Comment on Is Fast Charging Killing the Battery? A 2-Year Test on 40 Phones
BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 4 months ago
It's as if engineers knew what they're doing.
If engineers were the ones in control that would mean something.
As I see it, phone manufacturers have zero reasons to keep the battery degradation low, but many reasons to push advertised capacity and charging speed. If you were cynical, you could also assume that they’re trying to make sure the battery doesn’t last too long because they want to keep selling new phones.
I think we all know that if an engineer went to upper management and said “I can charge these batteries faster, but it degrades the battery life by 20% over a year.” they would have said “Do it! We won’t mention that last part.”
Well, except for the engineers on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. They put the battery terminals too close together, making it really easy for a short to occur.
Samsung notoriously fucks up something up in their phones - from shitty interface changes, to excessive battery drain. Just buy Pixel instead
Literally every flagship pixel up until the 8 or so has had major issues lol. The 7 series are all having batteries start swelling, causing Google to offer refunds lol.
You literally could not have chosen a worse brand to suggest on this topic 🤣
You say that like batteries don’t need replaced every few years or that they didn’t design the Samsung Note 8 phone that kept catching on fire.
Engineers get told to make the phone charge as quickly as possible, while still lasting 2 years. After that, the company with those engineers pretty much wants the battery to fail, so they can sell a new device.
The one thing I wanted to see from that video, was also just testing the batteries until they went below like 75% capacity. The initial degradation may start off similar for capacity, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
Yep. I’m gonna miss real engineering with the coming Ai-driven Idiocracy.
Granted, with all the planned obsolescence happening, you could also argue that engineers “knew” what they were doing.
Planned obsolescence happens but it's not as common as most people think it is.
The planned obsolescence is most likely a deliberate trade off rather than actual planned obsolescence.
If fast charging did do significant damage to battery life and this was known at the time of implementation, the decision would have been “users want fast charging phones” Vs “users want devices that last a long time”.
In this instance, the convenience of fast charging absolutely would have won.
“Users want a clear and easy to use device” Vs “users want a robust device”. Which is why we all have glass screens, and the glass technology had to catch up to further expectations.
“Users want easy wireless connectivity” Vs “users want fast and reliable network speeds”. WiFi wins, and has to catch up to further expectations.
And probably not as intentional as most people think it is vs just laziness and maybe a lack of planning.
So nothing planned obsolescence, then?
It’s always bulbs or Apple. Bulbs industry switched into LED like 15 years ago, which has 20x lifespan than “durable” filaments; and iPhones average life is 6 years whereas competitors usually went to bin in 3 years.
FauxPseudo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Engineers have the best of intentions. The Bean counters have very different intentions and they’re the ones that corporate listens to.