Submitted 8 months ago by otter@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.ifixit.com/News/90983/why-charging-your-gadgets-over-80-is-such-a-bad-idea
This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.
All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.
Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.
Your device manufacturer has designed it to break in as many ways as possible so you have to buy a new one.
Why do you think everyone switched to non-removable batteries?
If you don’t take responsibility for your device, you are just like the people that think not owning your own hardware is fine.
Why do you think everyone switched to non-removable batteries?
Well the purported reasoning is that less shielding is required. Seems plausible but IDK how true. I assume it’s partly true.
Samsung phones have the capability to do this. There’s a setting you can set to only charge to 80%.
Android phones in general have something called Adaptive Charging that attunes to when you normally need a full charge. For instance if you are charging at night while you’re sleeping it will charge slower than it would during the day to improve battery health.
Mine automatically charges to 80% if you have a alarm set, then it charges the rest in the last minutes.
Yup. If it’s such a huge issue, phones should only charge to 80% and report that to the user as 100%. But phone manufacturers won’t do that, because users want to be able to report the longest battery life possible when selling new phones. They don’t care that the charging habits are bad for battery longevity, because the user has already purchased the phone.
And they will purchase their next phone sooner if the battery on their old phones die early.
100% agree. Mate, there’s an another ongoing post on lemmy about autosaving documents, and how everyone seems to think that saving files with their fingers pressing keys on a keyboard is the best approach possible in 2024 because software just can’t do this reliably.
Of course everyone also knows better than their charger, battery and device.
You sound quite irritated. iFixit doesn’t even make phones. Direct it elsewhere.
He’s directing it to a forum of people under a topic regarding phones not being optimized to charge past 80%. Quite a fair frustration I’d say, since most people charge their phones while sleeping. The technology should stop charging automatically
I doubt this is directed at ifixit. I agree with their general comment, but at the same time device manufacturers have no incentive to make their devices last longer unless they are forced to.
Sir, this is a lemmy. It’s all about figuring out how to be the most outraged rather than the most rational.
No, it’s your problem.
The manufacturers correctly surmise that most people prefer a battery that holds it’s charge longer over the first year or so, rather than a battery that will last more years.
If your preferences differ from that of most people, then you need to exercise your preferences.
When you say “make it do x and y” who should be the person that does it? Without raising enough awareness of the problem, change will not happen. Te only way for it to happen is tjat enough people is pissed off and changes brands.
Just build phones with the understanding that batteries are consumables and make them easy to replace and standardized. Then swap in a new $5 battery when you need to so. Make the raw materials reclaimable too of course.
But then you aren’t forced to buy a new phone every few years?
What? No just a new battery. That’s the point.
No one is forced. Especially with fast charging.
The money is in the software services nowadays anyway. Subscription AI bullshit, cloud n stuff.
This is what the new European bill is forcing manufacturers to do.
Batteries of handheld electronics have to be replaceable.
No. People online have really misrepresented that bill.
All it says is that it should be easily replaceable by someone of moderate skill. I.e. still having to pry open your phone carefully, but now without using strong adhesive.
It also doesn’t apply for phone batteries over a certain size, or batteries that will still retain a set amount of capacity after a few years (I think 73%).
People are heavily, heavily mistaken if they think it’ll be a return to the days of trivially removable batteries.
Do most people not have the option to protect their battery already?
“Sleep time is estimated based on your usage patterns”
These systems exist on pretty much all modern phones, but they all work the same (shitty) way, by assuming your schedule is exactly the same every day and giving you zero programmable control.
Sure, but let’s also preserve current batteries as long as possible so we can lower our carbon foot print. We need to do both.
To be clear, you are still taking about rechargeable batteries right? I agree those should be replaceable. I sure as hell don’t think phone should use single use batteries!
Yes, 18650 or a standardized rectangular equivalent.
If you don’t ever charge it to over 80% then it’s effectively already degraded 20% since the day you got it. I’ll rather just use it as intented and then replace the battery when it no longer holds charge. That’s just one of the reasons I didn’t buy one with built in battery.
But you can still choose to charge it to 100% when you anticipate you need that extra 20%. So it’s not really “already degraded” it’s just “on demand”.
Which has consequences. Spontaneously staying out if you didn’t decide to charge to 100% the night before and running out of battery.
It’s not “on demand” it’s “in stock ready for dispatch.”
I don’t want to have to order a day ahead to get a non-degraded battery.
Now you’re spending limited cognitive resources to try and anticipate phone battery usage.
But increasingly the batteries are glued in.
Thanks to EU this will be changing in the near future. Personally I’m one of the stubborn ones who refused to buy devices with non-removable batteries and by the looks of it I will never have to either. Hopefully this applies to the headphone jack aswell.
Increasingly I buy fairphones
I’ve never seen an unreplaceable battery. Most phones use a glue that is easily removed with pull-tabs.
That being said it’s still a far cry from the devices of yore where you just popped off the back cover and slapped a new one in.
If you don’t ever charge it to over 80% then it’s effectively already degraded 20%
I wouldn’t agree. I’m doing that with my car, e.g., or with my notebook. 80% on both never sees the end of a normal day around here, but if I know a day is going to be long, e.g. going to a conference or something like that, I remove the limit before and have 20% more range on the first leg of the trip or know safely that I won’t have to hunt for a plug in the hallway at a party in the evening. If I were to degrade the battery immediately I wouldn’t have that option.
but that’s an incommensurable, fallacious comparison. What the article talks about is battery life, not single charge duration
This is my reasoning behind charging everything including my EV to 100%
Here’s my headline: Why obsessing over battery degradation is unhealthy and you should just do whatever is easiest for you
“hey here is a way to increase the life of your battery by possibly 400%.”
“OMG! Why are you obsessing over this!”
Seriously how dare they try to help us and educate us!
the 400% figure is extremely misleading and based on old assumptions and old battery tech.
Also it you’re not keeping the phone for 20 years then it doesn’t make sense to calculate “total electrons” over the absolute entirety of the battery “life”.
Agreed. If you’re a device maker and you haven’t considered the possibility of your users plugging in their devices for long periods of time in your design, then i feel that’s on you to improve your product.
I have enabled the option to limit charging to 85% on my Samsung, and last weekend I needed it to last for 2 days so I charged it to 100%. Easily made it. It’s nice to know you have that 100% when you need it .
If it shouldn’t be charged above 80%, then make 80% the new 100%. “But this one goes to 11”
They already did. The percentage range on your phone’s battery display is basically a usable range rather than an absolute range. The article talks about phone manufacturers making changes to their charging systems to optimize battery function, but the headline bit about not charging past a certain point has been taken into account by Android and iOS for ages.
A lot of charging circuits and battery designs already do this transparently.
I don’t like this article because it misses some of the more important details around how to lengthen your device’s life and why you may or may not want to keep your battery at a specific state of charge.
Personally, I don’t stress about the batteries in my devices at all. I generally keep an eye on the power and plug it in when convenient, but target plugging it in before it gets too far below 50%. I’ve historically had almost zero issues with the batteries in my devices wearing out before I’m ready to replace it for other reasons unless it started out with marginal battery life.
Yeah give your phone a 20% battery handicap out of the box because of your battery degredation paranoia. Dumbest shit ever.
Damn, some of you must have pretty chill lives if paying attention to what level your battery charge is at DAILY is something you want to add to your plates. I mean sure, if there was a setting that allowed you to have the phone automatically cut charging at 80% this might be worth thinking about. But when I charge my phone its during times when I dont have to think about it (Aka 90% of the time, when I’m asleep)
… Aren’t devices designed to only charge the battery to 90% (and report that as 100%), because actually changing a battery to 100% is pretty harmful for it?
I plug all my devices directly into the power line pole outside; everything charges to 75000%
At the risk of sounding like Spinal Tap, why don’t they just make the chargers stop at 80% and have the interface show 100%?
I live in earthquake, volcano, and tsunami territory, so I think I'll keep charging to 100% for now.
When I lived in the US and went through a hurricane, we had no power for almost 2 weeks and that stuck with me.
Depends who you ask. To manufacturers it’s a brilliant idea. It’s not a mystery that no electrical engineer knows that Li-Ion batteries don’t like to be fully charged. It’s just that manufacturers realized that charging 100% means you battery will die at around 2 year mark or 600-1000 charge cycles and that will be enough push for some people to buy a new device while at the same time your device seems to last longer on a single charge. Charging to 80% or 85% significantly extends life span of a battery. At that point chemistry almost doesn’t degrade.
And it’s not just with mobile devices and batteries that this is happening. Engineering with a plan to fail at specific time has become a precise science. Making something that will last forever is not that difficult, just not lucrative to them. Take for example LED lights. Manufacturer states 50k hours at 3.1V for white LED. Reduce that voltage down to 2.5V and you have basically made it infinite but it glows less, so to compensate you’d have to add more LEDs and that hits their income. Big Clive has a great video on the subject.
not going to trust a website that makes money from repairing phones
also a lot of armchair battery scientists in here
Leaving a battery at 100% over a long time wasn’t recommended but I would imagine most devices have BMS settings to deal with this now.
So my battery is at 85 and Im Supposed to wake up to it at 50 instead of plugging it in? This is a engineering issue.
My samsung n20 ultra has the 85% charge option built in and I’ve always used it to keep my battery good. Back when it was easier to use custom roms in the 2010-2014 Era there was a lost of them that had custom “stop charging options” like it.
I also have fast/ultra fast charging disabled. If you don’t need to quickly charge your phone, it’s something else you should avoid.
For steam deck owners it gets a bit more complicated. SD has pass through charging, so once the battery is fully charged and also while it is plugged in, you aren’t powering it through the battery like cell phones and most laptops do. It’s just running off the USB c power, so if you usually play while plugged in, you aren’t cycling the battery, but you are having to allow it to fully charge.
They talk about Apple but Sony phones have had this feature for a while. In the settings you can choose whether the phone is always 100% charged, or whether it charges to 80% (or a custom %) or whether you want it full by the time you wake up.
I use the 3rd option. It stops charging when it gets to 90% and I tell it when I’m getting up, and just before it will charge up to 100 %.
Best of both worlds. Only ever having 80% to start is not nice because you get less juice during the day and need to charge by the evening. Plus battery anxiety. I’d rather have a 100% full battery.
Clearly newer, better battery tech is needed. Plus replaceable batteries.
My Galaxy s22 has an option “battery protection” that limits my battery charging to 85%. Looks like they had a good idea there.
I’m convinced that apples battery saver feature that’s AI powered and decides when to charge above 80% vs just letting you set it to 80% and manually set it to 100% when needed is to cause the batteries to die sooner, because ITS GOD AWFUL AT DOING ITS JOB PROPERLY.
If 80% is enough, there is not much to loose that is usually wäre the battery health finds its plateau after some years. I rather change my battery once it hits 80% health after two years. I don’t want to use it like it would behave when the battery is already dead.
For android users, we can easily set notifications if battery level reach certain range by using apps like Tasker. Before this I set it for full change. Change it to above 80% just now.
I know plenty of devices will stop charging when the battery is optimal and just say it’s at 100% even though it’s 80.
I still charge to 100, but I use a slow charger, so my phone doesn’t start to spew flames while it’s charging. I wouldn’t be surprised if that helped as well (as heat is another battery killer).
I just can’t be bothered to handle that shit manually.
There used to be a magisk module that would charge the battery intelligently and stop before b Full charge but I don’t think it exists anymore sadly, or at least I haven’t been able to find it
I do this myself. I have mine set to 81% as the max and get a notification when it hits that level and then I get another notification when it hits 30% so I can plug it in.
Thanks for sharing
I’m capped at 80 for my phone and car.
For my phone, I’ll have my previous phone to compare to regarding longevity. Don’t really have anything to compare to car wise though.
regrub@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Most high-quality LiPo-powered devices already do this at the hardware-level. The 100% level you see on the software is usually 80% actual charge on the battery.
shalafi@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Any way to tell? I just got a monster phone with a 22K mAh battery.
Zak@lemmy.world 8 months ago
For Android, there are a multitude of apps, such as Wattz that will tell you the actual voltage of the battery. Full may be 4.2V or 4.35V depending on the chemistry used. ACCA (root required) will let you limit charge rates and stop charging at a certain percentage.
Staying under 4 volts (around 60% for most phone batteries) will vastly extend battery service life. 80% is a bit less extension, but still far better than charging to 100%.
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
That’s one hell of a battery
What phone is that‽
Taleya@aussie.zone 8 months ago
Jesus Christ that’s a car battery
swag_money@lemmy.world 8 months ago
omg kilo milliampere
LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Charge it from a smart power supply from battery at 1 to 100% then it can show you the number of mah/h it took to charge it.
I have this power supply which also has USB-C a.aliexpress.com/_mrChiQ6
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 months ago
My phone has a 10.8Ah battery and it’s huge, no idea how big that must be.
Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
22Ah at 4.35V would be 96Wh, which iirc is just under the limit of 100Wh you can take on flights in the us, and thus the limit for basically all laptops.
Bocky@lemmy.world 8 months ago
mAh are a terrible way to measure capacity, look for watt-hours instead. You need to know the voltage for it to be a relevant measurement
hitmyspot@aussie.zone 8 months ago
It’s a pity they don’t offer the option to ‘supercharge’ to 100, so you get extended battery life when desired, when you know you will need it. Say, going camping, or plan to use the phone a lot for whatever reason.
Reverendender@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Turn it up to 11!
RobotToaster@mander.xyz 8 months ago
So is there anyway to charge my phone to 11?
Redfox8@mander.xyz 8 months ago
It’s one more than ten, so yeah, it’s better.
otter@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Yea that’s what I’ve heard, and I personally keep stuff plugged in
It was a recent article by iFixit, so I thought I’d share it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Lojcs@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Isn’t the charge limit of the battery arbitrary? The manufacturer can set whatever target voltage they want. It’s meaningless to say they limit the battery to 80% when they decide what 100% is.
XTL@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Yes
lemmyingly@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Do you have sources?
XEAL@lemm.ee 8 months ago
80% “software” should keep the battery even healthier…
oktoberpaard@feddit.nl 8 months ago
I don’t doubt the fact that they take some margin to extend the lifetime of the battery, but if we take iPhones as an example, they:
This makes me suspect that that the margin between what’s reported in software as 100% and the actual capacity of the battery is less than 20%. This also makes sense from the standpoint of the consumer expecting a long battery life on their expensive high-end device, putting pressure on the companies to make the margin smaller and the charging algorithms smarter. Just my observations, of course.