4 ms·

Yep, purely malicious, no plausible reasons at all to reduce peak power drain on old batteries, in fact - batteries only get better with age! If we repeat this

Yep, purely malicious, no plausible reasons at all to reduce peak power drain on old batteries, in fact - batteries only get better with age! If we repeat this lie long enough we might believe it ourselves!

enslavedrobot 4y ago
Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious. The fact that phones have no option to bypass the battery when plugged in is another obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose. In fact, I built a relay that connects to home assistant to turn off my charger when the phone reaches 80% at night. My battery is much healthier for it. It would be dirt simple to add this option to your phone OS.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  OEMs seem to be getting better about this. I see batter limiters in MacOS, Samsung phones, Framework laptops, Microsoft Surface devices. Now we just need to normalize it on budget devices.
- alyandon 4y ago
  Samsung seems to have added a battery care feature that will detect if your device is mostly plugged in all the time and charge to 85% instead of 100%.
- misnome 4y ago
  > Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious. As pointed out by sibling comments this is somewhat common nowadays. iPhones will IIRC default only charge to ~80% overnight, stay there, and only charge up to 100% when it thinks your normal wake time is approaching. I remember Macbooks starting to do this at least 10-15 years ago. I'm not sure well this aligns as "an obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose". Is it possible that it isn't a grand conspiracy, but instead a natural consequence of having to quality and expense of parts vs what one thinks the market can support? The other option from your proposal of course is never to charge above 80%, or call 80% "100%", in which scenario you would almost certainly have the same sources accusing them of being underhanded and anti-consumer by "artificially limiting battery capacity".
  - enslavedrobot 4y ago
    There is obviously no conspiracy. It's common business sense to not care about battery life in a product with a 2 year lifecycle. The fact that SOME phones don't overcharge your phone battery shows that it's a business decision rather than a technology challenge.
prettyStandard 4y ago
> It's not the crime, it's the coverup. They may well had a technical reason, but I certainly don't appreciate them being underhanded about it. I don't have an apple device right now, so I'm generally out of the loop, but it seems like right now people can toggle the slow down, and also go get their batteries replaced. That seems like a pretty good end situation. Did I get that right?
- misnome 4y ago
  Underhanded? As a response to the incident they have made it so you can explicitly turn it off, sure. But people trust the phone to make a thousand other decisions on a moment-to-moment basis about the tradeoff between CPU and battery, is it reasonable to call it being "underhanded" when singling out a specific one of them retrospectively? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I know a single person who would choose to trade an hour or two's battery for a 5% CPU bump. Much like the iPhone 4 reception fiasco. Nothing actually changed reception-wise, except they changed the way they calculated and displayed the signal. But people were now seeing _different_ signal profiles than they expected, and apparently Apple decided (eventually) that changing it back and giving everyone a free case was better marketing that continuing to try and persuade people of that.
  - jodrellblank 4y ago
    It wasn't even trading an hour or two battery for a 5% bump, it was "when you open the camera, the phone rebooted" - or when you did anything else which demanded a short burst of high power the ageing battery could no longer supply. Imagine arguing that you would prefer 'broken phone' instead of 'working slower phone'.
  - prettyStandard 4y ago
    How did we find out about the battery thing?
  - mrjin 4y ago
    Haha, you reminded me of the days when some of my friends arguing iPhone's signal wasn't that bad but just could not make the call when everyone else could.
mrjin 4y ago
It's never the device vendor's decision to make on how users should their devices. That's not something to argue about.

enslavedrobot 4y ago

Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious. The fact that phones have no option to bypass the battery when plugged in is another obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose. In fact, I built a relay that connects to home assistant to turn off my charger when the phone reaches 80% at night. My battery is much healthier for it. It would be dirt simple to add this option to your phone OS.

prettyStandard 4y ago
OEMs seem to be getting better about this. I see batter limiters in MacOS, Samsung phones, Framework laptops, Microsoft Surface devices. Now we just need to normalize it on budget devices.
alyandon 4y ago
Samsung seems to have added a battery care feature that will detect if your device is mostly plugged in all the time and charge to 85% instead of 100%.
misnome 4y ago
> Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious. As pointed out by sibling comments this is somewhat common nowadays. iPhones will IIRC default only charge to ~80% overnight, stay there, and only charge up to 100% when it thinks your normal wake time is approaching. I remember Macbooks starting to do this at least 10-15 years ago. I'm not sure well this aligns as "an obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose". Is it possible that it isn't a grand conspiracy, but instead a natural consequence of having to quality and expense of parts vs what one thinks the market can support? The other option from your proposal of course is never to charge above 80%, or call 80% "100%", in which scenario you would almost certainly have the same sources accusing them of being underhanded and anti-consumer by "artificially limiting battery capacity".
- enslavedrobot 4y ago
  There is obviously no conspiracy. It's common business sense to not care about battery life in a product with a 2 year lifecycle. The fact that SOME phones don't overcharge your phone battery shows that it's a business decision rather than a technology challenge.

prettyStandard 4y ago

> It's not the crime, it's the coverup. They may well had a technical reason, but I certainly don't appreciate them being underhanded about it. I don't have an apple device right now, so I'm generally out of the loop, but it seems like right now people can toggle the slow down, and also go get their batteries replaced. That seems like a pretty good end situation. Did I get that right?

misnome 4y ago
Underhanded? As a response to the incident they have made it so you can explicitly turn it off, sure. But people trust the phone to make a thousand other decisions on a moment-to-moment basis about the tradeoff between CPU and battery, is it reasonable to call it being "underhanded" when singling out a specific one of them retrospectively? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I know a single person who would choose to trade an hour or two's battery for a 5% CPU bump. Much like the iPhone 4 reception fiasco. Nothing actually changed reception-wise, except they changed the way they calculated and displayed the signal. But people were now seeing _different_ signal profiles than they expected, and apparently Apple decided (eventually) that changing it back and giving everyone a free case was better marketing that continuing to try and persuade people of that.
- jodrellblank 4y ago
  It wasn't even trading an hour or two battery for a 5% bump, it was "when you open the camera, the phone rebooted" - or when you did anything else which demanded a short burst of high power the ageing battery could no longer supply. Imagine arguing that you would prefer 'broken phone' instead of 'working slower phone'.
- prettyStandard 4y ago
  How did we find out about the battery thing?
- mrjin 4y ago
  Haha, you reminded me of the days when some of my friends arguing iPhone's signal wasn't that bad but just could not make the call when everyone else could.

mrjin 4y ago

It's never the device vendor's decision to make on how users should their devices. That's not something to argue about.