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Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea | iFixit News
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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If you don't ever charge it to over 80% then it's effectively already degraded 20% since the day you got it. I'll rather just use it as intented and then replace the battery when it no longer holds charge. That's just one of the reasons I didn't buy one with built in battery.
But you can still choose to charge it to 100% when you anticipate you need that extra 20%. So it's not really "already degraded" it's just "on demand".
Which has consequences. Spontaneously staying out if you didn't decide to charge to 100% the night before and running out of battery.
It's not "on demand" it's "in stock ready for dispatch."
I don't want to have to order a day ahead to get a non-degraded battery.
If you keep it at 80% it doesn't take a day to charge to full. As long as you know 1 or 2 hours in advance, it'll be full.
But yeah, if your use-case is that you spontaneously need to leave your charger and require your full battery capacity, you should keep charging it to full. Maybe even get a powerbank as well.
If anyone is living a life where they might not spontaneously "leave their charger" they've given up or have young children they have to be responsible for.
On weekdays I know what I'm doing from when I leave my house until work ends. I might have plans after that, I might not. But I'm not going to short charge my phone because I usually go home after work in case I don't.
A phone battery should last as long as I might stay awake, that way I don't have to think about it.
People generally underestimate the mental effort of tiny decisions and micromanaging things.
In general the most freeing thing someone can do to is ensure their future self doesn't have to think about something.
Anyone micromanaging their phone battery is micro-damaging their mental health.
It’s the same problem with our new disposable bag ban in Denver.
Now, if I want to grocery shop, I need to take re-usable bags with me all day: on the bus, at work, etc, if there’s any possibility of grocery shopping on the way home.
Gone are the days of deciding to grocery shop on a whim.
Of course, this law was passed by people who all have cars. For them, grocery bags are something you can keep in your car, and then the furthest you have to carry them is from your garage into your kitchen.
Oh, and the bag ban isn’t all stores. It’s just the big evil stores that aren’t allowed to use disposable shopping bags. The rule, specifically, is any store with more than three locations is banned from offering disposable bags. Small, local places are still allowed to have disposable bags.
Well guess what. You know who shops for groceries at small local places? Rich people. You know who shops for groceries at massive chains? Poor people.
By targeting “the big evil corps” they also conveniently targeted the “corps with enough volume to get prices down to serve poor people”.
Now, I don’t think it’s a deliberate attempt to fuck with poor people. I think these legislators are trying to help. It’s just that none of them has any conception of what the life of most of their constituents is like. They’ve been upper middle class for so long, they just don’t know how people live. How much of an utter pain in the ass it is to not be able to have disposable bags.
And the cherry on top is that I bought a little trash can for my bathroom with a soft close lid that’s designed to take shopping bags as its trash bags.
I won’t run out for a while, but eventually I’m gonna run out of shopping bags and have to start buying little trash bags for that bin.
Now you’re spending limited cognitive resources to try and anticipate phone battery usage.
While true, I consider it a reasonable trade. I so rarely need the 100% charge.
But increasingly the batteries are glued in.
Thanks to EU this will be changing in the near future. Personally I'm one of the stubborn ones who refused to buy devices with non-removable batteries and by the looks of it I will never have to either. Hopefully this applies to the headphone jack aswell.
The USB C to audio jack is ok. I'd like to have replaceable batteries, but my last few phones there wasn't one that had that and what else I wanted. I had to compromise. Glad the EU is forcing things to improve.
I strongly disagree.
I have yet to buy a phone without a headphone jack.
I've got earphones that are 17 years old and sound great. An audio jack in the car that connects way faster than Bluetooth. A hifi older than me.
The amount of electrical waste and incompatibilities caused by ditching a universal standard is not small.
The standard still usable, you just need an adaptor. I don't because Android Auto is my car navigation anyway, so it might as well do audio for podcasts. If I'm out and about, or doing house stuff, my bluetooth ear piece means I can listen to podcasts without wires in the way. At work, I've not used wired headphones since forever. I subconsciously chewed the cable and kept pushing out my chair to roll over somewhere forgetting the wire.
Adapters are more electric thrash.
Not really, as it's a standard you could keep the adaptor longer than the phone. Adaptors keep legacy stuff in use, extending their lives.
Making up theories that don't match reality.
Is talking to you worth any time at all?
All dongles break, especially the fairphone ones.
They are initially unnecessary to manufacture, then become unnecessary waste.
I don't get why this works you up so much. The majority of users have gone wire free, and the manufacturers have cost optimized accordingly. They have left backwards compatibility via a standardized adaptor.
There is no reason the adaptors have to be fragile. You can probably get cables with the adaptor built in to be honest. Like DisplayPort to HDMI between a PC and a TV used to give that old PC a second life as a media PC.
The hypocrisy of encouraging waste while pretending to be against that is what I'm calling out.
They're hypocrites and the worse they do the better a competitor for the ethical market can rise.
To be honest I'd just buy a Nokia. They're more committed to actually producing a sustainable product at volume.
My last phone I got 5 years out of and it was second hand when I got it. At work we make of point of keeping old equipment going as long as we can (adaptors is one of the ways of doing that). I'm absolutely not encouraging waste.
Competing against the main phone makers is extremely hard. The market is very competitive on hardware. FairPhone do about as well as they can do. The problem is blind trust in markets. Consumers aren't suddenly all going to wake up and make long term decisions with lower value upfront. It's like FairTrade, why is it left to a consumer choice if trade is fair or not? What is needed is regulations.
I'm afraid your audio jack is legacy so few want it's not even part of this discussion to me.
They've probably lost to the competition already.
Nokia are more sustainable and offer more options for a lower price.
Fairphone are a virtue signalling brand at best now and a hypocritical one at that.
Anyone with a fairphone 4 might have made an honest mistake, a 5 or later and they're just gullible.
Even they aren't the most sustainable directly anymore, it shows there is an appetite for sustainability. But as I said before, I don't want this just left to the market. I want ratcheting minimum legal sustainability standard, right to repair in law and repairability index on products. Plus a lot of other stuff to help alternative operating systems compete.
The EU and Nokia are at the forefront of what you're asking for.
Ultimately the more appetite for sustainability the better and the less custom sent to companies which are not actually sustainable the better.
Fairphone isn't a sustainable company it's pretending to be one and taking market share from more reputable companies.
So how do you charge your phone while listening to music? Plug a splitter dongle into your headphone dongle? When this could be built into your phone? Yes a compromise.
Yer a cable that has both a male USBC and a female USB C and audio Jack. Easy. It's not worth limiting phone options for. Plus mainly I use bluetooth anyway.
Increasingly I buy fairphones
I nearly did, but I wanted to try GrapheneOS. Until now I've been LinageOS without Google (over a decade), but I've had to compromise and wanted to reduce how much that compromised me.
I know sooner or later I'll have to degoogle. Maybe once I know the first thing about how to run my home server I'll get to it.
Nextcloud fills a lot of the hole. I still use Google as little as I can, but I was bumping into apps that were are hard requirement to do things. Banking apps (no seperate security device anymore), EV charger apps (old chargers don't all have simple card payment) is just two classes.
We have a real issue here. The duopoly of Google and Apple is being reenforced by infrastructure requiring apps. Regulators need to wake up.
It's a whole system of bad incentives, yeah. I'll make a note to look into nextcloud, thanks!
I use Nextcloud for my auto-photo uploads, calendars, contacts, notes and passwords. I've been using it at least 8 years. It's great. 😃
I've never seen an unreplaceable battery. Most phones use a glue that is easily removed with pull-tabs.
That being said it's still a far cry from the devices of yore where you just popped off the back cover and slapped a new one in.
I watched videos on it for my previous phone. You had to use a heat gun to warm the glue but not heat it too much or you damage the screen. It was a bit of a knife edge temperature wise. Plus you then had to take most of the phone apart to get at the battery. It just wasn't practical. Replacing the screen looked better, but was as easy as it was on an old phone I did. This stuff just isn't designed with repair in mind.
I miss the form factor off my HTC Desire Z (T-Mobile G2 for Americans). It had a neat, flip-out keyboard, swappable batteries, and a compact, 3.7 inch display.
I replaced the battery in a 2016 iPhone SE and it was hell. Microsurgery to get the phone apart, multiple attempts at undoing the glue, and at the end the home key didn't work. Result: upgraded phone.
I wouldn't agree. I'm doing that with my car, e.g., or with my notebook. 80% on both never sees the end of a normal day around here, but if I know a day is going to be long, e.g. going to a conference or something like that, I remove the limit before and have 20% more range on the first leg of the trip or know safely that I won't have to hunt for a plug in the hallway at a party in the evening. If I were to degrade the battery immediately I wouldn't have that option.
but that's an incommensurable, fallacious comparison. What the article talks about is battery life, not single charge duration