In contrast, at night I plug in my phone, and it "knows" I won't need it until the morning alarm goes off, so it avoids unnecessarily charging the battery too soon or too rapidly.
Also, the discharge takes a very, very long time when plugged in, as it feeds directly from the power supply.
If you have an Apple Silicon Mac I can recommend Battery [1]. It can keep your Mac at 80%, and even force discharge while plugged in to get there. It’s a CLI and status bar utility, I love it.
If you have a highly irregular schedule, then sure, this may not be helpful. But I find that my and my wife's Apple Silicon laptops are usually kept at 80% unless we explicitly tell them to "charge to full now".
The same happens with your battery. If you charge it to 100% a lot and leave it there then it gets "stretch marks" and the permanent defects affect how long the battery lasts.
I'm boycotting laptops until this gets fixed
I’m not unhappy with that…so I am always a bit skeptical of these laptop plugged in all the time are bad claims because it just doesn’t match my recent experience.
"In terms of longevity, the optimal charge voltage is 3.92V/cell"
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
That maps out to roughly 65% charge state. So a little trickle charge on/off doesn't really help things much at all. You simply need to keep the battery in a lower charge state while plugged in for longer periods.
As bad as this is alone, the toxic combo that kills a plugged in laptop's battery in a year or two is regularly pushing it hard at full charge.
But the key point is that the battery will drop to 99% very quickly and on it's own because no battery can keep the energy in perfectly. So it's recharged for the missing 1% over and over again which causes the damage.
Unless some smart charging logic prevents that, see other comments here.
Edit: typo
but seriously, when they announced EV with lithium batteries, all I could think of was the baby sitting for batteries. Look at all the intelligence that goes into those EV car setups.
Does that actually work, though?
My iPhone does quite a terrible job at "optimized battery charging"...
"In terms of longevity, the optimal charge voltage is 3.92V/cell."
https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-808-how-to-prolong-...
That maps out to roughly 65% charge state.
There's a great app called AlDente for MacOS that allows you to set the charge limit while plugged in.
I regretfully set the bios to fully charge again to disable this auto-dim feature.
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000178000/dell-comm...
Because the manfacturers made the firmware defaults downclock the CPU if it was on battery power.
Also, is it just me or does this article have an "AI generated" feel to it? The arguments it makes are somewhat in the "uncanny valley" between truth and fiction, and the phrasing of some of the sentences seems very unusual, especially this last one:
Stop charging your laptop past 100% today, so you can free yourself from being plugged in tomorrow.
Stuff like this also raises some red flags:
It’s when hen[sic] there are too many lithium ions on one side that the battery gets stressed.
Just look at this paragraph:
“Many laptops sit on a charger throughout the workday and all through the night. We don’t even think about it; we just plug in everywhere. We’re charging at work, at home, at the coffee shop – a collective addiction to a laptop at 100% battery. There’s nothing more frustrating than a laptop that can’t hold a charge, but your charging addiction may be accelerating the issue.”
It’s entirely air. It says nothing. The transition to the “There’s nothing more frustrating than a laptop that can’t hold a charge” sentence also doesn’t make sense. It’s like an 11th grader padding their essay to 1000 words, except the entire article is like that.
The article is over dramatized causing false statements, doesn't use any of the usual GPT4 lingo etc.
E.g. claiming that it is the "worst thing you could do".
- Work MPB which I got 2021-12, 99% of the time plugged in because I was WFH, last time I unplugged it to return it to my employer, the battery was at ~95% of max capacity (as reported by MacOS)
- Personal MBP bought 2021-12, only plugging in when battery was low, and 1.5y later the battery was at 80% of max capacity
It was then that I investigated a bit and learned the trick of charging only up to 80%, which is something that MacOS does automatically when it's constantly plugged in which preserves battery life.
Since then, my personal laptop also stays plugged in most of the time, its battery is almost always at 80% and the battery hasn't decayed further.
- 2012 MBP used by my parents, almost always plugged in. Battery died last year. Forgot the cycle count but it shocked me by how low it was. This was before they implemented the feature where it stops charging at 80%.
- 2015 MBP used by me, mostly plugged in for the first few years, then afterwards always on battery, at least one charge/discharge cycle every day (often more than one). Battery died 2 years ago (and was 3 years younger). Cycle count was something crazy like ~2000.
If your laptop is near power, plug it in.
First laptop at work, always plugged in (except for maybe one or two hours a week). After two years of use (maybe a couple more from a previous employee) the battery lasted 30 minutes.
Personal laptop. Mostly plugged in (except when traveling maybe 3-4 weeks per month) but with the charging at 80% capped (it's an option from the manufacturer). Almost 10 years later still holds around 1-2 hours (disclaimer: I don't use this laptop anymore except for occasional tests)
Various things have different default behavior when not plugged in to the power (e.g. iTerm2 disables GPU rendering by default). This is just the one place I know that's a counterpoint (and there's a setting to disable that), but it's actually something that I've hit a few times while developing Ratatui.
Next month, they will release a version for laptops: https://chargie.org/product/chargie-for-laptops-preorder
Unless it's a desktop with ups, in which case it should stay at 50%-80%.
Hard to tell if it max a difference but judging by battery health stats others are reporting I’d say yes.
Would be nice if device had a built in way to cap it for daily use and only go to 100% if travelling etc. I’m rarely away from a power socket day to day anyway
The least losing move for the manufacturer is to always charge 100%.
On my Lenovo laptop I have a toggle I can switch any time between battery saver mode(stay at 80%) and fast charging mode (charge asap to 100%).
If when designing products you never even let users choose to learn, you guarantee you will have a stupid user base. Stop endorsing stupidity.
Even worse, unplugging your laptop makes it use battery charge, adding additional wear to your battery.
Virtually all EV's have good software, so your electric car should be plugged into a charger as often as possible. It should be the same for laptops, unless you have one that is poorly configured; most are.
It seldom charges while plugged in. Even when down to 80% it alerts me it's not charging because I seldom use the battery.
Apple could change this behaviour silently and mess it up but for now it's perfect for my needs.
Gizmodo: "Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance."
It’s why whenever a new M-series chip launches, Apple makes sure to highlight how it performs every bit the same on battery as while charging.
