This Retro Electric Moped Is Taking Over Europe

A moped spews more filth into the atmosphere than an 8-cylinder SUV. You didn’t know that? You would if you’ve ever been trapped behind one at a red light. One study found that these tiny vehicles generate amounts of pollution “several orders of magnitude higher than the limit values admissible in Europe and the USA.” As the study authors put it, “Waiting behind a moped in traffic may, therefore, constitute a considerable health risk.” Not good.

To help rush-hour victims breathe easier, Dutch designer Ronald Meijs has created the Motorman, an electric “moped” that’s become the fashionable green machine for daily commuters throughout Europe. Motormans have been spotted on the cobbled streets of Amsterdam, Ibiza, Düsselforf, Maastricht, Zurich, and Brussels; enough E.U. cities to fill a Jason Bourne itinerary.

The Motorman may fit the legal definition of a moped, but it has no pedals. The drivetrain is fully electric. No human power required. Tech-wise, though, this is no Tesla. The 2kw engine won’t allow you to do burnouts or evade the polizia. There’s no iPhone charger, blind spot detection sensor, or autonomous driving mode. Not even a lousy cup holder for your macchiato.

What you will get, though, is brilliant industrial design. While other moped and scooter companies are striving to make all their models look like Tron light cycles, Mr. Meijs has gone full retro. The Motorman—with its balloon tires, low-slung gas tank, oversized headlight, and spring-mounted leather seat—looks like a cross between a Schwinn cruiser and a 1915 Harley-Davidson.

A student of American culture, Meijs admits he mined inspiration for the design from the early board track racers that zipped around motordromes at the beginning of the last century. “This isn’t some alien machine from space,” he explains. “The antique motorcycle shape is instantly recognizable.” He adds that while his stylish two-wheeler is intended to be environmentally friendly, customers are attracted as much to the classic lines of its beefy tube frame as the zero-emission technology. Maybe more. “People smile when they see the Motorman on the street,” says the Dutch designer. “They love it because it transports them back to a time when life was easier and less complicated.”

The ride isn’t bad either. At just 99 pounds (less than half the weight of a typical moped), the Motorman is easy to balance and maneuver through congested streets. “If you can ride a bike,” says Meijs. “You can ride a Motorman.”

According to Koen Boot, it’s actually easier than riding a bike. “The Motorman is effortless to steer and has a much smoother ride than a bicycle,” says the 25-year-old engineering student. “When you hit cruising speed, it feels like you’re floating on air.” He concedes that the design is a large part of the appeal. “People get so excited that they stop me on the road to take photographs. It’s has those classic Harley and Indian motorcycle lines, but it’s extremely minimalist. Look down, and all you see is a speedometer and two buttons—one for the light, one for the horn. Even the electric plug is concealed beneath the fuel tank.”

That “fuel tank” holds a lithium polymer battery, the ideal choice for light EVs because of its high power density rating. That translates to some respectable specs. Range: 43 miles. Top speed: 28 mph. Charging time: 6 hours. Not road trip numbers, but ideal for office drones who like the idea of lowering their carbon footprint without breaking a sweat. The Motorman is also maintenance-free and economical to operate: less than two cents per mile. That may help soften the blow of the sticker price: $5,158 for the base model (available in Jet Black or Ruby Red). This being Europe, tack on another 21 percent for the V.A.T. Options, like Bauhaus paint jobs, leather saddlebags and custom logos, will pad the bill further. Which only proves that not every Dutch treat is cheap.

The Motorman is currently available only in European Union countries (+Norway and Switzerland). It will be available in North America within a year.

Absurd Creature of the Week: The Spanish Fly Is Real, and It’s Ridiculously Dangerous

The Spanish fly won't get you horny, but it will get you dead. K. Hinze/Corbis

In 1869, a French military doctor got what we can confidently say was one of the stranger cases of his career. A group of soldiers were complaining of weakness, stomach problems, dry mouths, and aggressively persistent erections. The problem, it seemed, was that they’d been eating frogs that had themselves been eating the fabled Spanish fly.

In reality, it’s not a fly. It’s actually one of the 3,000 species of so-called blister beetles. And the bug’s defensive secretion, cantharidin, has been used as an “aphrodisiac” since ancient times. Yeah, it doesn’t actually work, unless your idea of sexy is dying a horrible death. Still, throughout history men often laced women’s drinks with it (alleged rapists like Bill Cosby still joke about it) or took it themselves.

Anger one of these insects and it’ll leak cantharidin right out of its leg joints. Do something dumb like touch it and that cantharidin will make your skin bubble up into nasty yellow blisters (or, like this poor bastard, you could slap one that’s landed on your neck). Do something even dumber like eat the stuff and it may be your last meal—it’s as powerful as cyanide and has no antidote. It strips away the lining of your stomach and you bleed internally. As your kidneys struggle to purge the cantharidin, it inflames your urinary tract, giving you what you think is an erection, but is actually just severe inflammation.

One particularly strange story of cantharidin poisoning comes from a fishing trip gone terribly awry. The fisherman, for whatever reason, had the idea that his prey would be attracted to cantharidin, so he mixed some of the stuff up with water in a bottle, using his thumb to plug the hole. Unfortunately, he just so happened to prick that same thumb, then suck on it. A half hour later, he started vomiting. Then came the diarrhea, which continued for the two days he delayed going to the hospital. Once there, weakness and a racing heart set it, and just five hours later, he perished.

It’s not just humans that fall victim to the blister beetle’s incredible toxicity. Horses in particular are highly susceptible to the toxin, according to entomologist Dan Marschalek of San Diego State University. “What will happen is that there are some species that feed on alfalfa, and they’ll get incorporated into the hay. And even if the beetles are dead, that toxin still remains within the dead body.” Horses gobble up the alfalfa and the hitchhiking beetles, begin bleeding internally, and drop dead. Cows and sheep seem to be less susceptible to the poison.

That’s cantharidin-packed blood leaking out of the Meloe campanicollis’ leg joint. And the red and blue on its back aren’t natural spots—they’re fingernail polish (the specimen was the subject of a marking study). Dan Marschalek

You’d think that with such a reputation surrounding blister beetles, the initiated would go out of their way to avoid cantharidin, and you’d certainly think that it has no place in medicine. But in fact physicians have used it for thousands of years—in varying degrees of ridiculousness. Not that I should have to tell you, but no, cantharidin won’t cure rabies as some ancients believed. It is, however, effective at treating warts and skin bumps manifested by the molluscum virus, and has long been used in modern medicine (when applied properly it apparently isn’t even all that painful). And, again, not that I should have to tell you, but our lawyers would probably appreciate it if I mentioned that under no circumstances should you self-medicate by rubbing a blister beetle on your warts.

You’re welcome, lawyers.

The Cold-Blooded Antics of the Baby Blister Beetle

Only male blister beetles synthesize cantharidin, but out of the kindness of their hearts, they’ll transfer some to the females when they come together to mate. This is known as a nuptial gift, and all kinds of insects do it, though it’s typically a nutritious package, not a weaponized one. The males of some species will transfer an energy-rich fluid, while others present the females with prey items. The most extreme nuptial gift of all, though, is when the male himself turns into the gift as the female simply devours him. So he does not live happily ever after. Or at all, for that matter.

OK, maybe male blister beetles aren’t transferring the cantharidin out of the kindness of their hearts. Like with species that exchange nutritious packages, this is a male’s strategy to ensure the survival of his offspring. “The female will use the cantharidin to coat the eggs,” says Marschalek, “so it’ll provide some protection for the eggs before they develop.” Thus can the male help ensure the survival of his young without having to directly care for the ingrates.

Epicauta pensylvanica, a species common in the eastern US. Some blister beetles mate by mounting, while others take this bum-to-bum approach. Dan Marschalek

Once the eggs hatch into tiny larvae, though, the young don’t need no help surviving. Their mother will have laid them at the base of a plant, and the clever little things make their way up the stem en masse and get into flowers. When a solitary species of bee lands, the tiny larvae swarm onto it. Somehow they can tell the difference between male and female bees, which is important considering they’re trying to hitch a ride back to a nest, which only females maintain. If they get a female, great—it’s straight to the nest. But if they get a male, they have to pray that he’s about to mate with a female. When that happens, the larvae swarm from him onto the female to get to the nest. There they’ll first devour her supply of pollen that she intended to save for her own kids. Once she lays her eggs, they’ll eat those too, and if those eggs manage to hatch into larvae, they’ll eat those too. Unfortunately for momma bee, they’re positively insatiable.

But there are a couple species of blister beetle whose larvae get even cleverer. When they climb up the plant they don’t look for flowers, but instead form into a squirming mass on the stem (see the BBC video on it below). “So there’ll be tens to hundreds of these small larvae in a ball, and so kind of visually that mimics a bee,” says Marschalek. “But they’re also producing some kind of chemical cue to attract the male bees, and so they’ll bring the bee in, they’ll grab onto it, and then do the transfer to a female while the bees are mating.” Then it’s off to the bee buffet.

Thus the wildly dangerous legend of the Spanish fly perpetuates itself. And again, please don’t eat them. There are plenty of pills for that sort of thing that almost never kill their users in excruciating ways.

Big thanks to MaLisa Spring for suggesting this week’s critter. You can browse the full Absurd Creature of the Week archive here. Know of an animal you want me to write about? Are you a scientist studying a bizarre creature? Email matthew_simon@wired.com or ping me on Twitter at @mrMattSimon.

How One Man Invented the Console Adventure Game

Warren Robinett. Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

There’s this yellow guy who lives in a yellow castle, and he’s on a quest for a gleaming chalice. He’s a total square, and no one could argue he’s drawn with nuance or complexity. But his adventures represent a milestone in videogames. The yellow guy navigates complex mazes, hunting for objects that appear in random locations. He does battle with three dragons, each with distinctive personalities. He tracks down keys required to unlock impassable gates, all while dodging a thieving bat that’s itching to pilfer from him. The yellow guy can even uncover a hidden room that contains a secret message laid down by The Creator himself.

I am of course describing the epochal game Adventure that Warren Robinett created in 1979 for the Atari 2600 console. Robinett was 26 when he programmed the game, entirely by himself, on an HP 1611A microprocessor. It looks low-res and dated now, but Adventure was among the most ambitious and complex games of its day.

It also was incredibly influential. Robinett essentially created the console adventure game, and pioneered several videogame conventions that are now so common that we take them for granted. Robinett is not unlike the early filmmakers who hit upon techniques like the cut and close-up that would become the fundamental grammar of cinema. Adventure was made in the era of Space Invaders, when game worlds existed within a single screen. Robinett created the idea that a game could take place on a series of screens, each representing a discrete location. If you steered your avatar off the left side of the screen, it would reappear in the next room on the right side of the screen. “I didn’t set out to make the videogame world bigger than a screen, but I had to,” he tells me. It was part of the challenge he had set for himself, and he took great satisfaction in solving it.

Robinett explained how he made Adventure in a session at the Game Developers Conference. The game, he says, was inspired by a visit to Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab, where he spent several hours on a mainframe playing Colossal Cave Adventure by Willie Crowther and Don Woods. It was a pure text game (“YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING.”) built around exploration and inventory management. Robinett resolved to adapt it to a console.

Making It Seemed Impossible

That seemed impossible on its face. The Atari 2600 was designed for graphics-intensive games like Missile Command and Asteroids. The controller was a directional joystick with a single button. “Also, Colossal Cave required hundreds of kilobytes of ROM,” Robinett says. “The Atari 2600 had 4K.” He would have to vastly condense and simplify the game.

The first step was translating the game from a purely text experience to a purely graphical one. Robinett cleverly reduced environments, characters, and objects to instantly recognizable, simple icons. Except for the deadly enemies. They look more like giant waterfowl than dragons. “I’ve become attached to my Duck Dragons,” he says. “If I ever do a sequel, it will be Return of the Duck Dragons.”

Robinett built subroutines into the characters that gave them distinctive behaviors. The subroutines continued even when characters were offscreen in one of the 30 different rooms. [Thirty different rooms! It boggled the minds of kids who got the game for Christmas in 1979.] The offscreen action made the game world feel even more like a real place, and all sorts of emergent situations arose from these subroutines. For instance, you could be devoured by a dragon and trapped in its stomach, only to see that thieving bat fly in, pick up that dragon, and flit around the game world with the two of you in tow. “That wasn’t intentional,” says Robinett. “It resulted from the fact that it was a true simulation.”

Beyond dealing with the constraints of the console, Robinett had to battle his bosses, who initially discouraged him from tackling so ambitious a project. But when they saw a working prototype, they pressed him to make it a tie-in for the upcoming Superman movie. He ignored their demands. “Sometimes you have to fight for your ideas,” he says.

Somehow, Robinett crammed the entire game into the constraints of an Atari cartridge. “I even had 15 bytes of RAM left over,” he says. “There was room to have three more dragons if I had chosen to do so, but it seemed to be working pretty well. I guess that’s what what you’d call game balancing nowadays.”

He Gave Us the First Easter Egg

Instead, Robinett used some of that space to build a secret room accessible only through an elaborate series of steps. The room contained the game’s only text CREATED BY WARREN ROBINETT. It is generally considered gaming’s first Easter egg. Robinett didn’t tell anyone about it, and left Atari soon after finishing Adventure. “I thought of it as a self-promotion maneuver,” Robinett tells me. “Also, I was pissed off. Adventure sold a million units at $25 apiece. Meanwhile, I got a $22K a year salary, no royalties, and they never even forwarded any fan mail to me.” (The Easter egg, by the way, was first discovered by a 15-year-old in Salt Lake City. His letter to Atari is priceless.)

Last week’s appearance at GDC was karmic payback for all the fan mail Robinett missed out on. His presentation was met with thunderous applause, and Robinett was mobbed by fans. A Google engineer peppered him with intricate questions about his code and his data structure, pulling up a video on his laptop to demonstrate a specific flicker effect he wanted to know more about. Robinett patiently explained the tech, pausing occasionally to shake hands and pose for photos. Then he autographed the grateful engineer’s printout of the disassembled code for the Duck Dragon sprite.

A graphics design lead at AMD gushed to Robinett about playing the game as an 8-year-old. He was too young to memorize the patterns of the maze, and terrified of being trapped by the dragons as he traversed it. “Adventure was the first survival horror game,” he said.

A computer engineer and professor from Brazil asked Robinett to autograph his copy of the book 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987 , in which Adventure is the first entry. The fan thanked Robinett profusely as he clutched the book to his chest.

“Your game,” he said, “Is … everything to me.”

It’s all a bit surprising to Robinett, who left the game industry in the early 1980s, moved to North Carolina and has worked in other fields ever since. It’s only recently that he’s come to learn there is ongoing interest in his groundbreaking game.

“This is really gratifying,” he says Robinett. “I’m so glad it’s not forgotten.”

This Woman Wants to Take Common Folk to Space—In a Balloon

Jane Poynter has a mesmerizing way of describing what it will be like to be shuttled to the ends of the Earth in the souped-up space balloon being developed by her company, World View.

You’ll arrive at the launch site predawn, Poynter says, and step inside a comfortable capsule with a few other passengers. You’ll lift off the ground, and float upward for an hour and a half, gently rising at a speed of about 1,000 feet a minute. When you arrive at the top of the atmosphere, Poynter says, you’ll see “the most unbelievable panorama of stars” around you. The sun, rising up over the ground below you, will begin to creep over the horizon and light up the Earth below. You’ll hover in that place for about an hour before gliding back to the ground using a rectangular parachute called a parafoil.

Jane Poynter. World View EnterprisesOh, and there will be appetizers and booze. Mustn’t forget about the appetizers and booze.

Today, this vision is still the stuff of Poynter’s imagination, but recently, that vision moved a lot closer to reality when World View completed a flight that took its balloon 100,000 feet in the air, and safely landed it using a parafoil. Though parafoils have been used by the military to airdrop huge pieces of equipment, this was the first time one had ever successfully drifted down from 100,000 feet.

World View still has a long way to go before it can bring actual human beings this high. The test flight carried only research equipment, but its success suggests World View is steadily inching its way toward making a balloon ride to space possible.

“This means it works, which is pretty crucial,” Poynter says, laughing. “That was the big, risky part of the whole development. We still have some refinements to do on it, but we’ve at least proven that it’ll work, which is huge.”

The Race to Space

Of course, World View is far from alone in its mission to bring average people to space. Space tourism has become the obsession of some of the world’s most accomplished businessmen, from Elon Musk to Richard Branson. But while these players have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build their own spaceships, World View is taking a comparatively simple — and more affordable — approach. Poynter won’t say exactly how much the company has poured into developing its space balloon, but she predicts by the time it’s ready for launch as early as 2016, World View will have spent less than $100 million on development. That means tickets aboard a World View balloon—$75,000 each—will also cost less than half as much as a ticket on one of Virgin Galactic’s flights, she says.

“It’s all about making space as accessible as possible, so eventually, everyone can go if they so choose,” Poynter says.

From Biosphere to Balloons

World View is just the latest venture for Poynter and her husband, Taber MacCallum, who met in the early `90s as crewmembers in Biosphere 2, an experiment in which a group of researchers spent two years living inside a glass and steel structure to see whether they could live off the land within the enclosed dome. After leaving Biosphere, Poynter and MacCallum launched Paragon Space Development, a company that creates life support systems for organizations like NASA, with the eventual hope of supporting manned missions to Mars.

Last fall, however, Poynter and MacCallum announced they were stepping down from their role at Paragon to focus full time on World View, an idea that Poynter says MacCallum first proposed back in 2011. The pair had spent years talking to astronauts about their travels to space, Poynter says, and always heard it described as a life-changing experience. They decided they wanted to recreate that experience for other people, but the challenge was figuring out how. It wasn’t until MacCallum suggested using balloon technology, which had traditionally been used to carry equipment such as weather observation gear to near-space, that Poynter and MacCallum felt they had an idea that was actually achievable.

“If you’re not getting into developing a new rocket or designing a spacecraft, it doesn’t require completely new technology,” Poynter says. “It seemed like an incredibly accessible way to do it.”

Getting to Space Sooner

When it’s complete, World View’s balloon will consist of three parts: a helium balloon, not unlike the ones NASA has used for years to take payloads to space; a standard parafoil used by the military that World View has adapted to its own needs; and a capsule that borrows from existing spacecraft design. “We don’t have to invent technology,” Poynter says. “We’re just pushing the boundaries of how this technology is being used.”

All this means World View may be able to begin shuttling passengers to space sooner, and more affordably, than other players in this field. According to Poynter, tickets have already been selling.

In the meantime, World View has begun working with NASA on commercial applications for its technology. Just last weekend, World View completed its first major commercial mission, carrying research equipment built by university students to near space as part of NASA’s Flight Opportunities Program. The goal of this program is to let researchers take advantage of the growing number of commercial flight companies out there. World View’s balloon allows these researchers to test how their technology performs at a fraction of the cost of other types of technology.

“These devices can’t be tested on the ground, so getting them to those altitudes, above the majority of the atmosphere, you can see these instruments work in the vacuum of space,” says Ron Young, program manager for NASA Flight Opportunities. “These balloons are give us a huge advantage in terms of a gaining cost effective access to space-like environments.”

And for World View, this partnership means the company can begin bringing in revenue to fund more research and development for its space tourism business, which could take several more years to, quite literally, get off the ground. But when it does, Poynter says she’ll be first in line for the journey.

“I could give you all these high concept ideals about why we’re doing this,” Poynter says, “but at the end of the day, its because I want to go.”

Hey Twitter, Killing Anonymity’s a Dumb Way to Fight Trolls

Tor users started reporting last week that they are being prompted more frequently than ever for a phone number confirmation when creating a new Twitter account—or in some cases when using a long-standing account. This development is disastrous for the free speech the platform generally stands for, and will likely not curb the abuse for which it has come under fire. If this change was targeted at that harassment—addressing the leaked acknowledgment from CEO Dick Costolo that “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years”—it’s a dangerous example of the Politician’s Syllogism: we must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do this.

To be clear: Twitter has denied claims that it’s specifically singling out Tor users for phone number confirmation. Twitter says instead that spam-like behavior is being flagged for additional checks. And to a point, that’s probably true. But we’ve known since at least last November that the service could deploy mandatory phone number verification against accounts engaged in harassment. Tor use is likely one of many signals that are weighed when determining whether a sign-up is from a new, valid user, or whether it’s an account that will be used for spam or abuse.

Only Twitter can determine what these signals are and how they’re balanced; if the company considers Tor use a very strong indicator of bad behavior, then Tor users will be disproportionately targeted for measures like phone number checks.

Unfortunately, that undermines the anonymity of the people who need it most, without necessarily providing protection for targets of harassment.

Twitter users absolutely need to have more control over what messages they see and who may interact with them. But beyond that baseline, even well-intentioned solutions can cause harm if they’re informed by an inadequate understanding of how harassment works on the platform. Most visibly, Twitter briefly changed the behavior of the block feature in late 2013 to address what it perceived as a major problem: users were precluded from following or retweeting the accounts that blocked them, so it was easy to tell if you had been blocked.

This update was purportedly aimed at reducing offline retaliation for those blocks, but the backlash was swift. Users depended on blocks to stop some kinds of abusive behaviors that would be allowed under the new rules. Without an understanding of those abuse patterns, Twitter fell back to the familiar syllogism: here’s a problem; we must do something; this is something; we must do this.

The block behavior modification was reversed in mere hours, in large part because Twitter as a platform provided a megaphone to the people most affected by the change. Communities of women and people of color who are subjected to frequent abuse on the platform were able to take advantage of the medium to call on Twitter to #RestoreTheBlock, and get their voices heard.

Unfortunately, some voices can be so profoundly silenced by a pierced veil of anonymity that they won’t be around to protest unannounced updates. For instance, activists and journalists in countries where Twitter is forbidden use Tor to circumvent the censorship technology that blocks the site, and to do so without being traceable by the national internet service providers and phone network operators. Changes that make it harder to use Twitter and Tor in combination end up doing real harm to some of the speech that is most marginalized.

Asking these people to provide a phone number puts them at risk: in many places they will be forced to tie any phone number to a real-life identity. To pick just one example, a new law in Pakistan requires fingerprints from all cell phone users. Similar laws are common around the world, and obtaining a truly anonymous cell phone can be prohibitively difficult. Beyond that, a national phone provider could be pressed to provide details, say, of who is receiving Twitter confirmation texts.

Abuse on Twitter comes from accounts using real names, and from accounts using pseudonyms. It comes from accounts with massive follower bases, and from so-called “egg” accounts that are freshly made. It can come from a user with a handful of sock puppets, or a small army of one troll’s dedicated fans. Very few of these categories rely on Tor for their trolling, and they’re not likely to be affected. But other people that rely on strong anonymity will.

Twitter has to dedicate resources to learning how abuse works systemically on the platform and put powerful tools in the hands of users that need them. It needs to craft clearer terms of service and give the sense that it is enforcing them. These steps may be difficult, but they’re necessary. Cracking down on anonymity tools may seem like something to do, but Twitter—and the other online platforms we count on—need to do better than just doing something.

Apple’s Hugest Reveal This Week: Those Crazy New Batteries

The most exciting Apple announcement this week wasn’t a $10,000 smartwatch or a new, gold-colored MacBook. It was a battery technology that could have major implications for how long all future Apple products last between charges—including your next iPhone.

Apple’s battery breakthrough is already paying dividends in Apple’s super-slender MacBook. In order to achieve that 13.1 mm silhouette—and still deliver reasonable battery life while powering a 12-inch Retina display—the company’s engineers had to develop something entirely new. What they came up with is a terraced battery cell, a unique design that adds 35 percent more battery capacity than would otherwise be achievable.

“It might seem like a low level innovation, but it’s an incredibly clever design,” Jeff Chamberlain, executive director of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, told WIRED. In fact, it’s a whole new way of thinking about batteries.

Rethinking the Battery

A typical lithium ion battery “pouch” type cell comprises layers of a thin sheet of aluminum or copper, coatings of a specialized material that can absorb lithium ions, and layers of plastic. Each of these layers is mere microns thick.

What Apple has figured out, according to a patent filed back in early 2012, is how to fit these stacked electrode sheets into any size cell they choose. These different-sized cells can then be stacked on top of one another, allowing its engineers to pack as much battery as possible into any given space.

In order to assemble the terraced battery cells in the MacBook, Apple says it used high speed cameras to take photos of the casing and the battery. This process documents the minute variations in each that occur during real-world production, so that Apple can fit the batteries inside each individual casing with an unprecedented degree of precision.

Apple also—according to what it said during its Monday keynote—tweaked the chemical formula inside the cells. That didn’t have any bearing on the unique battery shape, but by altering the composition, Apple could eke a little bit more efficiency over previous MacBook batteries.

Apple lists the MacBook has achieving up to nine hours of battery life. That may sounds relatively paltry—the 13-inch Air gets 12-hours of battery power—until you consider that it has to push power to a Retina display’s huge number of pixels. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina gets 10 hours of battery life, and the 15-inch model gets eight hours. In a form factor that’s 1.5 pounds lighter and .2 inches thinner (at its thickest point), the MacBook lasts comparably long. That’s impressive, even when you also consider its power-sipping Core M processor.

An Adaptable Innovation

What’s even more exciting, though, is that while the MacBook is the first consumer product to use this new battery technology, we’re sure to see it applied to other iDevices. Apple’s tick-tock upgrade cycle for the iPhone normally leaves minimal hardware changes for the “tock” models (the “S” versions, like the iPhone 4s and 5S). But with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus’s contoured exterior, it’s not a stretch that this year’s S model could include the new battery tech. The beefed up battery design could also easily make its way into the iPad line, and into future MacBook Airs or MacBook Pros (both of which only saw minimal updates during Monday’s event).

Even if we don’t see this tech applied to new products immediately, we will undoubtedly see it at some point. iFixit’s Kyle Wiens says that one of the most important results of this battery innovation is its implications on product design across a whole range of devices.

“It frees the industrial designers to be able to design what they want, and then fit the battery in after the fact, rather than creating the design around the battery,” Wiens told WIRED. Until now, hardware designers have been a slave to the battery size required of a particular device, and forced to build a rectangle, or rounded rectangle, around that.

So, naturally, Apple engineered a new design that frees Jony Ive and team to let their imaginations run wild with possibilities. In addition to the rectangular layers we see in the MacBook, this terraced battery could also theoretically work in circular, triangular, and other shaped spaces. That’s not to say we’re ever going to see a trapezoidal iPad. But at the very least, it enables unconventional thought, like contouring the battery around the spot where the Macbook’s rubberized black feet attach to the notebook (which Apple did).

The redesigned battery also doesn’t sacrifice overall longevity; the new MacBook will survive around 1,000 charges, just like all other Apple laptops. The one caveat would be that this is a proprietary battery, so it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace yourself, should it wimp out before you’re ready to buy a new notebook. Then again, it’s not like Apple makes it easy to replace your battery anyway.

Eventually, some crazy new innovation in mobile energy storage will come along and end all our lithium ion woes. That could be a long way off, though. And the fact that Apple’s not content to sit around waiting for it could end up giving its devices—and you—more battery life relief than you could have imagined.

Psssst: Wanna Buy a Used Spy Website?

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