What Apple's Battery Health 'Fix' Looks Like (bgr.com) 69
Apple has released new battery health features in iOS 11.3 beta 2, which was seeded to developers today. BGR reports what those battery health functions look like, and how to disable power management if you're using an older iPhone: The feature is contained within a new "Battery Health" menu, which is under the "Battery" tab on iOS 11.3. The page only really has two fields: Maximum Capacity, which shows what percentage of the original charge your battery can still hold; and Peak Performance Capacity, which tells you if your phone's performance is being throttled due to the battery. Right now, there are no options to change anything within the menu. Maximum Capacity should be at 100% for newer phones, and it should fall down to around 80% over the course of about two years of normal use. A Redditor on the iOSBeta forum uploaded a photo of his iPhone 7, which is sitting at 87% capacity. That device still shows peak performance.
On older devices with a worse battery, the phone will show that reduced Maximum Capacity, as well as detail any performance slowdowns due to the decreased battery capacity. On devices that have weaker batteries, the Peak Performance Capability will change to read "This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again." A small blue hyperlink then says "Disable," which lets you manually turn off your iPhone's performance management.
On older devices with a worse battery, the phone will show that reduced Maximum Capacity, as well as detail any performance slowdowns due to the decreased battery capacity. On devices that have weaker batteries, the Peak Performance Capability will change to read "This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again." A small blue hyperlink then says "Disable," which lets you manually turn off your iPhone's performance management.
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uh... 20% loss after two years is not bad!
That is EXTREMELY pessimistic.
My iPhone 6 Plus, which is over 3 years old, is at 93% Battery health (measured by current battery charge capacity / "ideal" battery charge capacity). My 5 year old iPad 2 is at 88% battery charge capacity, both measured using the "Battery Life" App, that several people have mentioned agrees with the Apple "Genius Bar" battery Diagnostics.
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Knowing what to do with batteries to keep a good life on them stresses me out. Consider this. A nearly opposite position was taken by a drone battery "expert", who obsesses and lives by the "keep the charge at 50% when not in use" and acts like any amount of time at a high charge is bad for the battery. Double check me, but it also seems like he points to not allowing it to hang at 1% or 0% for any length of time, but any temporary drop to 5 or 10% isn't a big deal. I found the link:
https://www.youtube.com [youtube.com]
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When I say "and they stay at 100% charge for years" on laptops, I meant to say that I've seen laptops that were plugged into a wall for years (charge at 100%)and never used their battery, seem to have great batteries when you unplug them from the wall and use them. Whereas laptops that are on the road a lot definitely see their batteries worsen.
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See my comment below; if you drove your Tesla down to 0% and cycled it to 100% every day (or even multiple times per day) it wouldnt last any longer than your phone. Also, your car undoubtadely has lost a little range over time, though depending on which car you have (and if you have a sw limited battery) you may not have any indication of this. Tesla is very good at managing battery health and encouraging drivers to do the same. But if your cellphone worked the same way you would hate it.
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Hey, I would *love* a cellphone that worked that way - provided it had 2-3x the raw capacity to deliver the same or higher effective battery life. With the added thickness, maybe I could even buy a phone as durable as the old flip-phones used to be. And it'd be nice if it actually could go down to "real zero" in a pinch, though obviously doing so on a regular basis would defeat the point.
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Hmm, that's not bad. I still miss the old days when I charged my flip-phone maybe once a week.
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But cell phones leave some charge in the bottom as a cushion, just like you do with your car, and typically after you charge them fully, they start using power immediately and draining the batteries, so you aren't leaving them completely full, either. So really, the usage pattern is not that different from your car; it is just accelerated by maybe a factor of 3
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> The thinner a device, the harder it is to dissipate heat
you sure about that?
because for a given volume the surface area increases if you decrease one dimension
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I'm reasonably sure, yes. Air is a good insulator. Empty space between components, therefore, reduces thermal transmission between components. The best way to keep CPU heat away from the battery is to leave more space between the battery and hot components. You have two choices for doing that: make the phone bigger or make it thicker. But making it bigger means a bigger screen, which means more power consumption all around, which means more heat. Making it thicker doesn't have that
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Im not going to argue with you against the ridiculousness of the thin phone craziness, but the heat has a lot less to do with it than the crazy charge cycles. The charging and discharging of a phone battery cell is pushed very much further than the cells in a Tesla battery. For one the phone battery is always pushed to 100% charge and it is kept there for extended periods of time. That is basically battery rule #1 in critical lithium systems; this is the reason that Tesla advises you not to do it and the re
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For one the phone battery is always pushed to 100% charge and it is kept there for extended periods of time.
Maybe in a crappy Android phone.
But in iPhones (and other Apple battery-operated equipment), Apple only charges the battery up to the industry-recommended limit of around 90% (IIRC), to avoid overcharge issues. So, when your iPhone/iPad/MacBook shows 100% battery charge, it is actually at or around that "industry maximum" charge for LiOn batteries.
Here's some non-Apple-biased information supporting what I am saying (and curiously enough, what Apple themselves recommend and say:
https://www.notebookcheck.net/ [notebookcheck.net]
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Incorrect. Tesla cells, on a full charge-discharge, are rated for 3000 cycles. Panasonic don't lie about their batteries, that really is the absolute minimum you will get. Anyway, 3000 cycles, let's say 250 miles per cycle, that's 750,000 miles.
Apple are saying 80% after two years is normal. 80% is end of life for these batteries, it's the same metric that Panasonic uses. So to wear your Tesla battery out in two years you would have to do 375,000 miles a year, or about 1000 miles a day on average.
I'm sure s
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How is it that Apple's shitty battery technology can lose 20% of its capability over 2 years while my Tesla manages to maintain its range and performance?
For starters, because you very likely don't charge and discharge your Tesla battery nearly as (a) often, (b) quickly, and (c) deeply as does the typical iPhone user. It's primarily the frequency and character of charge/discharge cycles that degrade the performance of Li-ion batteries, not so much the time on the calendar.
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Because a Tesla and other (but not all) Electric vehicles have battery conditioning technology that is not economical or practical (with regards to weight) on mobile devices.
What? Battery conditioning in this case amounts to charge balancing which is impossible when the battery only has a one cell in series; there is literally nothing to balance. Controlling battery charge and discharge voltage and current is completely feasible and done on mobile devices or at least good ones. You do not for instance want to over or under charge the battery.
Good Battery Management (Score:5, Informative)
While I don't think it's necessarily right to "hide" it from people, good Li-Ion battery management does unfortunately require monitoring and limiting consumption rate in a lot of circumstances. Lithium batteries work best and can deliver the most current around 35-45C which is great since we tend to keep our phones close to our bodes and thus they stay at a good temperature. But a cold battery, a nearly empty battery, and an old battery all have severely diminished current capacity. Except for overcharging or overdraining a lithium cell, nothing will destroy it faster than pulling too much current than the current environment permits.
The problem with our phones is that we want them to be as small as reasonable, we want them to work full throttle for the longest amount of time possible, and we want them to be highly reliable. This is sort of a "pick two" scenario because you can't really have all three.
Tesla cars do a great job of giving the driver feedback about battery current limits BTW; there is a gague that shows you when you are being limited due to temperature or state of charge and as the battery ages the "full" capacity given in "rated miles" does diminish. As an example, an S100D will pull 500+ kW on a 100% full, new, warm battery, but on a very cold day with a low SOC it can be limited to as little as 150kW. Although this is sometimes not what people really want, they also in this case want a battery that will last for as many as 40 or 50 thousand charge cycles. Perhaps phones should figure out a way to give user feedback in the battery icon in a similar way. or allow the suers to set their own limits to optimize battery health.
Or perhaps phones should just put way bigger batteries in them and only let people cycle them between 20% and 80% true capacity. This would be fantasticlly good for battery health but can you imagine the uproar?
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It's been many years since I REALLY wanted my phone to be thinner. In fact, the last couple of iterations I think my phone is too thin to comfortably hold. Even after putting a typical case on my phone I think it's too thin. Sure, I can buy a thicker case, but why not just give me a better battery? I struggle to get through a full day without plugging in at some point, and I'm not typically a heavy phone user. I've had several iphones and currently have a Samsung S8. I'd gladly buy a thicker phone with a be
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>we want them to be as small as reasonable
I quite agree. But am I alone in thinking that the vast majority have gone well beyond that point? It's a rare phone that wouldn't benefit from being twice the thickness with 3x the battery life. Maybe they could even use that added thickness to include some structural components so the things could take more of a beating.
I still have my original-model TI-85 from 1992 - it doesn't get as much use anymore, but it took a heck of a beating through 10 years of sch
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I still have my TI-85 purchased in 1992 same as you. While I agree it's very durable and nice and still works it is a bit clunky and it's bigger than it needs to be. Heck there is a lot of empty space inside there- I have had mine apart and modified a number of times (including massively overclocking the z80)
I do agree with you on the absurd race to produce overly stupidly thin phones. The iPad has a "camera bump" for fucks sake. good design does not automatically guarantee good ergonomics. A slightly beefi
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Re:Good Battery Management (Score:4, Interesting)
For some perspective:
- My laptop is a chromebook switched to linux. From 2013.
- I've used it almost every day.
- My battery capacity reports: 45.3 Wh (design)
- It currently reports: 41.3 Wh (when full)
- Percent difference of ~9.24% over 5 years of constant use
So why the hell are cellphone batteries dying so much faster? Are they higher density for more initial capacity, at the cost of quicker wear and reduction of capacity? Because if you can lose over 20% of an iPhone battery in two years, that's a pretty stark difference to my laptop.
I had to replace my Wife's iPhone S5 battery (before this whole craziness) a 1 year ago or so.
Re:Good Battery Management (Score:5, Insightful)
Because simply, your laptop has more batteries.
Cellphones have one cell, and are often used from full to dead on a daily basis, which is a very hard operating regimen, and basically all the wear happens on that one cell.
Laptops rarely are operated like that - most sit on the charger all day, and maybe autonomous for a couple of hours, where it may undergo a slight discharge from 100% to say, 60%, then put back on charge. This imposes very little wear on the battery, and even then, laptops use multiple cells, so the wear generally gets distributed over more cells.
Think of it this way - a Tesla uses the same kind of cells, and basically you expect to get about 10 years of life out of it before it hits around 80% capacity or so. That's because there are thousands of cells and each is carefully managed by the onboard computer. Then after that, you can take those cells and put them in a battery pack and run a house off of them, even at their reduced capacity, they can run a house pretty well. That's because the load a house brings on a battery will be much less than a car, so you may get another 10 years out of those cells before they drop to 40% or so (and you probably won't notice the capacity drop if the battery gets you through the night before the solar array on your roof recharges them)..
Battery ageing is determined by how hard you run the loads - how fast and nasty you are at charging them - something cellphones do quite aggressively because you can have peak loads of amps coming out and fast chargers don't help that get you to 80% in half an hour. A laptop is used far more gently comparatively speaking, at least since the load is spread out, and the charge current is spread out as well, so the batteries are treated much more gently.
Electric cars even more so, despite ludicrous mode, the actual load imposed on one individual battery is probably more like it loafing around, and then retirement as a house battery is like pampering it in old age.
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What about UPSes like from APC? They don't seem to last long enough and have to be replaced even though rarely used. :(
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Most UPSes use lead gel battery technology (which has sulphuric acid as an electrolyte). An entirely different beast than Lithium ion cells. Lead cells that are used (too) sparingly have sulphate crystal buildup. Those crystals, when they get too big, act as insulators, diminishing the peak power performance of the cells.
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Ah, interesting. Thanks. :)
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The type of device isn't really relevant, it's how the battery is managed.
If you only charge to 90% and never below 10%, a lithium ion battery will last much longer. If you keep it close to the ideal temperature, it will last a lot longer.
For example, some laptop batteries last a very long time because they are kept away from sources of heat and the manufacturer limits them to between 10 and 90% charge. Others might die fairly quickly because they are right next to the laptop's major sources of heat and the
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My battery capacity reports: 45.3 Wh (design)
Was that a measurement made when you got it, or what they put in the spec sheet?
They usually under-rate the battery to preserve it. For example, a 30kWh car will probably only have 28kWh usable. A 3500mAh phone will probably only have 3300mAh usable.
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an iphone may require more power... (Score:2)
... than a lithium ion battery/cell can deliver? Even if aged?
the hell?
Single Line Fix (Score:3, Funny)
perf_degrade = 0;
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Then we'd just see lawsuits saying Apple's phones continuously rebooting made them buy a new phone when all they needed was a new battery.
Having experienced this in the past (old 3GS turning itself off randomly, often in the middle of calls... it was 3 years old at the time), the new battery health tools look like a vast improvement... now I'll know exactly what the problem is instead of having to guess.
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Hyperlink LOL. (Score:1)
Somewhat irrelevant to the story, but I just wanted to point out how shitty flat UI design has gotten if we're actually at the point where we're confusing clickable "buttons" (which is what borderless coloured text often denotes in iOS) with hyperlinks.
It's clear the author doesn't know what to call said text- it's a button without a border after all, so they're reaching for terms that apply, even though hyperlink is a web term. This should not be happening with offline software. If it's something you can p
Too bad they just won't replace the batteries (Score:2, Informative)
Their $29 scam is a scam since they don't do it, but only announced it to get out from under several class action lawsuits. They refused to replace my battery since I have a small chip in the glass. A coworker took the six 6S and 6S Plus iPhones we have for testing into a store, and Apple found excuses to deny a battery replacement, even at the full price, for all of them. It sucks that all of our newer iPhones suddenly drop from around 50% battery to 1% in just a matter of a few minutes.
More advanced options needed (Score:2)
What am I missing? (Score:2)
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Like any phone, if the voltage dropped the phone shut down. So what they did instead is reduce the maximum draw in order to maintain the necessary voltage. It made the phones more useful, not less, despite what you'll read in these comments.
Extra field needed (Score:3)
"Maximum capacity of battery if we'd made the phone 1mm thicker and weren't trying to make it the size of a credit card".
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