Company Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), recently bought special machines that can test the longevity of the energy cells in the batteries, which are used to double the life of the batteries in Tesla cars. The partner from Tesla managed to achieve this performance 4 years before the initial estimate, and those from Apple want to take advantage of the technology.
The equipment purchased by the Apple company is able to do a much more accurate monitoring of the energy cells during charging and discharging. This monitoring aims to discover the causes of the degradation of energy cells and to predict their longevity, and thus problems affecting the batteries' ability to store the same amount of energy over time can be corrected.
Each machine in the image has no less than 40 high-precision loaders that allow advanced monitoring of the loading process. The company Novonix produces these devices, and in a recent conference one of its prominent researchers confirmed that Apple is a customer that bought a large amount of equipment.
Separately from Apple, the Asian partners of the company that produce batteries for iDevices also bought equipment of this kind. In practice, Apple and its partners are working on the development of longer-lasting batteries, and although we won't see them in the iPhone this year, there is a chance that starting in 2018 they will make their way into products.
"Our high precision charger systems have been shown to measure the coulombic efficiency of cells to typically less than 10 ppm precision and 50 ppm accuracy. These systems have 2 Amp maximum current over a 0-5 Volt range with integrated temperature sensing (4-wire class A RTD) on every channel."
