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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.
uh... 20% loss after two years is not bad!
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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?
One charge per day lets say so 2 years is around 700 cycles. This is pretty good, but time to replace the battery if that means you have not enough charge to make it through 1 day.
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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.
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.
... than a lithium ion battery/cell can deliver? Even if aged?
the hell?
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perf_degrade = 0;
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 press, it should look like a goddam button. Jobs used to pride himself in creating systems anyone could use with little or no prior experience. It's pretty sad Apple has reached a point where people don't even know what to call their GUI widgets anymore, because the functions don't line up with the graphical representation anymore.
Articles are not negative, only descriptive. Comments tend to be negative towards Apple, but who's fault is that? Apple hid a slowdown "feature" that was rather a "stop using that device it's too slow, time to buy a new one" injunction in disguise.
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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.
I was recently in at -20 degrees Celsius in the Swiss Alps, and my old iPhone would die unexpectedly during use (or, the battery would drop 50% for five minutes of use). However, having since come back to Australia, I don't want my phone to throttle based on the one week a year I spend skiing - the system should permit more customisation than either just "on or off".
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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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.
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Don't the batteries naturally lose maximum output as they discharge? If a phone can't handle maximum performance anymore when it can't hold as much charge, how did it do it before as the charge went down ?
> 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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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 reason the DJI drone batteries self discharge.
Granted the usage pattern of a phone or laptop is quite a bit different, and the cells have indeed gotten very good. As to how much "above" the 100% mark and below the 0% mark the battery's true capacity is, i'm not sure. But I think we can agree that putting in a 30% larger battery and not letting people use the top and bottom 15% of the capacity would be quite agreeable to many.
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 problem. I suppose it does make the battery have less surface area per unit volume, which might require decreasing the charge speed to keep that from overheating the battery, but then again, you have the option of making the battery have significantly more capacity, which would mean being able to leave larger margins at the top and bottom, fewer charge cycles, shallower discharge, etc., all of which I would expect to reduce the battery's self-heating.
Yes, but heat sinking isn't purely about surface area. It's also about the mass of the heat sink itself. The less material you have to sink the heat, the less heat you can sink into it, which means that heat has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the battery. A thicker, heavier case, then, could sink more heat, averaging out the amount of heat that reaches the battery and thus reducing the temperature spikes that can cause so much damage to batteries.
Also, larger cases could allow them to consider alternative chemistries with lower densities that are less temperature sensitive (e.g. Lithium-Iron Phosphate), not to mention less likely to catch fire.
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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.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
"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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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.
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/...
Now compare that to what Apple says:
https://www.apple.com/batterie...
https://www.apple.com/batterie...
And some good discussions about this topic:
https://discussions.apple.com/...
https://discussions.apple.com/...
It's pretty bad if you've been taking care of your battery (for example, not letting it fall below 50% of full charge capacity most of the time). My current laptop is down less than 20% after four years. Tesla does this automatically. Their 'empty' capacity is nothing like actually flat, which is why they are able to provide a software update that increases the range at the expense of battery life. I'm not sure what they're doing now, but I seem to recall that the first generation reported that the batteries were empty when they were down to 50% capacity.
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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 someone will pop up to tell us that they do 1000 miles 7 days a week 365 days a year, but basically phones in general and iPhones in particular are about an order of magnitude worse on expected battery lifetime.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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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/watch?...
Also, DJI drone manufactuer user "paper/owner" guides say do not drop below 20% for best battery life and store at 50% charge.
I'm with you on the laptop thing though. Many laptops that never use their battery seem to have good batteries, and they stay at 100% charge for years.
It's really hard to know what to believe, so I try to meet somewhere in the middle. I always store things long term at 50%, I try not to run many cycles on my batteries, and I try not to let them get below 20%.
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.
... to sell a device into which a battery has been glued.
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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.