Even iOS iPhones now using 80% as a way to extend battery life

[VQTRVA]

Interesting article about the iOS 13.1 release recently that included some battery optimization feature that references a certain Tesla associated researcher but mainly explains the managed charging that Apple has pursued.

iOS 13 Optimized Battery Charging and why Android is next

 

[jkoya]

Nice find - thanks for the link.

 

[swaltner]

Nice. All through 6+ years of EV ownership, I’ve been hoping this would be added to portable electronics. Where it’s really needed is on MacOS and Windows for the ”pseudo-desktop” laptop computers that everyone has. I’m talking about the laptops that are always plugged in, so the battery sits at 100% charge always and the computer runs hot just cooking the battery all the time.

Now to see if the batteries in these millions of portable devices start lasting longer than the 2 years that they have been lasting. All indications say it should help extend the time between battery replacements, but it will be nice to see the actual impact. The cynic in me thinks it was a conscious effort to burn through batteries in these devices, thus getting more battery replacement sales after the fact.

 

[MrMassTransit]

Very interesting, thanks for posting. I had completely missed this as part of iOS 13. It's very cool they have implemented this, but I wish they also had a manual mode where I could set the maximum charge and change it on demand. 95% of the time charging to a maximum of 80% is the preferred behavior for me. But when I am going to be traveling, I typically want to top up to 100% so I can have maximum battery life. The phone will have no idea whether or not a particular day is a day where I want 100% charge or 80%. I suppose I could turn the feature off on those days, but its not entirely clear what that will do (will it lose all its previous learnings when I turn it back on?).

It's really the same use case as my car, I just wish they buried a user-configurable option somewhere in the settings.

 

[swaltner]

Note that this Optimized Battery Charging feature isn’t a hard/fast option to only charge to 80%. I have the feature on, but my iPhone 6s charged all the way to 100% at work today.

Based off the help text, it delays the 80% to 100% charge cycle if it thinks you won’t need the extra charge immediately. If you do a bunch of brief charge cycles, it would likely do the 80% charge. Maybe charging overnight would yield an immediate charge to 80% and then delay the top off to 100% until something like 5:00 AM. I typically charge during the day, not overnight, because I don’t want the battery to sit at 100% for hours on end. Maybe I’ll need to change my charging habits a little...

 

[boriszima]

good article. my iphone XS is down to 89% battery life only after 9 months according to Apple. Glad i am charging Tesla to 80% to prolong battery. 10% of daily 100% charging will do this...

 

[plumazul]

good article. my iphone XS is down to 89% battery life only after 9 months according to Apple. Glad i am charging Tesla to 80% to prolong battery. 10% of daily 100% charging will do this...

My 6S+ is also at 89%. I bought it when they first came out and have always charged to 100%

 

[RickW]

I have had my xs max for a year now and I am down to 98%. I do not charge every night. I do start charging when it falls to 20%% and if the charge hits 100% I immediately remove the charger. Same goes for charging the phone in the car. I also had a theory when I heard about the SuperCharger on Tesla. First of all I always wondered why Apple never sold larger chargers on devices with bigger batteries. I then realized that slow charging is better. I rarely do a quick charge and I have been using the small charger for both my phone and iPad.

This 80% or 90% max charge theory has me very interested. So far I have been told that the 2% degradation in one year is unheard of, so may be slow charging to 80-90% on my phone may help me to keep the phone for another 5 years.

 

[swaltner]

Has anyone seen this feature actually activate yet? I have the Optimized Battery Charging option turned on, but have never seen the alert that it will only charge to 80% or seen it stop charging. Since it’s based on past charging history, I’ve even gotten in the habit of charging my phone overnight, but still no luck. Previously, I didn’t charge overnight to avoid having the battery sit at 100% for several hours. I also noticed that this option appears to be iOS specific and isn’t even available on iPadOS.

Wondering if anyone is seeing this actually activate or if I should just go back to manually limiting the SOC on the iPhone battery.

 

[cdubois]

As I understand Apple's feature, when you charge your phone overnight, it will quickly charge to about 80%, then hold off. Based on your ordinary usage, it the tops off to 100% around the time you typically wake up. Their goal is to minimize the amount of time the battery is loaded with a 100% charge.

Here is Apple's description:
About Optimized Battery Charging on your iPhone
In that, you'll see that you can force it to a full charge earlier too.

 

[swaltner]

Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to work. I even posted that a few messages earlier. I just haven’t seen the “Scheduled to finish charging by X” message even with leaving it on the charger all night every night for the last 2 weeks.

 

[KenC]

I'd look at the two charts they include showing Battery Level and Activity. Mine seems to show that while it's on the charger, at night, it stops at 80% and then starts to charge again at 6am to finish off charging before I get up.