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What Apple's Battery Health 'Fix' Looks Like (bgr.com)
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.
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?
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.