If you are going to buy a new iPhone 11 on Friday, or if you are going to update the one you already have to iOS 13, the new version of Apple’s operating system, you may be in for a little surprise when you go to charge it.
Apple wants you to conserve your phone’s battery as well as possible, so it is going to activate a new software function that, in general, charges your phone up to 80% while you have it at night by feeding on the bedside table and, when you are about to wake up, it reaches 100% of its capacity.
It may seem like a great idea to prevent battery degradation from being plugged in for too long , if not because this is one of the great myths around drums that you still hear today. No, nothing happens to leave a mobile phone plugged in all night because these are already very ready and will stop sending power to the battery when due.
What Apple wants to do, according to the preview version of iOS 13, is ” reduce the deterioration of the battery “, so that “the iPhone learns from your daily charging habits to charge the battery up to 80%, and finish charging it when you go to use it. ”
It is a brilliant measure that is reminiscent of the recommendations made by several studies and some companies such as Tesla: the ideal is that your battery, be it from a car or a mobile, does not charge more than 80% daily and does not go below 30 or 40% of its capacity . If you keep it at that point and only occasionally charge it to 100% and deplete it to 10% or below, the battery life will be much longer.
Pure science. The lithium-ion polymers that power these devices have limited charge cycles and their effectiveness will be reduced after approximately 300 or so of them . Understanding by a cycle that the phone goes from 0% to 100% of its battery, if you only use half its capacity daily and charge it before it propagates, you would only be completing one cycle of its useful life every two days.
Don’t think that big tech is tricking you into ruining your battery by misusing it. No, fully charging it is fine and it is certainly more appropriate if your days are very long and you need the phone or the laptop or the console for hours, but you must be aware of the wear and tear that this has on the device . Hence these new recommendations from Apple, for example.
In the ideal situation, your thing would be to charge the phone half so that it does not exceed a cycle daily and, only when you are really going to need it, charge it completely. If you can anticipate these moments, your mobile battery could last two years or more at full capacity, so the phone would also be better.
The iPhone will be the first phone to take extreme care with the battery , either to avoid controversial pasts or because they prefer that users know this information and be the ones who decide on how to take care of the battery.
