Name: The Problem with these Smartphone Batteries
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T05:57:13.000Z
Duration: 8 min 32 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It has about a 5000 milliamp hour battery, but this is the Honor

Adverbs of degree

Power 2, yes, it's absolutely a clone of the iPhone, but

It's also thinner than the iPhone and has a 10,000 milliamp hour battery.

And this is the world we're living in now.

There are many phones out now with absolutely massive batteries, the size that we only used to see in power banks, but

Without actually making the phones any thicker.

But all thanks to a new battery technology called silicon carbon.

So if you're a subscriber, then you've already heard me talk a lot, especially in the past year, about silicon carbon batteries and how great they are and how they're even perfect for certain form factors of phones, like enabling the ultra thin ones like Galaxy S25 Edge and iPhone Air, because they could be super, super thin.

But still with silicon carbon, have normal battery capacities, but yet those phones didn't have silicon carbon.

In fact, a lot of phones, competitive flagship phones have come out lately that have skipped the silicon carbon battery.

Seems like whole companies like Samsung and Apple and Google are just waiting on the sidelines and not touching this new battery tech in any of their phones.

So let's talk about these new smartphone batteries.

So like I said on the surface, on the surface it would seem like silicon carbon is a no brainer.

Obviously you should have it in your phone, especially if you're just looking at the benefits.

They're called silicon carbon because they essentially swap out graphite and use silicon, which can hold way more energy than graphite.

So the main advantage is higher energy density.

We have phones now with way bigger battery capacities in the same footprint as always.

I remember when the new OnePlus flagship came out last January and it made this huge jump from 5,400 milliamp hours to straight to 6,000 milliamp hours by going with silicon carbon.

And then later the same year they went to 7,300 milliamp hours.

So it just felt like we are resetting what to expect from a smartphone battery.

But of course, like I mentioned, new Samsung phones keep coming out, no silicon carbon batteries.

New iPhones have been coming out, no silicon carbon.

And so people of course are talking about it now.

I had some suspicions about why, and a couple other YouTubers have also shared.

But I think the main theory was that these are huge companies that are going to ask for massive quantities of stuff from suppliers.

So with a brand new tech like Silicon Carbon.

You know, if you're Apple, you're going and asking for 10 million of these things for your new iPhone.

They're using Silicon Carbon and all their flagships and Realme and Honor and Oppo and Huawei and all these companies using tons of silicon carbon in a lot of volume of phones.

Meanwhile, Google's over here with the Pixel, not shipping that many phones and not using Silicon Carbon.

So then I recalled I've gotten a few emails in the past year from people in the industry, and

I won't say which companies they work for, but

All smartphone companies and individually, they'd each reached out to me to mention that there are some concerns with silicon carbon batteries.

And all their stories matched up about a totally different concern about swelling and longevity.

Now, I had only seen that in these emails.

So I went digging and I reached out to a couple other sources and people that I know at these companies, and

Now that I've heard back from them, I'm actually much more confident that this is the main reason that we're not seeing this tech everywhere in a ton of phones.

See, one thing about batteries is that as they charge and discharge, they expand and contract a little bit with the heat.

And just like almost any other material, it's why sidewalks have cracks, it's why bridges have expansion joints.

Basically, every material has to expand and contract a little bit with heat.

Water is one of the only materials that actually expands while cooling, but

It expands about 10% in volume while freezing.

So during charging in a silicon carbon smartphone battery, the silicon heats up and absorbs lithium ions.

And when that happens, the silicon can expand to three, three times its original volume.

Like, imagine a sponge that triples in size when wet and then shrinks back down and then over and over again every time it charges and discharges.

Eventually things are probably going to crack.

You know that meme going around where it's like, oh, if you want to clean the ice off your car windshield really fast, just pour boiling water on it.

But obviously you shouldn't do that because that could literally shatter your windshield because of rapid temperature change thermodynamics.

So in the battery, the silicon is actually really finely ground instead of a solid block to avoid the mechanical stresses.

And the carbon is actually there just to absorb the expansion.

So that's why it's called Silicon Carbon.

So everyone's messing around and trying to tune it.

Some companies are willing to include a higher and higher percentage of silicon because that lets you get a higher and higher battery capacity in the same space.

And so they also have to do their best to manage the inevitable swelling to counteract that.

I've actually been told there are certain devices that have a literal steel cage around the battery to prevent it from swelling.

And then the cracking in this case is potentially some type of internal damage to the battery, which is obviously really bad news.

And worst case scenario is some type of thermal runaway, which obviously nobody wants that happening in their pocket.

And so you might be thinking, oh, what about all the testing?

Like, that's one of the most common things we hear from these companies is they're always able to verify something like 80% battery capacity after 1000 charge cycles.

So trying to give us some confidence in the longevity of these batteries because they've actually tested that many cycles, that should make it survive years of regular use.

But batteries obviously go through a lot more in regular use than just charge cycles.

Like, like they deal with a lot of outside heat and cold, they get dropped sometimes, there's pressure changes, there's humidity changes, et cetera, et cetera.

So testing is really important, of course, but

It's really hard to account for all the variables that a battery might experience over a long period of time.

In one of my conversations, my source mentions that with all the thorough testing going on, getting issues down to a rate of under 1 in 250,000 feels pretty good.

Like if you have an error rate of something that's under 1 in 250,000, that's a very rare issue and you should be good to go.

But at Samsung or Apple's scale, if it's tens of millions of phones, that could still not be good enough.

That could still be a dozen exploding Note 7s like it was in 2016.

So since there isn't quite enough real world data yet, especially over longer periods of time, some companies are choosing to just sit it out for now and continue developing regular lithium ion batteries.

And you know, remember those companies I mentioned at the beginning that are all not using Silicon Carbon?

The Samsungs, the Apples, the Googles, they're all huge companies.

But there's also something else they all have in common, which is they all operate or at least have a big presence in America.

And I bring this up because we've talked about this before.

The US especially is a very software focused market.

There's all this ecosystem lock in and inherently less hardware competition.

People just want the blue bubbles at this point.

So if people aren't going to buy the new iPhone because of a silicon carbon battery, or they're not switching off of the iPhone because of some other phone's silicon carbon battery, then there is no reason for Apple to take that risk yet.

But in other markets where people can just use WhatsApp and be happy about it, then there's way more hardware competition and people are willing to switch.

So if one phone has a 40% bigger battery because of some new emerging technology and the other one feels like they're being left behind, people will move to that.

So yeah, this will be fascinating to watch it play out today.

Still in 2026, silicon carbon batteries are still a bleeding edge technology.

They're still a little bit riskier and lithium ion batteries are still the safe bet.

But there's this divide now, so we'll have to keep an eye on how these silicon carbon phones actually age.

You know, the first ones came out about three years ago, but

There's been a lot more out in the real world in the past year.

And so we'll check in, get subscribed and maybe in a year or two we'll have a lot more real world data.

We'll check in, we'll see how things are going.