swineone

After I had some batteries on Apple products die on me (and had to spend obscene amounts of money replacing them, because on top of Apple repairs being expensive, my country has some of the highest tax rates in the world piled on top), and being an electrical engineer, I decided to do some research on the scientific literature with regards to what could prolong the battery lifetime. Here is the executive summary: 1. Temperature: the main killer of batteries. Do everything on your power to keep the computer (and hence the battery) as cool as possible. For instance, using your phone for navigation in the car, which by itself heats the phone a lot due to GPS usage, plus having the sun shining directly on it, is just awful. If you do this often, try to leave the phone in the shade or right in front of the car's A/C vents to cool it. The inductive chargers I'm familiar with dissipate a lot of heat so I don't use those for the iPhone. 2. State of charge (battery percentage) and depth of discharge. Batteries degrade faster if fully charged. Some of the research indicates they'll also degrade if nearly depleted, and it appears a good compromise is about 60% charge. Too bad Apple won't allow you to connect the power adapter but disable charging (more on that at the end of the post). It might be very useful for those who don't need the full battery range, like me. Also some of the research indicates, as pointed out in the article, you should have shallow depths of discharge, i.e. 5 discharges from 60% to 40% are better than 1 discharge from 100% to 0%, although technically both are counted by the gas gauge IC as 1 cycle. 3. Charge rate. Try to charge the device as slowly as possible. Although the research isn't clear on the point of diminishing returns, one thing is certain: fast charging is harmful to the battery, so avoid it (the worst example being USB-C to an iPhone). This is probably what kills Apple Pencils so quickly -- at least the 1st gen, non-inductive-charging one (I speak from experience, having had one replaced with 9 months of very light use on it). I wouldn't even recommend using the iPad 12 W charger, but rather the iPhone 5 W one, even to charge the iPad. An interesting trick: you can use your iPad USB-A charger plus a USB-A to USB-C cable to charge the newest MacBooks very slowly if not in use (if in use, it'll at best maintain the charge with very light use, or deplete it at moderate to heavy use). 4. Cycle count. Best thing to do would be not to put in the cycles if possible, although if points 1 and 2 are not respected, even a battery that hasn't been cycled at all will eventually die. This one is simple: try to connect the charger as often as is feasible. Even if you're taking it out for a quick half-hour session, leave the charger connected. For MacBooks, there are also some settings to be used with the pmset command in Terminal to make sure the computer goes to standby, since it is not unusual to lose 10% charge (i.e. 1/10 of a cycle) over less than a day if you close the lid but don't go to standby. The computer will take a bit longer to wake up but depending on your usage patterns, it pays to do this since it could add up to as much as 30 cycles a year, which is far from negligible -- it's about half what I put on my computer over a year of use. I have written an app for MacBooks that is able to keep the computer at the desired charge level with the power adapter connected but not charging. I use it to keep my computer at 60% charge following point 2. I thought of releasing the app, but I'm certain that as soon as I do it, someone at Apple will take notice and close the API I use to do it (same reason why I'm being intentionally vague here). The point is, the capability is there, but Apple has a long history of stopping at nothing to prevent users from doing legitimate things with the devices they paid hard-earned cash for. This same API could be used on iOS but unfortunately it requires root access and I'm not willing to jailbreak my phone over it, if it's even still possible. Hope this helps someone.

The average Apple tech is much less knowledgeable and skilled than quite a few independent technicianS. I would trust e.g. Louis Rossmann with my hardware over ANY Apple technician. I mean ANY. There is no technician working at Apple that could do their job as well as Louis does. BTW: I’m an electrical engineer, I design portable electronic devices, and I’ve spent quite a few hours watching Louis’ videos. He displays impressive skills. And often he has to fix a crap job done by, guess who, Apple technicians.

williamlondon said:

swineone said:

The average Apple tech is much less knowledgeable and skilled than quite a few independent technicianS. I would trust e.g. Louis Rossmann with my hardware over ANY Apple technician. I mean ANY. There is no technician working at Apple that could do their job as well as Louis does. BTW: I’m an electrical engineer, I design portable electronic devices, and I’ve spent quite a few hours watching Louis’ videos. He displays impressive skills. And often he has to fix a crap job done by, guess who, Apple technicians.

Bullshit. And if he wants to become a certified repair person, I'm fine with that, but your other claims are pure bullshit.

BTW, anecdotes prove nothing

Nice argument you put there, “bullshit”. I’m fully convinced by this one magical word.

Screw the actual facts, such as that Louis Rossmann quite often fixes Macs deemed unfixable by Apple. And especially, how he performs fixes much more cheaply (never mind environmentally friendly) than Apple by replacing the few targeted components that actually failed rather than whole boards at a time as the Apple technicians do — indeed, if his fixes weren’t cheaper than Apple’s, who would be crazy to hire him rather than Apple fix their devices?

Plus, he does all of these things without proper access to repair documentation and knowledge bases, and most importantly, to the parts he needs. For those who don’t know: Apple has the awful habit of calling up an IC manufacturer and throwing their weight around to require the manufacturer to create a small variation of an existing part, with a trivial and technically unnecessary change such as swapping a couple of pins around. Then Apple won’t let the manufacturer sell the same part to anyone else but Apple or provide documentation on it. Thus, repair technicians can’t get ahold of it, and must take these parts from donor boards. This is simply the most actively user-hostile move by a company that I’ve ever seen in my life. It truly sickens me every time I think of it, especially when you consider all the (lying) marketing strategy from Apple trying to paint it as a nice, friendly company that just wants to help its customers and the environment. This one example brings all that illusion down.

sflocal said:

MplsP said:

OMG! We'd better stay out of New York - all the phones are going to start exploding because of dangerous repairs! /s

No... what will happen is those sketchy repair shops using crappy batteries for iPhones end up exploding, and then everyone blaming Apple.  That's what will happen.

Right, like they don’t do that already. If Apple was really worried about the safety of its users, it would sell genuine batteries to their party techs, knowing that people would go to these techs regardless. But since Apple only cares about the bottom line, they’re fighting this. And look, they really should worry about the bottom line, that’s the point of s company. Just don’t be such hypocrites about it. Apple only cares about you as much as they can shake cash out of you. Sorry, that’s the truth, regardless of the touchy-feels rehearsed to death lines you see on keynotes,

Mike Wuerthele said:

swineone said:

williamlondon said:

swineone said:

williamlondon said:

swineone said:

The average Apple tech is much less knowledgeable and skilled than quite a few independent technicianS. I would trust e.g. Louis Rossmann with my hardware over ANY Apple technician. I mean ANY. There is no technician working at Apple that could do their job as well as Louis does. BTW: I’m an electrical engineer, I design portable electronic devices, and I’ve spent quite a few hours watching Louis’ videos. He displays impressive skills. And often he has to fix a crap job done by, guess who, Apple technicians.

Bullshit. And if he wants to become a certified repair person, I'm fine with that, but your other claims are pure bullshit.

BTW, anecdotes prove nothing

Nice argument you put there, “bullshit”. I’m fully convinced by this one magical word.

Screw the actual facts, such as that Louis Rossmann quite often fixes Macs deemed unfixable by Apple. And especially, how he performs fixes much more cheaply (never mind environmentally friendly) than Apple by replacing the few targeted components that actually failed rather than whole boards at a time as the Apple technicians do — indeed, if his fixes weren’t cheaper than Apple’s, who would be crazy to hire him rather than Apple fix their devices?

Plus, he does all of these things without proper access to repair documentation and knowledge bases, and most importantly, to the parts he needs. For those who don’t know: Apple has the awful habit of calling up an IC manufacturer and throwing their weight around to require the manufacturer to create a small variation of an existing part, with a trivial and technically unnecessary change such as swapping a couple of pins around. Then Apple won’t let the manufacturer sell the same part to anyone else but Apple or provide documentation on it. Thus, repair technicians can’t get ahold of it, and must take these parts from donor boards. This is simply the most actively user-hostile move by a company that I’ve ever seen in my life. It truly sickens me every time I think of it, especially when you consider all the (lying) marketing strategy from Apple trying to paint it as a nice, friendly company that just wants to help its customers and the environment. This one example brings all that illusion down.

Anecdotes, like exceptions, prove nothing. One man is NOT better than *ANY* Apple technician. Your argument is so ridiculous, just stop.

Really? It’s impossible for one person to be better than the best in a given set of persons?

Let’s try this. Skill = playing tennis. Set of persons = { me, my wife }. One person = Roger Federer.

Your argument is that Roger Federer can’t possibly be better than me or my wife at tennis.

Now who has the ridiculous argument again?

Like you said, repair parts that are swapped out in the field are sent to the depot for refurbishment and return to the repair part supply stream, sometimes to assist the refurbished device stream that I am about to discuss.

Entire-device swaps at the store-level are also sent to a depot for repair and assessment. Whole-devices repaired at the depot in this fashion are sent to the service swap stock, or the refurb store.

This depot refurbishment is done at the component level, by humans with equal or better skill than Rossmann's. Some will be slightly less talented, and some will be slightly more.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Rossmann and others like him exist. But to say that Apple doesn't have anybody in the service stream that has his level of skill is false.

I do admit the point about Rossmann was made to shock those who somehow think the lack of Apple certification is an automatic sign of incompetence (though I'm sure he'd rank quite highly within Apple if he worked there).

Getting back to the point, though. How can the end user access these technicians so they'll, like Rossmann does, fix a fried voltage regulator for a couple hundred dollars, rather than over a thousand as Apple charges for say a logic board repair?

We can't? We have to pay full price (with markup, most likely) for a logic board from Apple which they'll turn around, refurbish and resell with even more markup?

Say I took a GM car to GM, out of warranty, to fix an issue which ultimately can be ascribed to a worn-out spark plug. GM tells me "we'll have to perform a full engine swap, and by the way, that'll be $5,000, please." Then GM turns around, replaces the spark plug (at a cost of a few dozens of dollars) and resells the engine for say $4,000. An engine which by the way probably costs $2,000 or $3,000 to make. Outraged by this, you thank GM and take this to your friendly neighborhood mechanic, and they tell you "sorry. I know it's just a worn-out spark plug, which by the way is quite similar to model XYZ1337 from NGK, but GM called up NGK and told them to use an english-unit screw thread rather than a metric-unit one for no good reason, and have an agreement in place that NGK is forbidden to sell the english-unit version. Maybe you can look for an identical car in the junkyard so we can take the spark plug out of it?"

I'm the last person in the world to demand the government step in. However, I can't help but rejoice when I see Apple being forced to do the right thing, as in this situation and also the most likely break up of the App Store 30% monopoly.

lkrupp said:

AppleInsider said:

So do expect some complaints, and also expect some bargain Intel-based Mac Pro machines to turn up on eBay. However, it's not that anyone need ditch their current Intel Mac, nor should anyone should put off buying one if they need it now.



Something I've never understood about some users. Your current machine is running perfectly fine, it's fast and it does what you want it to very well. Now something new and different comes along and somehow, someway , the machine you are using becomes an obsolete piece of crap not worth keeping. And you blame Apple for bringing out a new technology before you are damn good and ready for it. You rage at Apple for making your perfectly fine machine 'useless'. 

When you invest a substantial amount of money in some pro gear, you hardly do so with the expectation to use it for a couple of years and then discard it. In fact you sell it for a good fraction of what you paid for it. That's part of the economic calculation of buying a piece of pro gear.

Now suddenly your pro gear uses a fundamentally incompatible architecture, which will be supported for "some (unstated amount of) years". There's no guarantee developers will continue performing software maintenance for the Intel port, or even Apple itself, for that matter. Now your expensive pro gear may not last as long as you initially planned, and by the time you sell it, it will probably be worthless. I mean really, if you paid upwards of $10,000 on a Mac Pro recently (quite easy with CPU, RAM, storage and GPU upgrades), who's going to pay more than, say, $3,000 or $4,000 for it in three years, knowing the fate of Intel hardware?

Compare that to other pro gear. I work with electronics design, where you can get upgrades for decades-old test equipment from the likes of Keysight, Fluke or Tektronix. An HP 3458A DMM, the gold standard in high-precision metrology, is a design from 1989 (IIRC) which holds its value quite well, and is still sold today with minimal, user-facing changes only. The lens mounts for DSLR cameras are the same for decades, you can use a good lens from the previous century on a current Canon or Nikon camera. I know computer technology is faster paced than this, but still, the timeframes in the pro market are quite different from the consumer market.

If Apple really cared about its pro users, they should have stated Mac Pros will be supported by macOS and pro apps for, at the very least, 5 years, and for them to keep a modicum of resale value, 10 years. They could go even further by requiring fat Intel/ARM builds in the Mac App Store for a similar amount of time, but macOS and pro app support for 5-10 years is the bare minimum.

avon b7 said:

Beats said:

swineone said:

The average Apple tech is much less knowledgeable and skilled than quite a few independent technicianS. I would trust e.g. Louis Rossmann with my hardware over ANY Apple technician. I mean ANY. There is no technician working at Apple that could do their job as well as Louis does. BTW: I’m an electrical engineer, I design portable electronic devices, and I’ve spent quite a few hours watching Louis’ videos. He displays impressive skills. And often he has to fix a crap job done by, guess who, Apple technicians.

That man is an idiot. I wouldn’t let him touch any of my Apple devices.

Apple can at least take the blame if they fu** up. I’ve had Apple employees just hand me a refurbished device no questions asked when I’ve dropped my devices and broken them. Great customer service and no bashing original Apple products to promote some spyware cheap knockoff. 

What makes him an idiot? He is basing his opinion on experience and you can choose to agree or disagree with him but it's very hard to argue against what he's saying when he's giving you example after example of real world issues.

Your Apple employees offering you refurbished devices is ONLY in warranty. You'd probably sing a different tune if you presented the same cases out of warranty! 

Precisely. It’s so convenient for Apple that they’ll only perform full part swaps (say a top case, or the full display and enclosure, or the worst of all, the logic board). While it’s under warranty, great — if Apple wants to condemn a fully working logic board with one fried voltage regulator worth a few cents at their loss, fine by me. When it’s no longer under warranty, they’ll conveniently quote a price that’s worth as much as the computer itself on the second hand market, so the customer will just give up and conveniently buy a shiny new Mac.

Some people are easily bribed, as this shows, by some show of “great customer service” while under warranty — and by the way, that failed logic board of yours, do you think Apple just throws it in the trash? They’ll send it to an employee which will perform a component-level repair quite like what Louis does, and then sell it as refurbished. But they’ll sure charge the full cost of the replaced part out of warranty to you, even though they’ll fix your broken one and later resell it as refurbished.

Louis Rossmann will just do what’s nice and fair: charge you the actual cost of fixing the issue (and obviously his time to diagnose it, and supporting costs to keep his business alive — still much less than what Apple will charge you for a full part swap.)

mr. h said:

Wesley Hilliard said:

M68000 said:

So, now it’s bad to charge your phone to 100% ?  Lol,  so much different information out there.  It’s hard to know what to believe. 

Simple: ignore randombro69 on a forum and listen to the experts. We've detailed what you should and shouldn't do for iPhone battery health. My recommendation will always be "don't worry about it."

Really. This whole thing is getting silly. You can't beat physics.

And I would understand all the drama if battery replacements weren't readily available and cheap.

Who’s the expert here? You? Because your article is dead wrong. It has long been well established that charging lithium ion batteries beyond 80% accelerates the aging process. It’s not the charging per se; rather just being at that elevated state of charge. That’s why the optimised charging mode attempts to wait until the last moment to bring the battery to 100%: the theory is you will start using the phone soon after it reaches 100%, thus minimising the time the battery spends above 80%. However, in my experience the optimised charging is easily thrown off if the user has an inconsistent routine so I welcome this additional control provided by Apple.

I used to try to point this out in this forum, pointing out scientific sources to this source, but every time one of the site writers came here (probably the one from this article) and always claimed it was wrong, that it made no difference, etc. To him it doesn't matter that there are all these scientific papers; Apple itself ships devices half-charged; that it offered optimized battery charging; that it now offers this setting; that Apple offers a charge management feature since iOS 11 or 12, which detect when a device is connected to power all the time (like a kiosk) and automatically caps charging at 80%; that Samsung offers this setting as well; that RC battery chargers make the express same recommendation (and usually have a "storage mode" setting); that Tesla offers similar settings and guidance (avoid charging to 100% unless absolutely necessary) on their EVs; that e-bikes/e-scooters do the same thing; and so on and so forth. No, none of this matters, after all he's a "nuclear power electrician" and we should just believe that somehow makes him an expert on the completely distinct field of battery lifespan management. Really, the writing of the current article in particular shows how desperate he is getting: "yes, Apple added a setting; trust us, you shouldn't use it, you'll gain a few weeks". Which is false, with proper charge and heat management you can, very conservatively speaking, double the lifespan of your batteries.

Now onto some of the facts:
1. Some of us don't need, on a daily basis, the full 100% charge the phone provides. We have actual work to do and cell phones are generally just toys and, in an emergency, very poor replacements for an actual work machine like a Mac or PC. Or we always have a charger close by and could in practice keep the phone charging 95% of the time, and have no "range anxiety". I for one welcome this setting with open arms.
2. With regards to point 1, if people were to keep their phones charged 95% of the time at 100%, this would have definite effects on battery lifespan. On the other hand, with this setting, batteries could last much much longer.
3. When we do need the full charge, we can just toggle off the setting temporarily. Best of both worlds.
4. Heat is the #1 killer of batteries, especially combined with high state-of-charge. You have people who spend most of their day in a car, sometimes with the phone in direct sunlight, and charging to 100% all the time. I'm impressed that under such conditions a phone's battery would last a year. Now change that to charging to 80%, and suddenly the battery has a decent chance of lasting years.

Now onto the next fallacy: "just replace the battery, it's cheap". Here's a few other facts:

1. The world is not America. Where I live, changing an iPhone battery costs a significant portion of a month's minimum wage. I of course make more than the minimum wage, but it is proportionately expensive to myself. And pray you have an Apple store or an Apple authorized repair shop where you live; I live in a city of ~500,000 people and there wasn't one here until a few years ago. In my whole country, one of the largest on earth, with over 200 million people, there are only 2 Apple stores. 90% of the country is hundreds of miles away from the nearest Apple store. In fact a large percentage of the country is over 1,000 miles away from the nearest Apple store.
2. This leads people (even in America) to change batteries on unauthorized resellers in these phone-fixing kiosks you now find everywhere. Since Apple doesn't sell the batteries they use to the public (including these kiosks), you're taking a gamble on the lowest-bidder type battery, with awful performance and even risk of swelling and explosion.
3. Apple loves to claim how they're eco-friendly and so on. Well guess what's better than recycling a battery? Not swapping a battery at all! But of course in that case there's no money to be made swapping the battery or, even more convenient to Apple, swapping the device as a whole for a brand new iPhone.
4. To finish off, Apple may just plain refuse to swap the battery for you. I have a personal experience with this, on a 10.5" iPad Pro. The battery has been severely degraded, both as indicated by Coconut Battery, and from monitoring runtimes (much, much less than when it was new). I was in Abu Dhabi this year and took it to the Apple store in Yas Mall, asking them to change the battery for the price quoted on the website (459 AED, about US$ 125). Their reply, later confirmed by a call to the UAE Apple call center: "it's impossible to change the battery on an iPad, so we have to change the whole device and we charge much more [over 1200 AED as I recall] -- unless our [opaque] diagnostics claim that it reached the magical <80% threshold, in which case we'll replace it for 459 AED". Well now they run this opaque diagnostic and voilà, like magic, it claims my battery is at 90%, which disagrees with both Coconut Battery (which claimed <70%) and my actual experience. For all I know this opaque diagnostic software just outputs a random number over 85% to ensure they never agree to letting you pay the 459 AED price. Never mind that this information isn't given on this page or anywhere else. So you buy an iPad, safe in the knowledge that whenever you're not happy with how long a charge lasts, you can just pay 459 AED to replace it. Then when you go exercise this "right" you thought you had, suddenly it's 1200 AED price. Really slimy tactics from Apple.
5. By the way, a battery for the 10.5" iPad Pro costs US$ 25 at iFixIt. I'm pretty sure they sell decent batteries, although I'd rather have the Apple original one. And that's retail price, from a company that buys them in small quantities -- compare to Apple buying at gargantuan quantities with tailormade purchase contracts. So it's pretty clear that Apple is making a decent amount of cash on these battery replacements. And also, the claim by the Apple store that "it's impossible to replace the iPad battery" is blatantly false: iFixIt has a guide showing how to do it, and I've asked many of these phone-fixing kiosks and they will swap it if I want. In the end I just went with a new iPad (see, Apple's strategy of planned obsolescence worked perfectly with me) and will sell the old one to someone who will just swap it for a lowest-bidder battery and risk setting fire to their house. Oh well, at least it's their house, not mine.

Maybe Apple is finally growing some cojones? I mean, if you hate the company so much, why not just quit? I guess some people hate working so much and try to make lottery tickets out of their employers.