This is awesome! For only $450 you can get a machine that can automatically swap battery packs placed on bulky $120 phone cases.
You don’t need to plug a cable in your phone anymore, your over engineered machine can swap battery packs for you
I never imagined that I would live this long to see the future
A charging pad takes up way less space, costs way less, and is something you don’t have to plug into your phone.
Still, you could buy a whole bunch of nice MagSafe chargers for that kind of money. But what Swippitt offers is a tidier solution, one you don’t really have to think about.
I don’t really know how much mental labor I’m performing placing my phone on the nightstand every night.
Sounds super wasteful… It seems like the bigger the threat of climate change fucking up all of us the bigger the number of CEOs shooting shit into space and shitty “innovative” start-ups being founded
Wow, if only someone could find a way to miniaturize and “reimagine” this technology to put it in the phone itself…
Oh, right.
Why do so many western start ups come up with ways to make something simple complicated? This gives me lots of juicero vibes.
I mean a phone case with a removable battery? Yeah that’s cool. Already been done though … a very long time ago.
https://www.wired.com/2011/05/third-rail-case-adds-removable-battery-to-iphone/
But I don’t need a machine to take out the battery and replace it. It’s just something else to take up room on my nightstand and eventually break. I’d bet they somehow figure out a way to make it a subscription service too.
I worked at Apple for a while and I can see a use case for this.
It was a little annoying to have to change your iPhone with the card reader attached (for taking payment and stuff in the shop floor) when it was out of battery. You would have to go upstairs and grab another one off charge, sign in, two factor, and then go downstairs to carry on. Only this one won’t pair with the card reader so you gotta do it again.
If you could just do this like the toaster then time saved would be a lot across a company.
I was thinking the same for a similar use case at my job that would nearly cut the number of phones we own in half, but we don’t need the stupid toaster to remove and replace the battery. I’m a goddamn cripple and can do that myself.
Juicero was an attempt at replicating the printer (or Razor and blades) model for juice, that’s why.
They failed to consider that you can’t squeeze blades. Maybe they should’ve added some to their bags as juice DRM
Mercur 23C, btw, in case anyone is looking for a safety razor that’s both inexpensive and very good. Unchanged for literally a century now, no fancy materials (“aerospace-grade aluminium”) but good ole chromed zinc and brass. On the blade side, Russians being out of the picture, BIC is probably the right choice unlike other western brands they didn’t slouch on quality. Feather is always an option but many consider them too sharp. Also, more expensive. BICs should be somewhere around 15ct a piece. Don’t buy anything of that stuff from Wilkinson or such their offerings in that area seem to only exist to make safety razors look bad.
I thought the thing will lower your phone into the box so that the battery doesn’t take your whole room with it when it eventually explodes during charging…
That’s what my thought was, and that would be way cooler.
Swapable batteries were common on cell phones in the 80’s and 90’s except no fancy machine was needed.
Some fairly recent phones even had docks that would charge your phone and a swappable battery at the same time
That’s whole century.
You mean a decade. A century is 100 years.
I mean /s
……fuck.
IKR.
Why did we start building batteries into phones?
Because we kept buying thinner and lighter phones, and gluing the battery in makes thinner and lighter phones with better battery life possible. As a convenient side effect glue creates a nice watertight seal that can make devices more water resistant.
Hrm maybe.
I mean a wristwatch can be 200m water resistant and still be user servicable. A simple rubber gasket, some silicone grease and some screws.
I imagine it’s a hell of a lot cheaper/simpler/more reliable in manufacturing to use the adhesive over screws, gaskets, and grease. It reduces both the BOM and the number of processes required to ship a unit, and probably fails less often, which means fewer RMAs. Plus it just plain takes up less space, which leaves more room for the battery.
I don’t like it, my favorite phone I’ve ever had was a Galaxy Nexus with a zerolemon battery that was bigger than the phone itself, but I can see why gluing everything together would be an attractive solution for the engineers who design these things.
So they can sell you a new phone instead of a replacement battery.
and… get this: while you were swapping your battery you could drop in a swappable expansion on storage. Utter madness.
Many phones let you upgrade storage without opening it. Madness, I know.
90’s, definitely.
Which 80’s models mobiles are you thinking of, exactly?
The Motorola DynaTAC. They had a big Ni-Cd battery that is also the back of the case. You would need often need two batteries to get through a whole day, so they were made to be easily swapped.
I was using an LG G5 that had swappable batteries 3 years ago.
Coming Soon: A subscription model where you pay $10 a month for the ability to use your $450 battery swapper.
And you need a special mandatory app on the phone to use it. It needs all permissions and tracks you. It downloads audio ads and uploads them to the swapper while swapping, so it can play them while you sleep.
App Update: Fitness tracker permissions can now tell when you are sleeping, so the app only plays ads when you are awake and actively looking at your device.
I’m getting Juicero vibes
Right? This is so stupid
I especially love the sound! This thing is hilarious, can’t wait to read the disaster postmortem in a few years time.
Years? If this part of ever actually gets released it’ll last about 6 months before they stop production. It’s massively expensive and completely pointless.
So… you’re essentially carrying around a power bank on the back of your phone all the time? Seems like a gimmick at best.
Honestly, fast charging has turned this into such a non-issue that you’ll be hard pressed to find a more convenient solution.
The biggest issue for me is compatibility.
Swippitt works with any phone as long as there’s a case designed for it. That way, a single hub can serve a whole household of people with different phone models.
Makes sense. Similar to the replacement phone batteries we used to go l have…
At launch, it will offer cases for the iPhone 14, 15, and 16 series, and the company plans to expand with Samsung Galaxy S series cases by the end of 2025.
Soo… They’ll support some iPhones at launch, and in about a year, they hope to support some Galaxy phones. If being a hub is one of your selling points, that’s a very underwhelming, limited list.
Right?
$450 and a toaster to use something like the external batteries I’ve used for a decade.
I had one of those power bank cases, and it was absolutely awesome for extended battery life. It was always there with the phone, it was just a bulky case (which did not bother me), it tripled or quadrupled my battery life, and it was about $20.
Sorely missing that it’s not available for my current phone (Pixel 8a).
Magsafe case and a battery pack?
How does this make any sense when buying 2 of the cases is half the price while also faster and easier to swap? It would maybe make sense if it swapped out the actual phone battery. Maybe that’s their end goal, but how does it make sense at all to sell this as a real product?
Aren’t battery packs really bad for your phone tho? Keeping it at 100% constantly until it runs out
The article says the app can be used to limit your charging to 80%.
Still pretty batshit. Swapping external batteries yourself would be too hard?
They would get lost for sure if they left the toaster. You must not have kids. Which i suppose would be a noon fit this company to sell you refills.
2010s replaceable battery phones: look what they need to mimic fraction of our power.
fairphones have replaceable batteries and other parts
At least with an external battery pack you don’t have to reboot your phone (which is a minor inconvenience, as a FP5 owner).
2010s?
Laughs in Nokia
I’m always shocked by how unimaginative this tech-centric community acts. OK, so this version is silly for YOU. Are you the whole world? Are you the future? Stuff like this is typically a bulky demo unit in need of further development. Fringe case devices are also that - fringe case solutions. This isn’t for the person sitting at home with a dormant phone. This probably has an application in medical and scientific fields where mobility is critical, staying in one device is necessary, avoiding a tangled external battery pack is preferred, and automation prevent human error like not plugging in the dead pack fully kor at all). Could have larger applications for swapping vehicle batteries, as well.
So don’t buy it.
Well, their website pictures and targets only persons sitting at home with a dormant phone, and not some kind of other specialty use
It’d be cheaper to buy a power bank for every person in the house vs this abomination
Marketing =/= Reality!
Okay so you tell me what use case there is for an automated battery replacement system. As opposed to just doing it yourself which takes 20 seconds. Especially because when it inevitably breaks you’ll have to do it manually anyway.
All for the low low cost of a mid-range gaming laptop.
The fuck? Use a battery pack…
This issue has been solved for years.
