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The technology is just so far gone. It's just like back in the day you needed a suitcase just to have a cell phone. The battery was so heavy, it was like carrying a gallon of soda around with you all day.

A battery by definition is a collection of cells. So the cell is a little can of chemicals. And the challenge is taking a very high-energy cell, and a large number of them, and combining them safely into a large battery.

I keep hearing about battery innovation, but it never makes it to my phone.

For example, a breakthrough in better batteries could supplant hydrogen. Better solar cells could replace or win out in this race to the fuel of the future. Those, I see, as the three big competitors: hydrogen, solar cells and then better batteries.

If you want a product that's thicker with a bigger battery, it's also heavier, more costly, takes longer to charge.

Energy-saving technologies keep improving faster than they're applied, so efficiency is an ever larger and cheaper resource.

There's a basic principle about consumer electronics: it gets more powerful all the time and it gets cheaper all the time. that's true of all types of consumer electronics.

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that a new technology is very similar to its predecessors. A new technology is often perceived as the linear extension of the previous one, and this leads us to believe the new technology will fill the same roles - just a little faster or a little smaller or a little lighter.

The fuel cell is just a fundamentally inferior way of delivering electrical energy to an electric motor than batteries.

New technology is useful, but it's inefficient and ugly; it knows it'll be obsolete by lunchtime tomorrow, so it has no incentive to be anything else.