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.

Comments

Good Battery Management

[GoRK]

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?

Re:Good Battery Management

[ckatko]

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

[Kopp]

Why would they bother, they can sell them overpriced phones that would require replacement sooner. Their business is to sell as much as they can... Especially now that they are all the hype, they don't need to compete. And since no one else is actually competing on that market of non disposable phones, or almost no one (you have things like the fairphone, but the firepower behind is not strong enough to provide on both sides of repairable and actually up to date to begin with) Why would you want people to replace battery for 60$ when you can instead sell them a new phone for at least 500 ?

Re:Good Battery Management

[tlhIngan]

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.

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.

Re:Good Battery Management

[TheRaven64]

My only real complaint about Apple's new model is that they didn't do it from the start. I don't have any issues with them throttling performance to prevent instability, I do have a problem with them throttling performance to hide the fact that batteries are dying early and avoid replacing them under warranty. Now that a user can notice slower performance and see that they're experiencing it because their battery is dying, they can have a conversation with Apple about whether their battery replacement should be covered by the warranty. Before that, they would likely have thought that their phone needed replacing.

Re:Good Battery Management

[AmiMoJo]

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 laptop needs to draw on them during normal operation because the tiny thin charger can't supply enough power on its own. Some manufacturers allow you to charge to 100% and drain down to 1%, so they can claim to get 20% more battery life than their rivals.

It's interesting that Apple says 80% after two years is normal, because that suggests that they are managing the battery very poorly. 80% is considered end of life for rechargable batteries.

Re:Bad battery tech

[GoRK]

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.

Single Line Fix

[dohzer]

perf_degrade = 0;

Too bad they just won't replace the batteries

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Bad battery tech

[jblues]

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.

Extra field needed

[jez9999]

"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".

Re:Bad battery tech

[TheRaven64]

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.