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Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

electronics.stackexchange.com

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Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#251

Post by batch12 »

thfuran wrote: post #246
batch12 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When this came out, most people were distrustful because it was a secret. It was seen as a way to force device upgrades, not save devices. If they had been transparent, even in documentation, (and allowed opt out) it would have curbed some of this backlash.

It may well have, but that doesn't mean the backlash was reasonable.

I believe it was perfectly reasonable based on the information at hand. Apple gave no reason to believe otherwise and behaved in a way that appeared deceptive.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#252

Post by teekert »

I always try to keep between 20-80% with my iPhone and consequently always feel bad about my AirPods. The case is always as empty as possible, the pods as full as possible. They spend almost their entire life at 100% as a result of the charging case. Even though I always use them at a max of 1 hour or so at a time.

In other words: I first need to drain the case to the very bad 0% to get the pods to go down, otherwise they sit at 100% almost always because sometime I don't use them for days. I hope Apple designed for this...

I really wish I had more control over my device's charging cycles. I generally use phones until they really die (replaced my OnePlus 3 with an iPhone 12 mini because the power button broke and battery was down to 10 hrs or so), iPhone 12 mini still feels like my new phone and works great, I see myself using it for years to come (especially because I think it is the perfect size).

Perhaps I should get a non-charging AirPods case somewhere.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#253

Post by osdril »

rxyz wrote: post #217
osdril wrote: post #154

FYI, on Apple Silicon Apple included a firmware-level "hard-switch" to limit the charge to 75/80% only. It was discovered by marcan while working on Asahi and in my experience it's much more convenient than the built-in ML-based solution (and also less hacky and bloated than AlDente). See this discussion [0] on GitHub for the explanation and this snippet [1] for easy use. This solution also works while the laptop is…

this switch is available to users on iPhone 15's

I know, I hope Apple will decide to expose it to everyone in the future, since it's already implemented..

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#254

Post by fkyoureadthedoc »

luuurker wrote: post #230
fingerlocks wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> they don't tell you anything about a battery replacement, but instead suggest a new iPhone!

You keep repeating this, but battery replacements were a thing before this whole debacle. I got them a few times, I think they were like $79 (yes definitely more money than the sus extended batteries I'd buy off eBay for my HTC Evo). I realize society collectively forgot about them once the back stopped coming off the phone, but surely a tech savvy hackernews would realize that they couldn't use the same battery forever without replacement.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#255

Post by artimaeis »

deely3 wrote: post #186
sherry-sherry wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you force close the apps? Don't do this unless an app is unresponsive/not working correctly. It will just make apps slower to restart, using more power than it would if left to suspend/un-suspend as it's meant to.

Issues is: how can I know is app working correctly? I have 15 apps "in memory", my phone started lagging, what should I do?

If it's an iPhone, then iOS will suspend background apps in favor of foreground apps. If your phone is lagging it's almost certainly because the foreground app is resource-intensive.

If the foreground app requires more resources than are available due to background apps, it will suspend background apps to free up those resources.

Apps don't really have much they can do to get around this, assuming you're not jailbreaking or installing local profiles.

Well-built applications will have already saved state with every interaction. When they go to the background they will start unloading unnecessary resources and prepare for possible suspension by saving any additional data. Then when they're suspended, their state is saved to a snapshot that they can load in later so it's as though they never were suspended.

There _is_ more capacity in recent versions of iOS for an app to use background resources, and to start a background process automatically. Still, the system treats background processes with a lower priority and terminates them for using too much power way more aggressively.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#256

Post by vuln »

Zetobal wrote: post #228
Reason077 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

As if the typical user (not anyone that browsers hn) actually reads the _big fat popup_ and would just click through anyways. With no care or worry about what that pop up said or the implications.

Apple “You clicked a pop up that said you accepted random shutdowns and reboots due to a degraded battery instead of allowing us to degrade performance to enable a stable experience with a degraded battery.”

How would you explain the above to tech illiterate people? Increase suppose calls because you allowed a user to chose between degraded yet stable performance versus seemly random (to the user) reboots and shutdowns?

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#257

Post by nxobject »

Qwertious wrote: post #151
Reason077 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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…

>People just started noticing their phones slowing down without explanation. Also, Apple already had somewhat of a reputation; this was far from the first time they would do shitty things, blame the users, and/or refuse to communicate what's going on. It's a classic case of 100% right and 100% fired: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDO24U3hMkU

Well, duh. You're holding it wrong. /s

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#258

Post by tzs »

rpigab wrote: post #224
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 t…

Similar with my Surface Pro 4. After a couple years of casual use (it was my "browse on the couch" computer) the battery was significantly degraded.

I think a big part of the problem is that "off" doesn't necessarily mean "off". If you just do "Shutdown" from the menu it is just some kind of suspend or hibernate state (I'm not sure which...PC hardware and Windows have a bunch of different "not fully on" states). It's still doing stuff that uses power. It's also doing periodic things like automatic updates.

The net result I believe is that even though from my point of view it was only being used occasionally, it was actually going through a battery cycle almost as often as if it had been my main computer.

I haven't used Windows in a while so don't remember all the details, but I think if you hold shift while invoking "Shutdown" it shuts down more than a shiftless "Shutdown". There are also command line commands that will shut down even more.

I never did find a way to shut it down enough that I could not use it for a week and still have a usable charge on it.

Hey, do you have occasional problems with disk encryption? Every so often when I open it I get some obnoxiously bright screen telling me I need to enter my Bitlocker recovery key. But if I cancel that it goes ahead and boots and has no trouble decrypting the disk.

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#259

Post by [deleted] »

nrvn wrote: post #205
cubefox wrote: post #204

This post doesn't give any actual argument why you should charge your device only to 80%. If you use your phone for, say, four years, and charge it to 100% regularly, how much will the battery life deteriorate during those four years? I assume if the fully-charged capacity after three years is still at least 80% of the original, then regularly charging it fully was absolutely worth it. The point is that deterioration…

Bought my previous iphone in early 2018. Changed the battery this spring because its health reportedly fell below 80% of its maximum capacity. I could not care less to be honest. Always charged to 100%. Dropped the phone multiple times throughout its lifetime. Fully discharged at random. Exposed to 50°C and direct sunlight as well as well below zero. 5 years is a good job done for a non-replaceable battery. And the c…

[deleted]

Re: Charging a lithium battery to 80% only?

#260

Post by Angostura »

thfuran wrote: post #246
batch12 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When this came out, most people were distrustful because it was a secret. It was seen as a way to force device upgrades, not save devices. If they had been transparent, even in documentation, (and allowed opt out) it would have curbed some of this backlash.

It may well have, but that doesn't mean the backlash was reasonable.

I was an iPhone 6 user at the time and an Apple fan. I think the secrecy surrounding the move means that the backlash was reasonable.

Consider: a pop up saying "Your battery need replacing, it is operating in slow mode to avoid crashes" v people thinking "Damn, my phone is slow - I better buy a new phone"

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