>Camping with buddy who just came back from Afghanistan
>He brings this massive folding solar thing
>I am hugely skeptical, remember buying a small solar charger in the 90s that was expensive and barely produced any power
>This thing powers fucking everything
>Cooler, laptop, GPS, phones, radio

Why doesn't everyone do this? It was amazing. The panel output was overkill enough that even in cloudy weather it worked fine as long as we didn't charge everything at once. He said it cost him almost a grand which is serious money but this honestly worked as well as a generator and weighed much less when folded up. I am impressed. After that bad experience with the early solar charger years and years ago I gave up on it as a viable technology and stopped following the progress. Has it really improved substantially or is it just a matter of buying a way larger array than you need?

It worked so well he didn't bother with batteries. Cooler stayed cool overnight, all our gear had internal batteries anyway and the panel output was reliably good enough even with clouds that I never worried about not being able to power our shit. Really cool experience.