Tech This Out

With a few hours remaining Monday, April 5, the two coach buses carrying my fellow Gibraltar High School music students and I to Disney World made an unexpected stop. One of the buses had just lost power.

Our buses were equipped with DVD players playing on screens attached to the ceiling every few rows, PA systems, and wireless Internet, for which many students brought laptops or iPod Touches. All of these works of technology were taken advantage of. And yes, as has come to be expected from my generation, all were generally taken for granted. So it came as an unpleasant shock to most when a resource that is taken for granted by most people in the country – not just teenagers – was suddenly gone from one of the buses.

Turns out some of the underclassmen had tried to play video games against each other on their laptops, using the Wi-Fi from the bus. And, through a combination of their plugging multiple surge protectors into one of the bus outlets and the bus’s faulty air conditioning, we were left to sit and wait as the drivers tried to jump-start the broken coach. But aside from being just one part of the 34-hour horror story that was our drive to Florida, this little anecdote holds a lesson, and a question about the evolution of technology.

Ideally, those gamers never would have had to worry about plugging in their laptops in the first place. Ideally, their batteries could have lasted long enough to support even the hours-long gaming party they had planned. But unfortunately, the batteries in their laptops and many others have either significantly decreased in life or simply don’t work at all. Often this is due to overcharging, as I have touched on before. Giving a laptop, iPod, or cell phone more power than it needs can seriously mess up the battery. But considering how “smart” those devices themselves are, why is no computer yet intelligent enough to stop the flow of power to its battery when that battery is full? More importantly, why can’t those batteries last longer in the first place?

Considering how much and how quickly computers have evolved over the last two decades, batteries haven’t changed as significantly in the centuries since those first archaic combinations of zinc, copper and vinegar. And perhaps one of the biggest reasons, besides their ability to fit in a pocket, for the rise of smart phones and other hand-held computers is the battery life boost that comes from having a screen one-fourth the size of most laptop displays. Some advances are being made in laptop battery technology: Apple’s new MacBook Pro lithium-polymer battery lasts up to seven hours on a single charge, and has Adaptive Charging technology that distributes fresh charge intelligently over the battery’s cells. But until battery lives can be significantly extended, and batteries made to last even when users are pushing the limits of their systems, this age of mobility will only last as long as the battery that powers it.