This fantastic study by HTX Studio tests the claims that fast charging kills your battery and that you should never charge past 80%. The results are surprising and very useful to know.
I have been using the iPhone feature to limit charging my phone’s battery to less than 100%, under the assumption that it does something useful. It seems I have been duped. This fantastic video shows that the differences between fast, slow, and partial charging are really not much.
So you can sacrifice a chicken, sing calming songs, or even avoid using your phone’s battery to help it last longer, but in reality, just use it as you do, and it’ll likely be just fine. When battery life reaches around 85%, you’ll start to notice degradation and can address it then. Notably, AppleCare won’t replace a battery until it is below 80%.
Yeah, nah.
They don’t join the dots between the two different experiments.
For the iPhones, 0.5% difference between fast and slow charging; and 4% difference between the *fast* charging full cycle and the *fast* charging 50% cycle.
That’s 4.5% difference. They didn’t do a slow charge 50% cycle, which would have had the best results.
OK, so they’re saying 0.5% & 4% are not significant, hold that thought.
In the second experiment they say performance drops off at 85% of original battery health, and they recommend replacing the battery around 80% of original battery health.
So if we look at high performance battery life, and time-to-get-a-new battery life we are not looking at 4.5% of 100% battery capacity. Their recommended battery life is when the battery loses 20% of original capacity, so the 4.5% is actually 22.5% of their recommended battery life. The 0.5% fast/slow difference is 2.5% of battery life.
Don’t be bummed out. If you’re somewhere you can plug in, you can still get some use from devices with batteries in a pretty bad condition; they might need a rest to charge up a bit. Stop using if the case swells. Do *not* leave it plugged in and unattended.
As they say, don’t sweat it. Occasional 100% charge won’t kill your battery, best to charge to 100% as late as you can before use. Occasional low battery won’t kill the battery, but very low charge does more wear.
https://www.batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-415-how-to-charge-and-when-to-charge/