Galaxy Note7: What We Discovered
Since I have a bit of experience in the world of batteries I thought I'd post.First of all, deflected electrodes, insufficient insulation tape, and high welding burrs are absolutely fine explanations for what happened here. As someone who works with batteries, that would tell me everything I wanted to know. If I was running a battery fab, I'd be able to check for these problems in 20 minutes.Further in the favor of Samsung is that battery fabs are some of the most opaque places in the world. They never release any information of any value whatsoever to the outside, and there are only a handful in the world. For Samsung to release something like this so candidly is absolutely unprecedented in the world of batteries; I was shocked when I saw the post.Say what you will about Samsung in general, or about their treatment of the whole process, but posting this is a first among any of the major battery manufacturers and shocked me with its level of openness and detail.-------------------If anyone doubts this, try getting information on the closest battery fab to you. You can try to find what batteries they produce, but chances are that's not public. You can try to find their name, or if they still exist, but that's probably also not public. You might eventually find an address, and you might go there, but when you arrive you'll be forcibly removed from the area by armed security and/or police. To give an example, there are a couple debates in the industry about what company acquired another company. It's years after the supposed acquisition, and nobody knows anything.The battery industry is a whole secretive world of its own, and this is because batteries are simultaneously a low-profit commodity and a gateway to unlimited riches. If Apple is successful with its dream technology, it might capture 50% of the world smartphone market instead of the 14% it has now. If a battery company is successful, it will become successful beyond your wildest dreams. Lots of things are just on the edge of being possible with today's battery tech. The first one to 'win' gets to go from selling a couple billion of batteries (to small fish, like EV and power tool makers) to selling trillions of dollars to everyone that will buy, including every electric utility in the world that will be ecstatic to have the perfect demand-smoothing device.