TL;DW: Fast charging over 2 years only degraded the battery an extra 0.5%, even on extremely fast charging Android phones using 120W.
And with that, hopefully we can put this argument to rest.
However the Battery Saver mode on Androids that only charges the battery up to 80% DOES extend battery life. Substantial evidence shows that a high State of Charge accelerates degradation through: solid electrolyte interphase growth, loss of lithium inventory, and loss of active materials. (See: mdpi.com)
Here’s a fun fact: phone manufacturers know this. So what they call “100%” is not actually 100%. Your phone will not charge your battery to full. Battery charging is already designed around this.
Got proof? I’ve not cracked open a phone for a while to see if the component labelling matches the interface, let alone tested capacity of an extracted battery directly.
Article rests on one expert. That assistant professor’s publication list doesn’t seem to contain evidence about it, plus the quotes in the article don’t directly say it happens.
Maybe it does, but that article only seems to be guessing based on (admittedly reasonable) theory.
FYI: During this test it saved about 5% of SoH.
It must help as my dad’s S23 (which I happen to use now) has about 88% battery life with 870 cycle counts (he always charged to 80% with said option), and for that I am grateful.
I always find the same study referenced, which was good science but also almost 30 years old. I wonder if this is still true for modern batteries?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know there haven’t been significant changes in Li-Ion and LiPo batteries aside from extra density - which would only increase the effect. But it seems like solid-state batteries are starting to hit the real world now
I’ve got some devices I’ve been fast charging for 8 years; it seems to be more of a problem as the device ages; but that’s offset by having it ready to use again quickly.
Betteridge’s law of headlines: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
„Is drinking Paint thinner really as bad as everybody says?“
No.
Are we talking about water-based paint?
Corollary:
How not following trends and drinking paint thinner boosted my B2B sales
Well. It could be worse than what everybody says
is the poupe deck really what i think it is
You joke, but I actually know some contrarians that would legit try it if this was a headline they saw.
Maybe it can be modified to something like:
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by yes or no, whichever seems the most obvious.”
Ok, before i watch the video, no damage is not what great scott found from his testings… ( https://youtu.be/iMn2yVoEqPs ).
so i have no idea what to believe anymore, but my (based) experience is that it does damage it. Ill have to watch later.
Yea, but that wasn’t a great rest. I love Great Scott, but a lot of comments fairly call out his conclusion.
Most (all?)phones don’t charge at full speed to 100% charge, they fast charge when the battery is almoast empty, and charge slower the more full it gets.
Right, so basically he removed the software aspect in his tests which removes systems to protect the battery. I assume without them, it is damaging, like what great scott found.
Ye, he should have continued his experiments then!
Those circuits he made up doesn’t take into account that the phones have built in protections that alternate the input based on charge level.
TL;DW: No
“And with that, hopefully we can put this argument to rest.”
That’s not how the internet works, but nice try though ;-)
I disagree!
You fool! You fell into the classic blunder! All this time it was I, Dio!
You guys joke and all, but fast charge induces bigger heat and then translates in more harm for the batteries (which will affect more in hot places).
If we want to close this discussion forever I think all the anxiety that comes from this subject at all is due to the fact we can’t easily replace the batteries, if we could (with the normal-ish battery sizes we have today), I don’t think this test would be even worth doing.
It’s as if engineers knew what they’re doing.
Granted, with all the planned obsolescence happening, you could also argue that engineers “knew” what they were doing.
Planned obsolescence happens but it’s not as common as most people think it is.
And probably not as intentional as most people think it is vs just laziness and maybe a lack of planning.
So not planned obsolescence, then?
Well, if they realize the problem and do nothing to fix it and don’t advertise this problem, it ends up being a less worse type of planned obsolescence, but it’s still planned obsolescence imo
More like unplanned obsolescence but it’s a convenient problem so we plan on it happening
It’s always bulbs or Apple. Bulbs industry switched into LED like 15 years ago, which has 20x lifespan than “durable” filaments; and iPhones average life is 6 years whereas competitors usually went into bin in 3 years.
With iPhones i think it’s less about durability (and especially in the software department they were always great in terms of longevity), but more about repairability in case something does happen.
As far as lightbulbs go the issue with potential planned obsolescence doesn’t go way just because of the swap to LEDs. First there are a type of bulb even today that use some form of filament and second the part that gets damaged is usually some kind of capacitor or other electronic part that gets run with too much voltage and too hot. Don’t have time to watch it again, but i remember finding this video from a few years ago interesting.
Back when people made a big deal about iPhone planned obsolescence, they were actually easier to repair than most competitors. Nowadays it’s about the same.
its exactly as common as people think, when most people’s phones are lasting 3 years tops.
I’m sure this happens but with batteries the companies really are just desperately trying to get more capacity and life out of them. The chemistry just isn’t at all where they want to be.
If engineers were the ones in control that would mean something.
As I see it, phone manufacturers have zero reasons to keep the battery degradation low, but many reasons to push advertised capacity and charging speed. If you were cynical, you could also assume that they’re trying to make sure the battery doesn’t last too long because they want to keep selling new phones.
I think we all know that if an engineer went to upper management and said “I can charge these batteries faster, but it degrades the battery life by 20% over a year.” they would have said “Do it! We won’t mention that last part.”
Engineers have the best of intentions. The Bean counters have very different intentions and they’re the ones that corporate listens to.
You say that like batteries don’t need replaced every few years or that they didn’t design the Samsung Note 8 phone that kept catching on fire.
Engineers get told to make the phone charge as quickly as possible, while still lasting 2 years. After that, the company with those engineers pretty much wants the battery to fail, so they can sell a new device.
The one thing I wanted to see from that video, was also just testing the batteries until they went below like 75% capacity. The initial degradation may start off similar for capacity, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.
Yep. I’m gonna miss real engineering with the coming Ai-driven Idiocracy.
Well, except for the engineers on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7. They put the battery terminals too close together, making it really easy for a short to occur.
Samsung notoriously fucks up something up in their phones - from shitty interface changes, to excessive battery drain. Just buy Pixel instead
Literally every flagship pixel up until the 8 or so has had major issues lol. The 7 series are all having batteries start swelling, causing Google to offer refunds lol.
You literally could not have chosen a worse brand to suggest on this topic 🤣
That’s a great TL:DW;
Now I want an iPhone that can charge in 20 minutes. :)
He he Xiaomi 120 watt charge. 19 minutes from zero to full. Well I only have tried from like 12% to 80+ because that was more than enough and I wont let it go to zero-zero. I don’t use it regularly, not because I fear for my battery but it does get the phone warm and warm/cool cycles are bad for electronics.
The day the battery degrades I’ll just have it swapped for a new one, I think we’re far enough into the battery revolution to no longer really care about all this any more.
modern phones last long enough , that you likely wont see significant degradation unless you somehow using it for 10+years. most people would have switched phones multiples by then.
Wish granted, the battery is now small enough to slow charge to full in 20 minutes.
Tap for spoiler
The iPhone air is great, isn’t it?
As humorous as this sounds, this is not at all how battery chemistries works.
Some chemistries just charge faster than others.
for the common types of Lion or Lipo batteries, they max out pushing 2C which is around 30 minutes.
For something like LTO, where you lose capacity/density, you can get that up to like 4C (very rough numbers here as this all depends on the temperature of the battery while charging, age and other factors).
So like… this could have been accurate if this was referring to switching to LTO, but afaik, no one makes LTO batteries in this form-factor (not that it can’t be done though).
So put in a big-ass battery and artificially block it at 20% for “full”? 😁
I hadn’t watched the video yet, but my phone’s going the opposite way. It run slow charge overnight when it feels like it’s going to be enough for it to be fully charged the next morning.
We really should let electronics and tight software take care of these little things.
Its kinda funny as I remember when people wanted a phone that could last all day because there was plenty of time to charge on the nightstand. Feels like batteries got way better and people got lazy about plugging them in.
people got lazy about plugging them in
always have been, here. the old cdma flip phone went about a month between charges, even when it was 5+ years old. the new volte one sucks. with a higher power draw and the shitty 4g signal here, i have to plug it in every few days. the only ‘plus’ is that i always know where a charger cable is now, because it’s usb-c and i use that for other things, too.
We always want better :)
My phone tells me every night that it’s slow charging and it will be full by [the time I have my alarm set for].
Pixel 8 Pro.
iPhones do this as well, I assume both will also do it without the alarm as mine has simply learned what time I take it off the charger normally.
That works if you have a correct sleep schedule… this feature only enabled like 20 times in my life, and half the time it disabled itself because I used my phone during the night
If you’d watch the video you may realize it’s not needed.
No need to wait aeons for someone who enjoys the sound of their own voice to slowly and laboriously explain it like astronomy to a dog. Someone wrote 15 words and I read it in about a half-second.
I’m not saying your opinion is wrong or that you have to watch the video or anything like that, but videos like this are made so that you can see the testing procedure and judge it’s validity without just having to assume they did their job right. I wouldn’t trust someone just saying “yup, tried it out, doesn’t really matter 👍🏽”
Yeah I mean there is a progress bar, you can just jump to the results if you are in a hurry.
I’m sorry that you’re allergic to information.
Given that video is the format with generally the lowest useful information transmission rate, I think you’ve got that the other way around.
The point is that I never had to care about battery management for years. I just leave the phone doing its thing. Not that it’s useful or not useful to do so.
The whole point is that I leave that in the hand of people that know.
Well not charging to 100% all the time will improve your battery life, and if you keep your devices a long time and have a usage pattern that allows charging it less like I do (I leave mine on a wireless charge pad at work), then it makes sense to make some adjustments to that particular setting.
Nah, I can’t be bothered by that. And the only device’s battery I really had issues with was a seven years old laptop, years ago. BMS and software will almost always know better than the user these days.
Max charge level is not something the BMS can decide for you because it’s a trade off between battery health and daily charge level. That’s why they ask you to choose.
Who’s doing the asking there? Neither my laptop nor my phones asked anything.
According to the settings on my current phone, the automatic setting will decide by itself to limit the maximum charge overnight, then plan to go full charge around the time my alarm should fire.
But, again, that’s the kind of micromanagement that would yield a tiny fraction of “maybe improvement” over the lifetime of the damn thing. I’d rather have a device works all the time for 6 years than have a device that’s sometime undercharged for 6.1 years.
Depends on the phone I’m sure but every device I own has this setting.
I always thought that charging beyond 85% or so is what degrades batteries. The LiPos of my quadcopter actually actively reduce their charge if left sitting somewhere for a longer period of time. To prevent them from going up in flames.
The idea with fast charging is it’s going to generate more heat. That extra heat is what damages the batteries life
Video from the same guy.
Thanks, I’ll watch this
It does, but the battery charge controller in your phone already does that. What it shows you as 0-100 is 20-80 of the actual battery. Others may or may not.
What you call 0% or 100% on a battery is an arbitrary number anyway. Absolutely never do this for safety reasons, but back when I worked for a battery lab I did experiments where I discharged cells to below 0V.
In a previous job I once evaluated some returned product that wasn’t having the best battery life or wasn’t working right. It was specialized expensive equipment that used regular alkaline batteries.
TL;DR: ordinary batteries can have negative voltage if you don’t give a fuck and just mix your old and new ones in a drawer before you put them into your high-cost life-saving equipment.
Do you have more info on that?
Lithium-* batteries don’t actually have any specific useful numbers. It’s something like this (the actual numbers are pulled out of my ass and depends on battery time and test parameters and even then I’m simplifying):
-
At 0 volts, the battery is dead.
-
At 1 volts, the battery is practically dead.
-
Discharging to 2 volts kills it after around 100 times.
-
Discharging to 3 volts kills it after around 10 000 times
-
Discharging to 3.5 volts kills it after 100 000 times
-
Charging to 4 volts kills it after 100 000 times
-
Charging to 4.2 volts kills it after 10 000 times
-
Charging to 4.3 volt kills it after 1000 times
-
Charging to 4.4 volts kills it after 100 times
-
Charging to 4.5 has s significant chance of it catching fire
Now choose how many charge cycles you want it to survive, and you know which voltage to consider 0% and which to consider 100%. The bigger difference, the bigger capacity with the same battery.
This is why a phone with 0% battery can tell you that it’s out of battery.
You can also adjust what “killed” means. Is it when battery capacity is reduced to 80%? 50%?
I have to repeat - the numbers are not accurate, and this is strongly simplified.
It’s just an illustration of what 0% and 100% means it’s just where you are on the useful range, according to the manufacturers definition of useful.
-
The battery has a charge curve. What does the most wear or damage to the battery is the ends of the curve - either deep discharging the battery or charging it up fully to the point where it cannot take any more charge. It’s up to the manufacturer where they want to put 0% and 100% on the curve - to protect and extend the life of the battery most manufacturers don’t put 0% and 100% at the extreme ends of the curve.
Best source I can find: https://eugen-barilyuk.medium.com/how-i-realized-android-battery-percentage-wasnt-serious-enough-0310e484d874
3.7v is 0%, 4.2v is 100%. But a lithium battery can go higher and lower, it’s just that doing that can harm the battery, perhaps spectacularly. OEMs just narrow the voltage range to extend life. When you set a charge limit, it narrows that range further.
You’ll find that based on 3.7 - 4.2 that most li-ion batteries are indeed charged from 0-100 and not 20-80 as you previously claimed. Manufacturers have no reason to overprovision consumer products that are made to be replaced in 5 years or so.
Yes, that’s what I said. You could go higher and lower, and it would be reasonable to do for a short-life device, but they reduce it to extend the life. Mapping voltage to percentage is arbitrary.
This is the type of scientific method that can put all this nonsense to rest. I really appreciate their work proving that the difference between fast/slow/30-80% is insignificant to the majority of people.
Thanks!
Battery lore has been cargo-cult woo since the NiMH days… most of it feels like manufacturers saying “oh, I’m sorry you didn’t get our advertised life, you must have done something wrong.”
Non-magnetically-aligned wireless chargers are far worse than fast charging.
Far worse at what? Wasting energy? That isn’t what the video is testing.
At killing batteries faster - the wasted energy creates heat, which degrades the battery.
That makes sense but has it actually been tested?
But keep in mind the phone will throttle charging speeds when it gets warm, so the battery doesn’t end up getting much warmer, it just takes forever to get a full charge (especially when using a thick case that puts further space between the charging coils and also acts as thermal insulation, thus reduces the phones ability to cool down)
It is still keeping the battery warmer which degrades it faster regardless if its being charged or not.
They tested that too, actually. Heat, I mean. It’s in a different one of the channels videos. It’s easy to find, since the channel only has like 10 videos and only a few are about phones .
[citation needed]
https://www.ifixit.com/News/94409/wireless-charging-trading-efficiency-for-convenience
It’s true, but wireless charging is still inefficient and should be avoided.
It’s literally a few watt hours. Not kilowatt hours, watt hours. I pay $0.08 per kwh, so after a few years of wireless charging I might pay $1 more
But the USB-C cord might break in less than that time and cost more. Manufacturing cords is never going to be green, but electricity can be made renewable
The charging pad might also break and they require cables themselves, plus all the materials to make the charging pad, plus every phone has to support wireless, which is even more materials. I’ve never broken a USB-C cable, that’s a user issue, you are either being way too aggressive with them, buying low quality ones, or both.
You keep on connecting and reconnecting the USB-C cable, and if you use it while charging you probably bend it.
The cable in the charging pad never gets unplugged
You can’t use a wireless charger while in bed. Unless it’s magnetic, then it’s also got the bending risk.
I lay in bed all the time with my phone charging, the cable bends, but I’m aware of it, it’s never broken. I’ve had this specific one for 4 years now.
What if I want to charge in a different room? Do I buy another wireless charger? That’s more cost and material again versus just a cable. Do I unplug the charger and take it with me? Cables just make way more sense. Your phone is tethered to something either way, might as well do it the more efficient and green way and plug a cable in.
If you yank a magnetic stick on charger it just disconnects. If you yank a wired cord it can break it.
I never said you must stop using wired charging. If you’re using it while charging and it works for you, you can continue to do that.
Wireless charging is a gimmick like 3D TV was. There’s only one use case, and it’s car use. But it doesn’t need to be fast. In every other case it’s worse than cable in every aspect
sure grandpa
You’re so cool. You can just throw your phone at charging plate to cook itself, while you can’t use it. But it looks cool. Cool tech for cool people.
It makes my wife considerably less pissed off when I come to bed late and am not fumbling with cables, so it’s a win for me.
She gets pissed off if you take 2 seconds to plug a phone in? Are you alright brother?
Well if I wake her up then yes. No one likes being woken up.
A phone with wireless charging is a bit niche, but if only all my little devices had wireless charging; earbuds, vape, tablet, controller, remote, etc. I’d set a charging mat in the middle of the coffee table and have all my devices just be charged and ready to go. Now it’s just a mess of wires, with the only thing I keep glued to my hand featuring wireless charging!?
I’m hoping for ranged wireless charging. Everything is always charged when Im inside.
Just live in a microwave. Problem solved!
Only with the correct iOS version though.
Not doable without some very expensive addons to your house - like IR charging from ceiling
Everything is always charged when Im inside.
That’s living in microwave, I’d say its not going to ever happen
https://news.mit.edu/2019/converting-wi-fi-signals-electricity-0128
I’m fine with infrastructure overhaul. We build new houses every day.
We just need to be clever enough to do it without cooking ourselves
Wifi is limited to ~100 miliwats of power, and what reaches you and your phone is in range of microwats or even less. You can’t charge your phone with it.
Wireless charging sucks. It costs significantly more energy to charge the same battery to full.
Your phone doesn’t have that much energy stored in it. 5 watt hours or so? Now consider the energy cost of making usb-c cords
The charging pad itself probably requires a USB-C cable itself? It takes much more materials to make them than a cable…
It doesn’t have plugging and unplugging cycles and doesn’t get bent in different directions, so it will basically never break unless you use the phone while holding the charging pad
So I’m expected to hold a wireless charger as well? When I can just have a light cable plugged in, generating less heat and for less time? Unless you are buying really low quality cables, they shouldn’t break and unless you are aggressive with it, the cable and the port will last years. When they eventually wear out, the cable is recyclable and depending on your phone, the USB-C port replaceable.
Wireless charging is for toothbrushes.
Nobody said you must get rid of wired charging.
Over four years I’ve broken three or four cables. Every time it’s because the phone moved while plugged in. Whether it’s my error (forgetting it’s plugged in) or the cat knocking the phone down, nothing breaks when the phone falls down from the wireless charger
yup, the chinese brand have it right. Fast charging is amazing, just put the phone on charge for like 10-20 minutes and you can forget about your battery for another day. It’s great.
I have a one plus phone.
The super vook charging works very well. It feels like less than 10 minutes to go from 10 to 80 percent.
The Chinese have it right with the food too. Love me egg foo yung
Magnetic portable battery packs are fantastic too.
This isn’t a fair like-to-like test though. They used iPhones, which use one battery and then for their 120W test they used iQOO 7, which has two batteries that charge in parallel. They aren’t testing the charge rate effects on a single battery, but just how different phones behave.
While it’s an okay test to see how certain models of phones hold up, it’s not a test for longevity of a single battery using fast and and not-as-fast charging.
So the title, as it often is these days on YouTube, is misleading.
No they did a fast and slow charging group for iPhone, and also did a fast and slow charging group for Androids. Did you not pay attention.
The video was pretty poorly structured to be honest, should have been longer with better information and they didn’t post their data anywhere to read. I mean they had ~30 seconds just growing plants…
But the point stands, they weren’t testing 1 to 1 on batteries (hard to do anyway). There’s good reasons for why manufacturers havent just cranked it all to 200W charging.
The video isn’t a sudden revelation, we already knew how batteries behave, they’ve been tested in labs under much more strenuous conditions too.
And with that, hopefully we can put this argument to rest.
wow… the idea that the anecdotal evidence of some youtuber should be the proof, not the engineering and chemistry knowledge of people who designed the battery and charging system and know how it works, is on par with the belief that global warming is caused by farts of the turtles carrying the earth. sad noises.
Which part contradicts what the engineers or scientists think?
