6 ms·

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

plushpuffin 9y ago
I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.
- darrylb42 9y ago
  Same here, the phone is otherwise fine. I don't really want to go to a Pixel 2XL because I like having a headphone jack.
- kilroy123 9y ago
  Same here. I have to carry around an extra battery booster. :-/
- disconnected 9y ago
  I have a similar situation. My Android (1st Gen Moto G, running Lineage OS, about 3 years old) shuts down once the battery level hits 15%. You can actually see it change from 15% to 1% for one brief moment before it shuts down. Sure, the battery is old, but this behavior is unlike the behavior of any other OS/device I've seen. I've seen some laptops with seriously messed up batteries and as far as I can remember, the OS reports a smooth discharge profile without steep drops and without and strange "surprises". I think Android is probably not taking battery health into account when it reports remaining capacity, but that is only a guess.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    My old MacBook Pro battery got so bad that it would jump down and back up 20% randomly.
  - k3a 9y ago
    Can't it be a problem with the fuel gauge inacurately measuring the battery capacity? I have seen it only on one "cheap" Android device and I have been using Androids for a long time. Anyway, easily removable batteries are the way to go.
- wstrange 9y ago
  I replaced the battery on my 6P, and it's like a new phone. It is a bit tricky, but well worth it.
- katastic 9y ago
  That's really strange. Because most/all modern systems build statistics about your battery as it charges and drains, to predict the life left. Without those statistics they'd have no idea how long it will last because it changes over the life of the battery. In Linux you can even see pretty graphs showing "confidence" for each percentage of battery vs "how confident" Linux is of remaining power. https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_statistics_laptop_battery_history.jpg https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_s... My Samsung Android phone shuts down at 5-7% battery life. And the battery dies much faster these days. But it's never "inaccurate." It doesn't jump from 50% to 2% over a course of five minutes. Other than something else being wrong with your OS, my only guess there would be the battery got bad so quickly the OS hasn't adapted to the new life cycle yet by removing enough of the old datapoints.
- praneshp 9y ago
  Effectively the same, but it just quickly degrades from 60-0 for me (like 20 mins of just reddit/hn). 100-60 is still decent.
bjackman 9y ago
I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.
- londons_explore 9y ago
  I vaguely remember the dram and camera clock rates being reduced when the battery SoC went under 40% in the nexus 5, and then when users complained of early shutdowns when using the camera with HDR mode, an update changed it to 60%. I think I even commented on the bugreport that it would be best to do the frequency scaling based on interrupts from the voltage regulators on board, but that piping all the necessary drivers/events to do that with low enough latency to not cause an under-voltage reset was far more work than was feasible. Thats also why 60fps video dropped frames at the start of the video if you were recording video with less than 60% battery. Anyone care to dig out the relevant commit...?
izacus 9y ago
Most Android devices have rather severe issues with flash degradation (due to use of cheaper chips, controllers and connection... cheap MMC controllers are still very standard) which makes them practically unusable after a few years.
- copperx 9y ago
  Is this true for flagship Android devices too?
  - izacus 9y ago
    Depends really, a lot of them nowdays use better flash controllers and technology (e.g. UFS) but only time can tell how they cope with aging. Pixels seem to be doing quite well.
- ams6110 9y ago
  I've owned two low cost Moto G phones and never had this issue.
- endorphone 9y ago
  Most? Absolute nonsense. The Nexus 7 have a small issue that was resolved when Google added TRIM support for Android. That was years ago. I have a long history with almost every Android device. The device doesn't get slower, the battery life just gets terrible.
  - plaguuuuuu 9y ago
    My Nexus 6P's performance has degraded considerably over the past couple of years. It's actually quite laggy now. A few of my friends report the same with their 6Ps. To be fair I haven't tried factory resetting it in a while, although I shouldn't need to do that in the first place..
  - izacus 9y ago
    The 2012 Nexus 7 is an outlier because it has especially bad flash controller - by 2015 most of the devices were unusable due to degraded flash. TRIM helped very little. Other devices suffer from similar effects - not as bad, but most devices certanly lose quite a bit of I/O performance (especially writes) over time which makes OS run noticably slower.
slg 9y ago
Electric cars have fundamentally the same problem and Tesla decided to attack it by hiding some of the battery's capacity when the car is new. While the car might report to the user it is 100% full, it might only be actually 90% full. The battery can therefore lose a decent percent of its capacity before the user will ever notice the difference. This decision was made because cars obviously have a longer ownership cycle than phones and a drastic drop in range as a car ages is a huge flaw. But I do wonder if any phone companies might start to rethink this decision now that we are seeing some people use the same smartphone for 3-5 years.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Li-ion batteries also last longer when kept between 30% and 90%. Several car manufacturers don't let you completely charge or expend your battery for this reason.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Tesla, for example, encourages owners to not charge beyond 90%, and refuses you let you drive below some number, which is around 20%, that it hides from the driver.
  - UncleEntity 9y ago
    I wonder how much driving style effects that too, racing around vs Driving Ms. Daisy?
    - bri3d 9y ago
      Discharging lithium batteries at a high C rate (C = Instantaneous Draw / Capacity) causes a different form of degraded life than storage at a high state of charge. And the major killer of lithium batteries is heat, which Tesla are known to manage well. The biggest killer, though, is storage with the graphite electrode more than 50% lithiated - there is a gigantic step-up in capacity fade when batteries are stored with the State of Charge over around 90%, which Tesla are very smart to avoid. http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full
aequitas 9y ago
I had a Nexus 5 before which I replaced of about 2 years after buying it. Can definitely say performance improved after that (for a short while though as it was a cheap ebay battery).
meebs 9y ago
Nexus 6P the phone will die randomly at random percentages. Sometimes you can turn it back on hours later and it'll last thirty minutes. Sometimes you have to "charge" it a little bit first. This issue happens at all percentages and I've had it for over 8 months now.

How do non-apple devices cope as they age ? Any word on what Nexus, Galaxy or Pixel devices of a similar vintage do? does the performance stay the same but the battery life becomes shorter?

plushpuffin 9y ago

I have a Nexus 6P and its battery is going bad. It just shuts down when it reaches 20-30%. Kind of annoying because I never know quite how much battery life I actually have remaining.

darrylb42 9y ago
Same here, the phone is otherwise fine. I don't really want to go to a Pixel 2XL because I like having a headphone jack.
kilroy123 9y ago
Same here. I have to carry around an extra battery booster. :-/
disconnected 9y ago
I have a similar situation. My Android (1st Gen Moto G, running Lineage OS, about 3 years old) shuts down once the battery level hits 15%. You can actually see it change from 15% to 1% for one brief moment before it shuts down. Sure, the battery is old, but this behavior is unlike the behavior of any other OS/device I've seen. I've seen some laptops with seriously messed up batteries and as far as I can remember, the OS reports a smooth discharge profile without steep drops and without and strange "surprises". I think Android is probably not taking battery health into account when it reports remaining capacity, but that is only a guess.
- kalleboo 9y ago
  My old MacBook Pro battery got so bad that it would jump down and back up 20% randomly.
- k3a 9y ago
  Can't it be a problem with the fuel gauge inacurately measuring the battery capacity? I have seen it only on one "cheap" Android device and I have been using Androids for a long time. Anyway, easily removable batteries are the way to go.
wstrange 9y ago
I replaced the battery on my 6P, and it's like a new phone. It is a bit tricky, but well worth it.
katastic 9y ago
That's really strange. Because most/all modern systems build statistics about your battery as it charges and drains, to predict the life left. Without those statistics they'd have no idea how long it will last because it changes over the life of the battery. In Linux you can even see pretty graphs showing "confidence" for each percentage of battery vs "how confident" Linux is of remaining power. https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_statistics_laptop_battery_history.jpg https://www.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/power_s... My Samsung Android phone shuts down at 5-7% battery life. And the battery dies much faster these days. But it's never "inaccurate." It doesn't jump from 50% to 2% over a course of five minutes. Other than something else being wrong with your OS, my only guess there would be the battery got bad so quickly the OS hasn't adapted to the new life cycle yet by removing enough of the old datapoints.
praneshp 9y ago
Effectively the same, but it just quickly degrades from 60-0 for me (like 20 mins of just reddit/hn). 100-60 is still decent.

bjackman 9y ago

I worked on Android power perf (frequency scaling in particular) for the last 18 months and I'm not aware of any linkage with the battery state, except for the Battery Saver mode. So yeah same perf, just shorter life. There could be something in vendor Android builds I don't know about, but it isn't there in AOSP and almost certainly isn't in Pixel/Nexus.

londons_explore 9y ago
I vaguely remember the dram and camera clock rates being reduced when the battery SoC went under 40% in the nexus 5, and then when users complained of early shutdowns when using the camera with HDR mode, an update changed it to 60%. I think I even commented on the bugreport that it would be best to do the frequency scaling based on interrupts from the voltage regulators on board, but that piping all the necessary drivers/events to do that with low enough latency to not cause an under-voltage reset was far more work than was feasible. Thats also why 60fps video dropped frames at the start of the video if you were recording video with less than 60% battery. Anyone care to dig out the relevant commit...?

izacus 9y ago

Most Android devices have rather severe issues with flash degradation (due to use of cheaper chips, controllers and connection... cheap MMC controllers are still very standard) which makes them practically unusable after a few years.

copperx 9y ago
Is this true for flagship Android devices too?
- izacus 9y ago
  Depends really, a lot of them nowdays use better flash controllers and technology (e.g. UFS) but only time can tell how they cope with aging. Pixels seem to be doing quite well.
ams6110 9y ago
I've owned two low cost Moto G phones and never had this issue.
endorphone 9y ago
Most? Absolute nonsense. The Nexus 7 have a small issue that was resolved when Google added TRIM support for Android. That was years ago. I have a long history with almost every Android device. The device doesn't get slower, the battery life just gets terrible.
- plaguuuuuu 9y ago
  My Nexus 6P's performance has degraded considerably over the past couple of years. It's actually quite laggy now. A few of my friends report the same with their 6Ps. To be fair I haven't tried factory resetting it in a while, although I shouldn't need to do that in the first place..
- izacus 9y ago
  The 2012 Nexus 7 is an outlier because it has especially bad flash controller - by 2015 most of the devices were unusable due to degraded flash. TRIM helped very little. Other devices suffer from similar effects - not as bad, but most devices certanly lose quite a bit of I/O performance (especially writes) over time which makes OS run noticably slower.

slg 9y ago

Electric cars have fundamentally the same problem and Tesla decided to attack it by hiding some of the battery's capacity when the car is new. While the car might report to the user it is 100% full, it might only be actually 90% full. The battery can therefore lose a decent percent of its capacity before the user will ever notice the difference. This decision was made because cars obviously have a longer ownership cycle than phones and a drastic drop in range as a car ages is a huge flaw. But I do wonder if any phone companies might start to rethink this decision now that we are seeing some people use the same smartphone for 3-5 years.

tormeh 9y ago
Li-ion batteries also last longer when kept between 30% and 90%. Several car manufacturers don't let you completely charge or expend your battery for this reason.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Tesla, for example, encourages owners to not charge beyond 90%, and refuses you let you drive below some number, which is around 20%, that it hides from the driver.
- UncleEntity 9y ago
  I wonder how much driving style effects that too, racing around vs Driving Ms. Daisy?
  - bri3d 9y ago
    Discharging lithium batteries at a high C rate (C = Instantaneous Draw / Capacity) causes a different form of degraded life than storage at a high state of charge. And the major killer of lithium batteries is heat, which Tesla are known to manage well. The biggest killer, though, is storage with the graphite electrode more than 50% lithiated - there is a gigantic step-up in capacity fade when batteries are stored with the State of Charge over around 90%, which Tesla are very smart to avoid. http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/9/A1872.full

aequitas 9y ago

I had a Nexus 5 before which I replaced of about 2 years after buying it. Can definitely say performance improved after that (for a short while though as it was a cheap ebay battery).

meebs 9y ago

Nexus 6P the phone will die randomly at random percentages. Sometimes you can turn it back on hours later and it'll last thirty minutes. Sometimes you have to "charge" it a little bit first. This issue happens at all percentages and I've had it for over 8 months now.