21 ms·

I wish they would label it so that it shows 100% charge when it's actually charged 80%, and then give an option to 'overcharge' a configurable amount till 125%

I wish they would label it so that it shows 100% charge when it's actually charged 80%, and then give an option to 'overcharge' a configurable amount till 125% (the current 100%). That way it will make people aware that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging, and be picky when they overcharge. But this won't happen because reduced battery life is a big direct and indirect(by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones) driver of phone upgrades.

Panzer04 3y ago
Top charge in a lithium battery is very arbitrary. Most batteries can tolerate going higher than the specified 4.2v, up to 4.3 or 4.35v - but the cycle life degradation is not worth the extra capacity.
- starky 3y ago
  This is exactly the answer. Especially with Li-Ion cells everything is a compromise. You can extend the life of the cell by a fair amount, but then it won't last as long before you have to re-charge. Similarly, if you charge it quicker, then it reduces the lifetime of the cell. I honestly don't understand how people worry about their batteries in their devices so much. I give pretty much zero care into how I treat the battery in my devices other than to try to charge them before it drops down too low (which is where most of the damage occurs if you do it repeatedly) and I can only think of 1 or 2 times where my devices battery has worn out before I end up replacing it.
  - baq 3y ago
    I replace my devices when the battery wears out because I can get a new phone in 5 minutes and the battery takes a week to replace in this forsaken country.
  - J_Shelby_J 3y ago
    I've babied my iphone x battery (battery case ftw) and it's at "86%" after five years. Even with all the nice features apple offers for battery management they still design their phones to have undersized batteries and encourage usage patterns that degrade the battery in ~2 years, when they could just slightly increase the thickness of the phone and increase the lifespan to ~5 years. Very conservative depths of discharge and charging termination voltages can extend life spans into the 10,000 cycle ranges which is effectively forever for a device with a finite lifespan. And it wouldn't increase the weight of the phone too much: doubling battery capacity isn't doubling the size of the phone or even the battery itself. Just the active material in the battery.
p1necone 3y ago
I'm pretty sure most (all?) manufacturers already do (the first part of) this. 100% can't be the point at which the battery literally stops taking new charge - if you did that they'd catch fire all the time. It's just that the manufacturers idea of what "100%" should be generally skews more towards the immediate battery life end of the tradeoff, whereas some users prefer to have "100%" closer to the maximizing long term lifetime end of the scale. Some devices do let you configure stuff like this - I know my android phone will let you cap max charge at an arbitrary level (although it won't report that level as 100%). Many laptop bioses will have a similar setting (good idea to set this to ~50% if you're using the laptop plugged in all the time, or just using it like a server with a builtin UPS).
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  Almost everyone caps below max voltage, but a toggle between small margin and big margin is a lot less common. And if you have to reboot into the bios, it only half counts.
- dheera 3y ago
  > I know my android phone will let you cap max charge at an arbitrary level Yeah I used to have old Pixel phones as Home Assistant clients on my walls until they all started bulging one by one and I had to treat them as a fire hazard. I now use Samsung tablets, ironically, that have a cap at 80% feature and they seem to be doing fine.
  - KleerKut 3y ago
    Are those cells 4.4v? Samsung makes great cells, and if you only charge them to 4.2V or less they should last quite a while. When charging to 100% means different things in different cases for the same battery technology then things get murky.
  - 1970-01-01 3y ago
    >I now use Samsung tablets, ironically, that have a cap at 80% feature and they seem to be doing fine. Yes, this feature is one of the most underrated features on Samsung devices. Massively underrated.
trustingtrust 3y ago
Almost nobody cares about saving batteries. Those are replaceable and cheap to replace every couple of years. Innovating more battery life and leaving 20% battery life on the table sounds extremely pointless for what costs 20-30$ a year but lets you use the device all day instead of just shutting before the end of the day.
- p1necone 3y ago
  > Those are replaceable and cheap to replace every couple of years. If you specifically seek out devices with cheap replaceable batteries, sure. But this isn't the case with a lot of devices.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    Replacing an iPhone battery is cheap, especially compared to replacing the whole phone: at the Apple Store it’s either $99, $69 or $49 and I’ve had other stores do it for like $40. That’s not too bad for a once every couple years cost.
    - datameta 3y ago
      Cheap for the wallet, but not the biosphere. Unless you mean to imply that people would get new phones less frequently?
      - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
        It’s cheaper for the biosphere than replaceable batteries were, because you just switch out the battery and don’t need the plastic case for the replaceable part.
      - incongruity 3y ago
        How is that all that damaging? I’m sure those batteries are recycled in basically all cases and yes, I’d expect battery replacement does indeed forestall replacement for many phones.
dheera 3y ago
> That way it will make people aware These are all electronic devices. You can also just put big warnings in software instead of calling it 125%. It's not any different from filling up a blender, water bottle, etc. to 80% instead of 100% to avoid creating a mess. Sooner or later people will know to avoid charging batteries to 100%. > that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device, which helps boost sales, boost revenue, boost shareholder happiness, boost stock price, and ultimately boost CEO net worth
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device This tactic would work great in a world with only one phone manufacturer.
  - rgblambda 3y ago
    My anecdotal evidence is that people tend to stick to the same brand when upgrading phones.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      I think that depends on the brand. If they like the product, then yes. If the product has terrible battery life, probably not so much.
  - theodric 3y ago
    There's only one iPhone manufacturer, and that seems to be extremely important to many people-- even extending to limiting their dating pool, apparently. https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-choice-could-be-impacting-your-love-life/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-ch... https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-ick-for-2021-says-new-study-15825870/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-... https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not-tech-compatible https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not...
instagib 3y ago
With a jailbroken iPhone you can set some things like that up iirc. I had a 5 or 10% setting that would turn the screen off and make it appear battery powered down but it was still on. That way you retain your jailbreak. There were more limitations on cpu speed also. Could turn on the super low power mode (which above setting did), custom max cpu frequency or temperature. Idk about max battery charge but it was nice to be able to control those things. Could make a battery last much longer and phone would not heat up too much. I considered downgrading to get the many features back.
onetimeuse92304 3y ago
Some more responsible device manufacturers are doing this. For example, the industrial equipment I worked with charges batteries much more sustainably, also by charging it with less current. Remember, there are multiple factors when it comes to batteries degrading. Voltage (how far the battery is charged) is one of them, but so is the charging current (how fast) and also the temperature during and outside of charging. Personally, I usually use slower chargers for my laptops and phones to prolong the device lifetime.
- vultour 3y ago
  I don't understand the obsession with fast charging. I can probably count the number of times I needed to charge my phone instantly on one hand. The other day I bought a MagSafe charger because my new phone doesn't fit properly on my old wireless charger, turns out it doesn't support the "legacy" 5W power bricks. Now it's sitting unused in the drawer because I don't want to charge with more than 5 watts.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    Also an issue for travel-friendly charging solutions: there just aren't any truly lightweight USB-C cables that merely support the old USB2-era maximum currents that are perfectly fine for overnight charging. If you count grams, you're ent4irely better off with certain cable models of bulky A to micro-B + adapter.
- usrusr 3y ago
  And even voltage is just a rough proxy for the actual state of ions in the anode-cathode dance. When voltage goes down with temperature, the charge state does not change. But drawing a certain amount of joules will be very different because at lower temperature you'll need more coulombs for the same amount of joules, aka VAh. And at nontrivial discharge throughput, observed voltage will drop to much lower values than what a snapshot of the current ion-dance state would look like at steady state. This is the "smartphone SoC must not try performance bursts as it used to" scenario.
rekoil 3y ago
> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phones last longer than they otherwise would have. Apple deserves a lot of shit for their bullshit surrounding replacement parts, but this particular topic is something they get an undeserved amount of shit for in my opinion.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  They didn’t explain what it did. The feature was amazing, the presentation misleading.
  - KennyBlanken 3y ago
    No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
    - rat9988 3y ago
      This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.
      - fingerlocks 3y ago
        Do we know they actually didn’t tell people? Does anyone read through the “What’s New” pop-ups after they upgrade the OS, or just blindly dismiss them? Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it. I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.
watwut 3y ago
Another reason is that batteries are ... small. Too small. If it charged to 80% from the get go, then your phone is already effectively living on reduced battery, it is already kinda broken because battery runs out too quickly.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  This really depends on the person and use case. Pretty much the only time I get even close to depleting my phone or laptop battery is during air travel which happens like 2-3 times a year. Otherwise I charge the devices throughout the day at my desk where the laptop is plugged in 98% of the time anyways.
alliao 3y ago
Panasonic Let's Note series had an eco button that charges it up 80% only, man I love that series of laptops.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hunta2097 3y ago
My wife's Galaxy Tab S7+ does this. It's configurable in the battery settings, 85% == 100% unless you disable the battery saving function.
prima-facie 3y ago
Samsung phones have an option called 'Protect battery' which limits the charging to 85%.
willvarfar 3y ago
But then the unscrupulous competitor advertising 100 hours will get customers and the responsible company advertising 80 hours doesn't, even if they advertise 20 hours overcharge?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dghughes 3y ago
People that know about the 80% trick may then only charge it to 80% of the 80% which now shows 100% which would be 60% (if my morning fog brain is getting it right). But if they know it's actually only 80% when showing 100% they'll charge it to 100%. Then people will complain "they don't make phones like they used to".
- SushiHippie 3y ago
  80%80% would be 0.80.8 which is 0.64 -> 64%
  - dghughes 3y ago
    Thanks but the 100% battery capacity is hidden but still accessible otherwise you couldn't ramp it up past 100% that's why I say it's 60%.
krsrhe 3y ago
[dead]
bhpm 3y ago
Why even go that far? Just call 100% what is actually 80% on the battery and call it a day. We already get “actual formatted capacity less” when it comes to data storage, and EV batteries are generally under-provisioned.
jackmott42 3y ago
The battery ages faster the more it is charged. It is approximately linear. Nothing special about 80%, you could draw the line anywhere.
panda888888 3y ago
I have a slightly older iPhone, and the "Optimized battery charging" setting only kicks in maybe 10% of the time for me. I don't love your proposal of mislabeling the percentages, but I really wish there were a way to make my iPhone only charge up to 80% and then stop.

Panzer04 3y ago

Top charge in a lithium battery is very arbitrary. Most batteries can tolerate going higher than the specified 4.2v, up to 4.3 or 4.35v - but the cycle life degradation is not worth the extra capacity.

starky 3y ago
This is exactly the answer. Especially with Li-Ion cells everything is a compromise. You can extend the life of the cell by a fair amount, but then it won't last as long before you have to re-charge. Similarly, if you charge it quicker, then it reduces the lifetime of the cell. I honestly don't understand how people worry about their batteries in their devices so much. I give pretty much zero care into how I treat the battery in my devices other than to try to charge them before it drops down too low (which is where most of the damage occurs if you do it repeatedly) and I can only think of 1 or 2 times where my devices battery has worn out before I end up replacing it.
- baq 3y ago
  I replace my devices when the battery wears out because I can get a new phone in 5 minutes and the battery takes a week to replace in this forsaken country.
- J_Shelby_J 3y ago
  I've babied my iphone x battery (battery case ftw) and it's at "86%" after five years. Even with all the nice features apple offers for battery management they still design their phones to have undersized batteries and encourage usage patterns that degrade the battery in ~2 years, when they could just slightly increase the thickness of the phone and increase the lifespan to ~5 years. Very conservative depths of discharge and charging termination voltages can extend life spans into the 10,000 cycle ranges which is effectively forever for a device with a finite lifespan. And it wouldn't increase the weight of the phone too much: doubling battery capacity isn't doubling the size of the phone or even the battery itself. Just the active material in the battery.

p1necone 3y ago

I'm pretty sure most (all?) manufacturers already do (the first part of) this. 100% can't be the point at which the battery literally stops taking new charge - if you did that they'd catch fire all the time. It's just that the manufacturers idea of what "100%" should be generally skews more towards the immediate battery life end of the tradeoff, whereas some users prefer to have "100%" closer to the maximizing long term lifetime end of the scale. Some devices do let you configure stuff like this - I know my android phone will let you cap max charge at an arbitrary level (although it won't report that level as 100%). Many laptop bioses will have a similar setting (good idea to set this to ~50% if you're using the laptop plugged in all the time, or just using it like a server with a builtin UPS).

Dylan16807 3y ago
Almost everyone caps below max voltage, but a toggle between small margin and big margin is a lot less common. And if you have to reboot into the bios, it only half counts.
dheera 3y ago
> I know my android phone will let you cap max charge at an arbitrary level Yeah I used to have old Pixel phones as Home Assistant clients on my walls until they all started bulging one by one and I had to treat them as a fire hazard. I now use Samsung tablets, ironically, that have a cap at 80% feature and they seem to be doing fine.
- KleerKut 3y ago
  Are those cells 4.4v? Samsung makes great cells, and if you only charge them to 4.2V or less they should last quite a while. When charging to 100% means different things in different cases for the same battery technology then things get murky.
- 1970-01-01 3y ago
  >I now use Samsung tablets, ironically, that have a cap at 80% feature and they seem to be doing fine. Yes, this feature is one of the most underrated features on Samsung devices. Massively underrated.

trustingtrust 3y ago

Almost nobody cares about saving batteries. Those are replaceable and cheap to replace every couple of years. Innovating more battery life and leaving 20% battery life on the table sounds extremely pointless for what costs 20-30$ a year but lets you use the device all day instead of just shutting before the end of the day.

p1necone 3y ago
> Those are replaceable and cheap to replace every couple of years. If you specifically seek out devices with cheap replaceable batteries, sure. But this isn't the case with a lot of devices.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  Replacing an iPhone battery is cheap, especially compared to replacing the whole phone: at the Apple Store it’s either $99, $69 or $49 and I’ve had other stores do it for like $40. That’s not too bad for a once every couple years cost.
  - datameta 3y ago
    Cheap for the wallet, but not the biosphere. Unless you mean to imply that people would get new phones less frequently?
    - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
      It’s cheaper for the biosphere than replaceable batteries were, because you just switch out the battery and don’t need the plastic case for the replaceable part.
    - incongruity 3y ago
      How is that all that damaging? I’m sure those batteries are recycled in basically all cases and yes, I’d expect battery replacement does indeed forestall replacement for many phones.

dheera 3y ago

> That way it will make people aware These are all electronic devices. You can also just put big warnings in software instead of calling it 125%. It's not any different from filling up a blender, water bottle, etc. to 80% instead of 100% to avoid creating a mess. Sooner or later people will know to avoid charging batteries to 100%. > that they are reducing the battery life by overcharging Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device, which helps boost sales, boost revenue, boost shareholder happiness, boost stock price, and ultimately boost CEO net worth

robertlagrant 3y ago
> Unfortunately their capitalist asses probably want you to reduce the battery life faster and buy a new device This tactic would work great in a world with only one phone manufacturer.
- rgblambda 3y ago
  My anecdotal evidence is that people tend to stick to the same brand when upgrading phones.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I think that depends on the brand. If they like the product, then yes. If the product has terrible battery life, probably not so much.
- theodric 3y ago
  There's only one iPhone manufacturer, and that seems to be extremely important to many people-- even extending to limiting their dating pool, apparently. https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-choice-could-be-impacting-your-love-life/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/iphone-or-android-your-phone-ch... https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-ick-for-2021-says-new-study-15825870/ https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/26/owning-an-android-is-a-major-... https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not-tech-compatible https://www.vogue.com/article/breathless-couples-who-are-not...

instagib 3y ago

With a jailbroken iPhone you can set some things like that up iirc. I had a 5 or 10% setting that would turn the screen off and make it appear battery powered down but it was still on. That way you retain your jailbreak. There were more limitations on cpu speed also. Could turn on the super low power mode (which above setting did), custom max cpu frequency or temperature. Idk about max battery charge but it was nice to be able to control those things. Could make a battery last much longer and phone would not heat up too much. I considered downgrading to get the many features back.

onetimeuse92304 3y ago

Some more responsible device manufacturers are doing this. For example, the industrial equipment I worked with charges batteries much more sustainably, also by charging it with less current. Remember, there are multiple factors when it comes to batteries degrading. Voltage (how far the battery is charged) is one of them, but so is the charging current (how fast) and also the temperature during and outside of charging. Personally, I usually use slower chargers for my laptops and phones to prolong the device lifetime.

vultour 3y ago
I don't understand the obsession with fast charging. I can probably count the number of times I needed to charge my phone instantly on one hand. The other day I bought a MagSafe charger because my new phone doesn't fit properly on my old wireless charger, turns out it doesn't support the "legacy" 5W power bricks. Now it's sitting unused in the drawer because I don't want to charge with more than 5 watts.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Also an issue for travel-friendly charging solutions: there just aren't any truly lightweight USB-C cables that merely support the old USB2-era maximum currents that are perfectly fine for overnight charging. If you count grams, you're ent4irely better off with certain cable models of bulky A to micro-B + adapter.
usrusr 3y ago
And even voltage is just a rough proxy for the actual state of ions in the anode-cathode dance. When voltage goes down with temperature, the charge state does not change. But drawing a certain amount of joules will be very different because at lower temperature you'll need more coulombs for the same amount of joules, aka VAh. And at nontrivial discharge throughput, observed voltage will drop to much lower values than what a snapshot of the current ion-dance state would look like at steady state. This is the "smartphone SoC must not try performance bursts as it used to" scenario.

rekoil 3y ago

> by reducing performance like Apple does with old iPhones What Apple did was clock down the CPU of iPhones with degraded batteries in order to reduce peak load which would otherwise result in crashes that would have made the device borderline unusable below some charge percentage. Yes, they should have shipped the feature off by default and with a toggle, but the feature itself was amazing as it let already old phones last longer than they otherwise would have. Apple deserves a lot of shit for their bullshit surrounding replacement parts, but this particular topic is something they get an undeserved amount of shit for in my opinion.

actionfromafar 3y ago
They didn’t explain what it did. The feature was amazing, the presentation misleading.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago
  No, Samsung and others spread a bunch of FUD that Apple was crippling their phones to force people to upgrade, and Reddit and HN apple-haters ate it up. Still to this day people on HN repeat it like it's fact, and when you correct them, shift the goalposts to "well they didn't TELL people."
  - rat9988 3y ago
    This is not a goalpost shift. It's THE argument. I'm not sure what arguments are there for alternative narratives.
    - fingerlocks 3y ago
      Do we know they actually didn’t tell people? Does anyone read through the “What’s New” pop-ups after they upgrade the OS, or just blindly dismiss them? Apple provides a very comprehensive user manual that ships as a pre-installed app on every phone. There are large headings describing the latest features right when you open it. I don’t recall being unaware of this feature before it became a “scandal”, but I’m one of those weirdos that reads the release pop-ups.

watwut 3y ago

Another reason is that batteries are ... small. Too small. If it charged to 80% from the get go, then your phone is already effectively living on reduced battery, it is already kinda broken because battery runs out too quickly.

ajmurmann 3y ago
This really depends on the person and use case. Pretty much the only time I get even close to depleting my phone or laptop battery is during air travel which happens like 2-3 times a year. Otherwise I charge the devices throughout the day at my desk where the laptop is plugged in 98% of the time anyways.

alliao 3y ago

Panasonic Let's Note series had an eco button that charges it up 80% only, man I love that series of laptops.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hunta2097 3y ago

My wife's Galaxy Tab S7+ does this. It's configurable in the battery settings, 85% == 100% unless you disable the battery saving function.

prima-facie 3y ago

Samsung phones have an option called 'Protect battery' which limits the charging to 85%.

willvarfar 3y ago

But then the unscrupulous competitor advertising 100 hours will get customers and the responsible company advertising 80 hours doesn't, even if they advertise 20 hours overcharge?

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dghughes 3y ago

People that know about the 80% trick may then only charge it to 80% of the 80% which now shows 100% which would be 60% (if my morning fog brain is getting it right). But if they know it's actually only 80% when showing 100% they'll charge it to 100%. Then people will complain "they don't make phones like they used to".

SushiHippie 3y ago
80%80% would be 0.80.8 which is 0.64 -> 64%
- dghughes 3y ago
  Thanks but the 100% battery capacity is hidden but still accessible otherwise you couldn't ramp it up past 100% that's why I say it's 60%.

krsrhe 3y ago

[dead]

bhpm 3y ago

Why even go that far? Just call 100% what is actually 80% on the battery and call it a day. We already get “actual formatted capacity less” when it comes to data storage, and EV batteries are generally under-provisioned.

jackmott42 3y ago

The battery ages faster the more it is charged. It is approximately linear. Nothing special about 80%, you could draw the line anywhere.

panda888888 3y ago

I have a slightly older iPhone, and the "Optimized battery charging" setting only kicks in maybe 10% of the time for me. I don't love your proposal of mislabeling the percentages, but I really wish there were a way to make my iPhone only charge up to 80% and then stop.