6 ms·

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" logi

• mcronce 3y ago
  FWIW, I can't speak to other operating systems, but with Linux (maybe requiring cooperative hardware? I'm actually not sure) you can configure it to stop charging at a certain % if the charge controller doesn't have reserve. I can find a link if you're interested; IIRC it was easy to setup and easy to temporarily disable if you need to fully charge for e.g. a long flight without outlets
  • Tostino 3y ago
    Most laptops come with some software bundled that helps configure this. Dell does I know. So did Lenovo.
  • myself248 3y ago
    https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/index.html
    • scns 3y ago
      https://linrunner.de/tlp/settings/battery.html https://linrunner.de/tlp/settings/battery.html
    • jonah-archive 3y ago
      Hey -- I don't see another way to get in touch with you, so advance apologies for the comment spam. In a past comment you mentioned that you used to run the Ricochet modem wikispace and have a bunch of documentation/etc -- perhaps I can host them on the Internet Archive? Particularly interested in the Garage Gateway stuff, I've never seen the code and I have an otherwise working Ethernet Radio & pair of poletops I'd love to get properly running. Email's in my profile if you'd like to get in touch.
  • thrtythreeforty 3y ago
    This does require firmware support but it's pretty seamless in Plasma. It requires a root password which is slightly irritating. At one point I went through the PolicyKit contortions to allow normal users (me) to change it.
• vGPU 3y ago
  Even my iPad has horrible background drain. My iPhone is the only device I have that I can calmly leave at 15% when I go to bed and know my alarm will still work in the morning.
  • cryptoegorophy 3y ago
    Yeah, same experience with iPhone. Can leave it at 20% then when I wake up it would drain like 5% or so.
  • justworkout 3y ago
    I had an iPad that I bought 5? years ago and I could leave that thing in sleep mode for literal weeks at a time and I'd still have a mostly full charge. I "upgraded" to a Pro 2 years back and the first thing I noticed was it'd go from a 100% charge to 60% to even 40% overnight. All apps closed, freshly rebooted and did nothing but charge it the previous night before unplugging it. A lot of comments online say "This doesn't happen. You're doing something. And it's certainly not wifi and bluetooth because those don't use battery while idle so do NOT turn those off!" I tried everything that was recommended, turning off iCloud, uninstalling random apps, etc. Then I got into a habit of turning bluetooth off every night and my battery would only drain about 4-6% a day while idle. Turning off wifi as well and I get about 2-3% drain per night. I have no clue what Apple is doing, but when putting my iPad to sleep at night with any sort of wireless on, the device connects to every fucking thing it can find but wouldn't do while awake. I never even synced my Airpods with my iPad and made sure to delete them when they did connect, but still, if I leave bluetooth on before going to bed, my iPad will connect to my airpods while they're in the case, drain them to 0% (even after fully charging the Airpods before sleeping. It's not even possible to drain the case's battery with actual usage that fast!), then drain 40% of its own battery. I can't make sense of it. In short, turn all wireless off when you're done for the day. iPads/iPhones are annoying in that you can't turn them off from the drop down menu though, so you need to go through settings or make a shortcut.
    • gnyman 3y ago
      The amount of background crap has been steadily increasing on Apple devices, you're probably right in your observation that it's related to wireless/Bluetooth. I have a iPad 2 (yes, the one from 2011) which I keep around with the plan to turn it into a house-automation screen and I'm always surprised when I look at it every 2-5 months to see it still has a decent chunk of battery left. And it's in sleep, not turned off. I just checked it, it's at 76% with a standby time of 562h (23.4 days). And this is with WiFi turned on. Im really impressed, it's after all a 12 year old battery. And the device was in daily use for the first 4 years and then less frequently. This is a side topic but I find it's a good example of forced obsolescence, because there is nothing wrong with it other than the fact that it does not support modern web standards or modern iOS apps which makes it trash for most people.
• deleted 3y ago
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• artimaeis 3y ago
  I just picked up my 2017 iPad Pro. It was last charged Nov 15. Been sitting by the bed mostly unused since. Currently at 80% charge. I haven’t experienced what you’re describing on an Apple device since they switched the laptops away from Intel chips. In my experience, the OS does matter. I can’t believe how bad the rest of the industry is at this. Amazon’s Kindle line is incredible at this IME, but those are pretty atypical devices. Screenshot from said iPad’s battery screen: https://postimg.cc/xcHpy5Sr https://postimg.cc/xcHpy5Sr
  • bluSCALE4 3y ago
    iPhone does not reflect these gains. I did own a Huawei and I felt those really had slow drain.
    • artimaeis 3y ago
      I'm not sure I've gone more than a day without looking at my iPhone in years probably (not great, I know..) but I've not had any notable standby drain issues. That is, I've never left it at something like 80% and come back to it hours later for it to be drastically lower. I'm pretty religious about what apps are allowed background data, and notifications in general. But I never turn off any of the radios.
  • gamblor956 3y ago
    I recently picked up my Surface 3 for the first time since 2017. It had a 66% charge from the last time I used it... It's not so much the OS as the device firmware, since the Surface 4 runs the same OS but has significantly worse battery performance.
    • JBiserkov 3y ago
      That's a joke, right? The battery held a charge for 6 years?!
      • gamblor956 3y ago
        It did. I was surprised myself since I thought the battery would be completely dead (as in, 0 charge and incapable of holding a charge) but I am using right now and it still has about the same battery life as it did before.
• Dylan16807 3y ago
  > So I just leave them plugged in Isn't that exactly why you want a device that can self-limit? It doesn't need to lie.
  • jader201 3y ago
    If you leave it plugged in all the time, battery life doesn't matter. Self-limit or don't. I'm rarely away from a power source for very long (and when I am, I'm not on my phone much). So I just leave it plugged in all the time. I've very rarely had my battery die on me, and like OP, I leave mine plugged in all the time. At night or while working, it's charging. Even after a few years, I don't notice much of an impact. I'll sometimes notice it's getting low (again, if I'm out of my routine), and just charge it.
    • Dylan16807 3y ago
      It's plugged in when not in use. A single use that takes it away from an outlet can last a good while.
    • The_Colonel 3y ago
      > At night or while working, it's charging. It doesn't have to be charging all the time. Some laptops have "intelligent" detection of the "usually plugged-in" state and won't keep the battery charged 100% at every moment, but will allow dropping it somewhat before charging again. I suspect MacBooks are doing this quite aggressively (while lying about 100%), since their batteries tend to last (in terms of cycles) longer than windows laptops.
      • em-bee 3y ago
        i thought that if the battery is charged the device will simply ignore the battery and run directly from the wire. so a fully charged battery should not be affected at all. repeatedly dropping down and recharging sounds like a bad idea.
        • The_Colonel 3y ago
• beAbU 3y ago
  I've found this to be true as well. Sample size of 1: My Android tablet, Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, loses something like 10%/day when on standby. I don't use it every day, so either I have to leave it plugged in the whole time, or have the foresight to charge it the day before I want to use it for something. What /really/ annoys me is I have this really really old Android tablet. I think it's running Anrdoid 5 or 6 or something. It's only really good for light web reading and nothing else. When it's charged, it'll standby for literal months. It can lay in my drawer, forgotten, and then a month later I can pick it up and it'll be still above 60%. When in use the battery drops like a lead balloon, within the hour it's dead. But standby is fantastic. Why can't modern Android do that any more?
• alliao 3y ago
  I had an Nintendo NDS, that thing was a beast in stand by power consumption, the battery was tiny I think no more than 2000mAh but every time I flipped it open it had power
• i5-2520M 3y ago
  My samsung tablet (wifi) has an average idle drain of 0.3% per hour, meaning what you see in 2 days would take a week. On windows laptops hibernation can also fix idle drain, but that is a bit of a hack. The 3ds is atrocious though, even with wifi off. With wifi it can't even last a day.
• matheusmoreira 3y ago
  I don't understand why devices can't switch to external power when plugged in. It's like they simultaneously charge and discharge the battery instead of bypassing it.
  • vladvasiliu 3y ago
    I think some do. I don't use my macbook anymore so don't have it on hand to check, but both my HP laptops (one running windows, the other linux) and my iphone seem to not fluctuate the battery charge if I leave them plugged in. The iphone doesn't even get warm, which can happen when it recharges from a drained battery. The laptops won't even attempt to charge if the battery's above a certain threshold, like 95%. My linux laptop barely moves from my desk, so it regularly spends multiple days on end with the battery showing something like 96%.
  • kube-system 3y ago
    Depends on the device. Some do. Some actually can't, because they are capable of drawing more peak power than their wall chargers provide.
    • FeepingCreature 3y ago
      Yeah I can notice the battery dropping on my Thinkpad even when it's powered on, if I put moderate to heavy load on the CPU. So it has to be using the battery like a buffer.
• rpigab 3y ago
  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 than what is being charged, idk. I have set the desktop background to 0x000000, removed all non-essential startup services, reinstalled it from scratch, etc. So everytime I want to use it, I have to wait till it's 5-10% before powering it on. The worst part is that if you look it up online, some ppl say it changed drastically after some Windows update, can't confirm because it's not my main PC, I don't remember the exact moment where it had this problem.
  • tzs 3y ago
    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.
    • rpigab 3y ago
      No, I don't have disk encryption set up on the Surface.
• throitallaway 3y ago
  Do you leave your Nintendo Switch in standby mode or hold the power button for a few seconds for a full power off? If I don't do a full power off, the battery is gone after a few days in standby mode. It's really annoying when I forget to do it and am welcomed by a dead switch. My Switch is often outside of WiFi connectivity, and I wonder if it's constantly searching for a known network to latch onto.
• LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  If you shut down your Windows laptop or Linux laptop completely, or remove the battery, the battery will not drain. I've accepted that manufacturers cannot or do not care or will not give me instant wake without atrocious power drain during sleep. Modern solid-state storage boots up really fast, and my browser, IDE, text editor and other tools are pretty good at restoring my working state after boot.
  • J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    Windows laptops are embarrassing. I don't want to only use Apple, but why can't anyone else make a laptop that doesn't require a Human BMS? When I got my first Macbook for work, I was amazed to open it after a week of traveling to find it booted instantly at full charge. Meanwhile my old HP would play slack notifications in my backpack as it's going through the x-ray machine at the airport lmao