Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

electronics.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 362 posts

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#221

Post by luuurker »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #128
actionfromafar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn’t explain what it did. The feature was amazing, the presentation misleading.

No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."

My iPhone was affected by this. Let me tell you my experience, without "Samsung FUD":

- The phone became slow, laggy animations, etc.

- I had no idea what was causing the problem.

- There was no way to return to an older iOS version or a way to disable the new behaviour.

- I went to an Apple store and was told that I probably should get a new phone.

I'm sure they had some good intentions, but in practice they degraded my experience too much and profited from new iPhone sales that didn't need to happen. Apple had to be sued first to add a setting to disable this feature and start offering cheap battery replacements (by then I had already moved on).

From the implementation of this feature to the way they handled it, it was all Apple. Samsung had nothing to do with my bad experience.

Not everyone was affected this much by the change, but some where. And that's a problem.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#222

Post by vladvasiliu »

aikinai wrote: post #215
glandium wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact opposite experience. My 2013 MBP can keep its charge for months while suspended/hibernated. My first-gen M1 MBA will deplete the battery in a week under the same conditions.

Does the latter have Power Nap enabled?

Don't have my MBP (late 2013) on hand to check, but IIRC the power nap was enabled only when plugged in.

That's the issue with regular PCs: most don't have the choice anymore to use S3 suspend. They default to "modern standby", the half-assed copy of Apple's power nap.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#223

Post by vladvasiliu »

glandium wrote: post #108
artimaeis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just picked up my 2017 iPad Pro. It was last charged Nov 15. Been sitting by the bed mostly unused since. Currently at 80% charge. I haven’t experienced what you’re describing on an Apple device since they switched the laptops away from Intel chips. In my experience, the OS does matter. I can’t believe how bad the rest of the industry is at this. Amazon’s Kindle line is incredible at this IME, but those are pretty…

I have the exact opposite experience. My 2013 MBP can keep its charge for months while suspended/hibernated. My first-gen M1 MBA will deplete the battery in a week under the same conditions.

Suspend and hibernate are not the same thing. The latter actually fully powers off the device. As far as the hardware is concerned, it's the same as "shutting down".

Windows does a similar thing on pcs with "modern standby": it will switch to hibernation if it's unplugged for a while. I don't know the specifics, but my work pc running windows 11 will be hibernated in the morning if I leave it unplugged going to bed.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#224

Post by rpigab »

Arainach wrote: post #3

I've given up trying. If a device is willing to lie to me and only charge to 80% while saying it's charged, great, but all of this "try to stay in a range" logic flies in the face of reality. Every device I use besides my cell phone, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo 3DS has atrocious power drain when not in use. OS does not matter. Windows laptop, Linux laptop, ChromeOS laptop, Android Tablet, Amazon Tablet, you name it…

My Microsoft Surface Pro 4 can do 100% to 0 in less than 48hrs, powered off the whole time. It's old now, but it became that way in the first 2-3 years, without even using it that much.

It's such a pain to use because when it's at zero, If I plug it in and power it on, it'll boot Windows, then at any moment will power off by itself, maybe because Windows doesn't want to run at low battery, maybe it's consuming more than what is being charged, idk. I have set the desktop background to 0x000000, removed all non-essential startup services, reinstalled it from scratch, etc.

So everytime I want to use it, I have to wait till it's 5-10% before powering it on.

The worst part is that if you look it up online, some ppl say it changed drastically after some Windows update, can't confirm because it's not my main PC, I don't remember the exact moment where it had this problem.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#225

Post by dalore »

bayindirh wrote: post #195
dalore wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not? I find running on battery, lots of things are throttled or disabled. CPU is slower for example. That's probably a good reason for why not.

I generally do mundane tasks like SSH sessions or zoom meetings when I'm on battery. Heavier tasks are always offloaded to my desktop system, most of the times, so running on battery here and there doesn't impact many things in my case.

A video call though isn't that mundane. Google Meet often has my cpu and fans spinning. I do prefer Zoom as it uses fewer resources. But of course, it will work on battery.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#226

Post by vladvasiliu »

lopis wrote: post #143
artimaeis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just picked up my 2017 iPad Pro. It was last charged Nov 15. Been sitting by the bed mostly unused since. Currently at 80% charge. I haven’t experienced what you’re describing on an Apple device since they switched the laptops away from Intel chips. In my experience, the OS does matter. I can’t believe how bad the rest of the industry is at this. Amazon’s Kindle line is incredible at this IME, but those are pretty…

An android device in standby in airplane mode will last a week in a single charge easily, in my experience. But if you have radio on, yeah, 2 days tops.

What device is that? It doesn't sound all that exceptional.

The longest I've had my iphone 14 pro unplugged was around 3 days, with very light use (I'd say 2 hours of active use, randomly browsing HN and reading a newspaper on its app). It barely went below 50%, with all radios on.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#227

Post by luuurker »

rekoil wrote: post #116
belltaco wrote: post #14

I wish they would label it so that it shows 100% charge when it's actually charged 80%, and then give an option to 'overcharge' a configurable amount till 125% (the current 100%). That way it will make people aware that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging, and be picky when they overcharge. But this won't happen because reduced battery life is a big direct and indirect(by reducing performance like Appl…

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phon…

Some devices had a small performance hit, but some had had their clock speeds to less than half, making devices laggy even during normal usage.

By itself this is already a problem, but they also decided to not allow you to disable the feature or reverse to an older iOS version. I don't think they informed their Apple store employees either, at least I was told to buy a new phone. They had to be sued first to add a simple setting, ffs!

So yeah, I think the criticism is valid and deserved. I'm sure they had good intentions, but the implementation was shit and not only they created issues for some iPhone users, but also profited with new iPhone sales (not me, that was my last iPhone).

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#228

Post by Zetobal »

Reason077 wrote: post #135
rekoil wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phon…

> "What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load" It wasn't what Apple was doing that was the problem, it was the fact that they were initially quite secretive about it! People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Now days iOS tells if your battery no longer supports peak performance, which is the right thing to do. > "Yes, they s…

iPhones with degraded batteries have the tendency to shutdown on peak loads. Default is fine but only after a big fat pop-up with the option to deactivate it.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#229

Post by vladvasiliu »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #216
Arainach wrote: post #3

I've given up trying. If a device is willing to lie to me and only charge to 80% while saying it's charged, great, but all of this "try to stay in a range" logic flies in the face of reality. Every device I use besides my cell phone, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo 3DS has atrocious power drain when not in use. OS does not matter. Windows laptop, Linux laptop, ChromeOS laptop, Android Tablet, Amazon Tablet, you name it…

I don't understand why devices can't switch to external power when plugged in. It's like they simultaneously charge and discharge the battery instead of bypassing it.

I think some do. I don't use my macbook anymore so don't have it on hand to check, but both my HP laptops (one running windows, the other linux) and my iphone seem to not fluctuate the battery charge if I leave them plugged in. The iphone doesn't even get warm, which can happen when it recharges from a drained battery.

The laptops won't even attempt to charge if the battery's above a certain threshold, like 95%. My linux laptop barely moves from my desk, so it regularly spends multiple days on end with the battery showing something like 96%.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#230

Post by luuurker »

fingerlocks wrote: post #194
rat9988 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.

Do we know they actually didn’t tell people? Does anyone read through the “What’s New” pop-ups after they upgrade the OS, or just blindly dismiss them? Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it. I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of…

Let's say you read that "what's new" pop-up and still update your phone because you expect it to work like before, but it doesn't because you're one of the lucky ones that had the clock speeds cut in half.

What do you do now? Your phone is laggy and there's no setting to disable the feature or a way to revert to an old iOS version. You go to the store and they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone!

The feature was useful, the implementation wasn't. The issues weren't caused by the user not reading the changelog.

Post reply on HN