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

[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.