... If you look at motorcycle racing in the 80's and early 90's there was a huge divide between horsepower technology and tire grip. Tire manufacturers weren't moving along at the same pace as the Japanese motorcycle OEM's were bringing up the horsepower of the bikes. So the bikes were over powering the tires with ease
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Imagine if the bike manufacturers told tire companies back in the 80's "oh don't worry about developing tires any further, the racers should just watch what they're doing out there on them". Racing would have hit a brick wall long ago. ...
If battery technology never moves forward, then smartphones will hit a brick wall as well. ...
Good analogy, but I see it reversed from how you do. You're comparing phone technology to motorcycle technology, and the batteries to the tires. I see it as phone = tires and battery = motorcycle. For years and years batteries were improving while the phones themselves were relatively stagnant ability-wise.
In the early days the original brick cell phones had roughly 8 hours of standby, 30 minutes of talk time, and it would take 10 hours to fully recharge the battery. In the 90s the Motorola Startac improved performance to up to 90 minutes of talk time in a much smaller package. By the time we got to the Razr V3 in the 2000's, we're looking at even smaller batteries that give you about 11 days of standby time, up to 7 hours of talk time, and the one I have for my work will fully recharge in less than an hour. Those are pretty impressive advances.
Suddenly, cell phones that for almost 20 years only changed in size but didn't add any new features started getting new abilities. It's only really been over the last 5 years or so that phone technology has exploded from "telephone with a few little features" into "full-blown miniaturized computers that can make calls". The technology and associated power demands, of phones has only recently accelerated at an absurd rate to overtake the steady improvement of batteries.
If we complained about the range of cars the same way that we do about battery life it would sound pretty silly. In the 80's we had the equivalent of a Ford Crown Victoria with a 20 gallon gas tank that would take us 100 miles. By the 2000's we had a Toyota Corolla with a 10 gallon gas tank that could take us 400 miles. Now we're all going full-speed in a Bugatti Veyron with a 5 gallon gas tank and we're complaining that we can only make it 100 miles.
The bottom line is that energy density in batteries has been improving at a pretty impressive rate, but as long as we keep increasing power demands at an even faster rate we can't exactly blame the batteries for not lasting as long.
