for hot swapping the battery pack while running on a secondary built in battery. Adding up to 23.5 Whr built in plus up to 72Whr per battery pack.
I suspect the 100% charging time was miscalculated. USB power is 5volts, so a 1A charger meants 5W of continuous power. Battery charging, especially past 85% is not very efficient, so I suspect total charging time will be more in the neighborhood of 20 hours.
Without even taking into account efficiency, “nine hours for 100 percent charge [of a 50 Whr battery] on a [5V USB] 1A power supply” obviously breaks the conservation of energy. The claim “4.5 hours for 80% charge” breaks it even more.
They should make perpetual motion devices, not external batteries.
High end laptops are a good place to start when you are selling a ~$140 accessory.
I would be shocked if they didn't have plans to expand to other products/devices. My guess is that they are betting that Macbook owners are most likely to pay right now. I'm not certain, but I'm willing to bet that Macbooks have a majority chunk of the high end laptop market.
So if I were in their shoes, I'd probably start with macbooks in order to gain a foothold.
I am guessing they have licensed magsafe from Apple. Pretty sure they would get a call from Apple lawyers otherwise. There are universal chargers and batteries with all sorts of connectors which are not patent encumbered.
Kind of makes me wonder if Apple would cooperate at this stage and then consider buying the company later.
For the same reason Tesla built a roadster to start their company. Low volume and high margin is MUCH easier to achieve when you are small than high volume and low margin.
Watch Shark Tank for a while and you'll realize that even if you have a product people want, it's not trivial to scale a physical product business unless you have significant capital. Even if you reinvest the money you make, you are constrained by how quickly you can turn the money over.
If you wanted to cover as much current and future market share as possible (at least in the market they're targeting) I can't think of a better current combination than magsafe2 + usb.
They can't put an actual wall socket on it, and they already have USB. If they're going to put one laptop port on it, a Mac port is the obvious choice because it's the largest market.
Love it. Actually sitting next to my own "battery box" - a wheeled backpack with a 55 amp-hour AGM (lead acid) battery and inverter. I think I can get 3 work days out of that, but it's a lot bigger than this. Great for taking to the park though.
There's not much to discuss about BatteryOS until it's been verified by third parties. Every 4 months or so we get a news article about some amazing breakthrough in battery technology, and they never ever seem to pan out.
This technology, if legit, is I think a very good example of where software patents can add value. The future of this technology isn't a little $139 backup battery for Macbooks. Rather, its licensing the charging algorithms to every battery charging controller manufacturer on the planet. One can imagine that over time it might be a good idea for a company like this to vertically integrate and start producing its own batteries, but it's going to be a long time before they have the capital to take on the Korean/Japanese companies currently playing in that space. The alternative might be to angle to get bought by an Apple or Samsung, but that's probably not what's best for the industry. There's a lot of value to R&D companies like this that can focus on a specific niche without having to rely on some vertically-integrated conglomerate to get anything done.
What laptop do you have? Macbook Pro's are so thin now even a RJ45 hole is too tall. I can forgive them for not having a replaceable battery for size/weight and noise reduction having everything so tightly integrated.
Question on how the technology works: I don't really understand what a "battery OS" is. Do they have circuits that somehow manage the battery better or something?
Mentioned in passing in child comments below, but worth highlighting - the HyperJuice Battery range of products (eg http://amzn.to/1mqK9ap) already does this, at a similar price point, and is available for purchase today.
In fact they're already onto the second generation of the product, with minor bugs and issues with the first gen already ironed out. I get this GBattery has a new "BatteryOS" management feature but right now that's vaporware and unproven, and unavailable for purchase - thus I don't really understand the excitement vs what you could already buy today.
They claim that their 50 Whr battery can power a MacBook Pro for 6 hours, a MacBook Air for 12 hrs. By my math, that would mean that the MacBook Pro would only be consuming an average of around 8.3 watts an hour, the air only around 4.2 watts an hour.
That seems absurd to me, considering the power supplies that ship with the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air are 85-watt and 45-watt respectively. They are assuming that each only draws about 10% of the power that the official power supplies are rated at. Anyone have a Kill-A-Watt to see the actual draw of their device?
The 13" MBA has a 54Wh battery, and Apple claims it get 12 hours of "wireless web" use. The 13" MBP has a 72Wh battery and claims 9 hours of "wireless web" or "iTunes movie playback". In practice, people find the Apple claims fairly reasonable.
While that does not prove how precise or accurate their projections are, I don't think they are absurd. Software-based monitors of power consumption on MacBooks show variation between low single digits and low teens under light use, and shoot up dramatically if you are doing something intensive.
It's entirely true, and means I could run my MacBook Air off of USB power at 5 volts and one amp (5 watts), but zero battery charging. Unfortunately Apple doesn't allow this scenario, but the math works out...
The Air has I think a 50 WHr battery and will last 11-12 hours for Wi-Fi surfing. I think the idle load is just a couple of watts. Peak load is of course higher.
The difference in power draw between idle and 100% utilization on a modern computer is enormous.
The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100%, but the sort of usage where you get 6-12 hours of use while on battery is very much near idle almost all the time.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro, which has a 95Wh battery. Apple claims 8 hours of battery life on it, and in my experience that's an understatement. It also ships with an 85W power adapter.
Many companies have been trying to produce external Macbook batteries (e.g. http://www.hypershop.com/HyperJuice/External-Battery-for-Mac...), but the major stumbling block has been that Apple does not allow third parties to use the Magsafe interface. Has Gbatteries found a way around this problem?
It was about time someone optimized charging/discharging of batteries. I didn't know ordinary batteries have such a potential for optimization, I thought that would be the batteries in UPSes. Current UPS batteries die in 3 years, having been used just a dozen times, apparently because the UPS insists to keep them fully charged at all times. Someone fix this, please.
Pre-ordering hardware that makes promises of substantial improvements over the status-quo that will only be testable by the buyer a few years down the line is a recipe for disaster.
Do yourself a favour and hold on to your money until there are actual units that have been tested rigorously (as in, in an independent lab unaffiliated with the company) to see if the promises are delivered on.
Would have been nice if TechCrunch did some testing / reporting, instead of accepting / repeating. Not that I'm surprised, just would have been nice in this area.
That was my first thought. I remember reading a few years ago that a company actually had to stop making Macbook compatible external batteries because Apple threatened to sue them over use of the MagSafe connector.
EDIT: I found the article, and apparently the company was sued for using actual recycled connectors, not just using the design.
BatteryOS seems to be the most important aspect here. Consumer electronics manufacturers have different goals than this class of product, which may not always align with every consumer. So if they are abstracting all that logic into their own MCU OS, that is pretty smart. I can see an iPhone/Mac app to tune your BatteryBox to charge faster at the cost of life time/cycles(?) (clearly telling you this!) or vice versa...allowing you to tailor the solution to your needs. This is different to what Apple would offer as they need to find a one size fits all solution and that is usually some sweet spot for high cycle count + low charge time and long battery life.
Going one step further, possibility for some ML to learn your use case and charge your MacBook accordingly. Regardless, the battery is irrelevant, the OS is key.
The Air's battery already lasts 12+ hours. How much demand could there possibly be for people to stretch it out even further? HyperJuice (and I would guess others) is already out there and I've never even seen one of those things in the wild.
The latest Air in ideal conditions does 12hrs. My friends couple of year old one managed to run out fairly promptly when using by the swimming pool where there were no sockets. He could be a customer if the gadget's good.
I would love if this had some sort of a universal plug on it so you can power other laptops besides Macs. Then you can plug some sort of adapter in so you can charge Dell, Sony, etc. laptops as well.
This is really exciting, and a real problem solver, than good-for-nothing social apps popping up every other day. I wonder do they ship 'internationally'?
on a second thought, why not make the color of the box, say like mbp body color, or other light grayish colors, when it's intended for apple products. the green color does not seem a right fit for an accessory of apple products.
>and a total of 9 hours for 100% charge
yikes! But i guess it's okay since it's a 'standby' battery.
If this works, it seems pretty strange to build their own devices with it. With a patent on the methods they could make a fortune licensing the technology to Si companies. They would reach the market much quicker too.
However, having worked on BMS systems for lithium batteries this sounds very fishy. Maybe they've hit on something spectacular, but it seriously looks like snake oil based on the info they've provided thus far.
I think all laptops can extend the battery life-span significantly with just smarter software. I manually cycle my laptop battery regularly & do not keep it charged at 100% all the time even if the laptop is plugged in (some Thinkpad models allow that). Even after 2 years of daily use, I've got greater than 80-90% battery capacity left.
Somewhat odd to target a computer that already runs for 12hours to run 'another 12 hours' with a big bulky external battery pack. Would make more sense to target something like an iPhone or others that run way too short to last a day. Problem is: battery packs for those are a dime a dozen.
I do wish them best of luck though!
Their battery technology sounds great but, honestly, I am a consumer so my point of view is "do I want to buy this for $139?"
Yes, I do want it, mostly so that I can set it next to my Macbook Air (mid-2012) for a full day's worth of power, as is the use case shown so prominently on the web site.
This looks like a great idea. We are applying to the upcoming class with a different approach though. Instead of owning batteries (however spectacular they are), we think it's about creating a network to share batteries. Think bike share for batteries.
Would love to chat about using Gbatteries in such a network.
> note it does not charge the internal Macbook battery. Instead BatteryBox feeds power directly to the Mac in an effort to minimize the number of cycles (and stress) on the internal battery.
Is this something that any power adapter does? Is there something in the way they have it connected that does this?
I don't know why many people are focus on Apple or protable battery. With such tech, the potential could be anywhere need an efficient energy solution. The BatterBox might be the first appliance. Are you willing to buy something cost you 10 bucks while it saves you 20 bucks?
How is this different from my HyperJuice? That gives me 50Whr, too, and also has a USB port. It pretty much doubled the life of my Air, and slightly less for my 13" rMBP (Haswell i5, with 16GB).
Nice though would not a A4 (laptop sized) slab instead of a box be better as could then sit under the laptop and also easily fit inside the laptop case.
Absolutely. And Apple, and Dell, and anyone else that uses rechargeable batteries that degrade over time. This solves the degradation aspect of batteries, so it would improve the longevity of devices.
bittercynic|12 years ago
In electric RC heli circles, batteries come along once in a while claiming to use previously unknown techniques to improve the performance of existing cells and a few gullible people buy them. They never deliver on the promises.
People who make (established) battery management circuits understand very well how to care for the cells, and claiming to beat the numbers published by the battery manufacturers by a wide margin is close to announcing an "Ambient Energy" device.
[Edited to poke fun at idea, not person/company.]
larrys|12 years ago
I was around when in order to fly an electric heli you needed to attach a power cord to a wall socket. I'm serious. Back when I started it was gas only (I made it up to 60 size). I remember seeing a demo at a local hobby shop where outback someone had prototyped an electric which was hovering with a 110v power cord plugged in by extension cord.
thrownaway2424|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
pg|12 years ago
_jss|12 years ago
This happened to HyperMac (now HyperJuice) batteries back in 2011. I still have mine, ordered before Apple lawyers went after them. It's wonderful.
Edit: Adding link to Wired article: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/01/hypermac-is-back-with...
bnejad|12 years ago
I don't mean to be offensive, just curious why you are so confident this company or product is a industry game changer.
marvin|12 years ago
Everything from cars to renewable energy to light aircraft is going to be battery-powered in the future. It will be very exciting to see what happens in this space, and I'm bummed that I'm largely unable to invest in this space myself. Best of luck to the YC-backed companies :)
(Case in point: Tesla Motors have announced that they're building the world's largest Li-ion battery factory, to the tune of $5 billion).
qwerta|12 years ago
benjamincburns|12 years ago
A few months ago I looked into building this exact product. If you're a DIY kinda person and you don't mind carrying around some extra bulk, it's somewhat easy to cobble something together. If you want a light/small brick w/ self-contained charging and output regulation that just works, it's much more difficult and potentially dangerous -- especially if you want it to charge fast enough that a 1h airport layover is meaningful. Add in more advanced battery management/conditioning schemes, and I'm just all kinds of impressed.
Though, this claim does irk me a little:
> With the same battery, we could charge to a full 100 percent and it won’t degrade
> Never experience loss in capacity again. A Li-ion battery powered by BatteryOS doesn’t degrade in capacity over time, and as a result has a 4x higher cycle life than when controlled by conventional methods.
I think I need a better definition of "capacity degradation" here - if you acknowledge that there's still a charge cycle limit, I'm curious to know what happens once it's reached. Either way, I'm very sceptical of anything which claims to completely eliminate the effects of entropy.
oskarth|12 years ago
rasz_pl|12 years ago
they even lie about capacity/charge time just like Chinese
mxfh|12 years ago
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/t-series/t440s...
wmf|12 years ago
bananas|12 years ago
hackcasual|12 years ago
pascal_cuoq|12 years ago
Without even taking into account efficiency, “nine hours for 100 percent charge [of a 50 Whr battery] on a [5V USB] 1A power supply” obviously breaks the conservation of energy. The claim “4.5 hours for 80% charge” breaks it even more.
They should make perpetual motion devices, not external batteries.
jmgrosen|12 years ago
gopalv|12 years ago
Is Apple friendly towards people who replicate their connector interfaces?
Or are Macs the only popular device out there where people wish "I wish I could carry an extra battery!"?
Snail_Commando|12 years ago
I would be shocked if they didn't have plans to expand to other products/devices. My guess is that they are betting that Macbook owners are most likely to pay right now. I'm not certain, but I'm willing to bet that Macbooks have a majority chunk of the high end laptop market.
So if I were in their shoes, I'd probably start with macbooks in order to gain a foothold.
w1ntermute|12 years ago
runamok|12 years ago
Kind of makes me wonder if Apple would cooperate at this stage and then consider buying the company later.
masklinn|12 years ago
The exact opposite: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/hypermac/
programminggeek|12 years ago
Watch Shark Tank for a while and you'll realize that even if you have a product people want, it's not trivial to scale a physical product business unless you have significant capital. Even if you reinvest the money you make, you are constrained by how quickly you can turn the money over.
maxmcd|12 years ago
Other than, maybe, a portable power outlet.
Rotten194|12 years ago
mjolk|12 years ago
ja27|12 years ago
diminoten|12 years ago
I'm a little sad that folks can't get past the proof-of-concept product.
The game-changer is BatteryOS, not BatteryBox. Who cares about BatteryBox itself?
Think bigger, people, come on.
kalleboo|12 years ago
rayiner|12 years ago
qwerta|12 years ago
It is really funny to see Mac fans excited about simple external battery. This stuff is around for decades!
alexcroox|12 years ago
mikeash|12 years ago
zxcvvcxz|12 years ago
Question on how the technology works: I don't really understand what a "battery OS" is. Do they have circuits that somehow manage the battery better or something?
klaruz|12 years ago
http://www.gbatteries.com/technology/
rasz_pl|12 years ago
and
>I don't really understand
in same post, what are the odds? :) Its a scam. They are tryting to sell 50Whr battery that can be charged in
>nine hours for 100 percent charge on a 1A power supply
from usb (5V), thats maths 101
>Do they have circuits that somehow manage the battery
They are selling product that stores more power than it consumes while being charged. Its snake oil at best, more likely a scam.
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
dotBen|12 years ago
In fact they're already onto the second generation of the product, with minor bugs and issues with the first gen already ironed out. I get this GBattery has a new "BatteryOS" management feature but right now that's vaporware and unproven, and unavailable for purchase - thus I don't really understand the excitement vs what you could already buy today.
mcmillion|12 years ago
JSadowski|12 years ago
That seems absurd to me, considering the power supplies that ship with the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air are 85-watt and 45-watt respectively. They are assuming that each only draws about 10% of the power that the official power supplies are rated at. Anyone have a Kill-A-Watt to see the actual draw of their device?
rz2k|12 years ago
The 13" MBA has a 54Wh battery, and Apple claims it get 12 hours of "wireless web" use. The 13" MBP has a 72Wh battery and claims 9 hours of "wireless web" or "iTunes movie playback". In practice, people find the Apple claims fairly reasonable.
While that does not prove how precise or accurate their projections are, I don't think they are absurd. Software-based monitors of power consumption on MacBooks show variation between low single digits and low teens under light use, and shoot up dramatically if you are doing something intensive.
savrajsingh|12 years ago
rayiner|12 years ago
mikeash|12 years ago
The power adapter needs to be able to handle 100%, but the sort of usage where you get 6-12 hours of use while on battery is very much near idle almost all the time.
I have a 15" MacBook Pro, which has a 95Wh battery. Apple claims 8 hours of battery life on it, and in my experience that's an understatement. It also ships with an 85W power adapter.
tlrobinson|12 years ago
FYI, the unit you're looking for is "watts", not "watts per hour".
ed|12 years ago
ycaspirant|12 years ago
huslage|12 years ago
ntoshev|12 years ago
jacquesm|12 years ago
Do yourself a favour and hold on to your money until there are actual units that have been tested rigorously (as in, in an independent lab unaffiliated with the company) to see if the promises are delivered on.
JacobAldridge|12 years ago
williwu|12 years ago
iwasakabukiman|12 years ago
EDIT: I found the article, and apparently the company was sued for using actual recycled connectors, not just using the design.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/10/09/21/apple_sues_hyperma...
williwu|12 years ago
akramhussein|12 years ago
Going one step further, possibility for some ML to learn your use case and charge your MacBook accordingly. Regardless, the battery is irrelevant, the OS is key.
dsirijus|12 years ago
Plugging this into my MacBook Air would make me feel like getting a $20 prostitute. And paying her $200 afterwards nonetheless.
bluedino|12 years ago
tim333|12 years ago
uncleruckus|12 years ago
frade33|12 years ago
on a second thought, why not make the color of the box, say like mbp body color, or other light grayish colors, when it's intended for apple products. the green color does not seem a right fit for an accessory of apple products.
>and a total of 9 hours for 100% charge
yikes! But i guess it's okay since it's a 'standby' battery.
evck|12 years ago
However, having worked on BMS systems for lithium batteries this sounds very fishy. Maybe they've hit on something spectacular, but it seriously looks like snake oil based on the info they've provided thus far.
maxmcd|12 years ago
http://www.getbatterybox.com/#faq
btrautsc|12 years ago
ehsanu1|12 years ago
thisisrobv|12 years ago
enscr|12 years ago
evan_|12 years ago
ulfw|12 years ago
magoon|12 years ago
Yes, I do want it, mostly so that I can set it next to my Macbook Air (mid-2012) for a full day's worth of power, as is the use case shown so prominently on the web site.
Take away the MagSafe 2 and I don't want it.
kiddz|12 years ago
Would love to chat about using Gbatteries in such a network.
oddevan|12 years ago
Is this something that any power adapter does? Is there something in the way they have it connected that does this?
4684499|12 years ago
rosser|12 years ago
tim333|12 years ago
Zenst|12 years ago
Just a thought.
kalleboo|12 years ago
rdl|12 years ago
oq|12 years ago
alandarev|12 years ago
zakelfassi|12 years ago
jernejz|12 years ago
mpg33|12 years ago
phreeza|12 years ago
mrfusion|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
oddevan|12 years ago
rasz_pl|12 years ago
>nine hours for 100 percent charge on a 1A power supply over USB
to charge fully into 50Whr battery. Its Perpetuum mobile. Musk would love one of those.
revmoo|12 years ago
[deleted]