iOS 18 is already among us… half way. We’ll have to wait until the presentation of the iPhone 16 to get a taste of the final version on the iPhone. Apple introduced a lot of new features at WWDC 2024, but there was one thing it didn’t say was really useful: configurable maximum charge limits.
And that means…? Let’s start from the beginning. Not only a mobile phone, but a tablet, a smartwatch or an electric car, one of the most important points of any device with a battery is its useful life. It is measured in cycles. The more cycles the battery offers us, the longer it will take until it begins to deteriorate excessively, losing capacity and, therefore, offering less autonomy.
what is a cycle. A cycle is complete when we charge the battery to 100%. This is one cycle of charging from 0% to 100%. Charging it 20% today, 40% tomorrow and 40% the next is a cycle. It doesn’t matter how we do it. A cycle is complete when the sum is 100. Well, the battery can withstand X number of cycles before it starts to lose performance. A ten cycle battery will provide more autonomy than a 600 or 1,000 cycle battery. call it “Battery health“
If your cell phone is old, you haven’t changed the battery and you notice that it is slow and has much less autonomy, this is why. Cycles add up, battery wears down, autonomy worsens and the device adjusts performance to maintain a power/autonomy relationship that doesn’t allow us to charge the phone every two hours. There are more factors at play, but this is one of the main ones.
USB-C port on an iPhone 15 Pro Max Image: BDtechsupport
20/80 rule. How can we optimize device charging to extend its useful life? With good charging habit. Both are highly recommended. First, avoid fast charging when we don’t need it. Second, keep the battery charged between 20% and 80%.
The Scientific evidence indicating that the regions between 0-20% and 80-100% are most important. Charging in these ranges increases battery drain, requires more power and generates more heat In short, charging the phone while it is switched off or charging more than necessary can work against us.
the problem. This requires some intervention on our part. If we want to keep our mobile charged between 20% and 80%, we need to think about plugging it in and unplugging it on time. The first is easy, but the second is another story. It’s easy to charge your phone before it drops below 20%, but if we have a habit of charging phones at night, the reality is that no one gets up at four in the morning and unplugs the phone at 80%. .
It is now possible to set an upload limit in iOS 18 settings Photo: BDtechsupport
solution. If we activate in case of iPhone Optimized loading The battery will charge up to 80% and won’t charge to 100% until the phone thinks we’re going to wake up. Now, with iOS 18, we can go even further: we can limit the maximum charge to 80%. Thus, when we charge the phone, it will automatically turn off when it reaches 80%. It’s something that phones from Samsung, Huawei, OPPO, Realme and Sony could already do, and now it’s coming to Apple.
It really only came relatively recently with iOS 17, but with iOS 18 this system goes a bit further, as we’ll see later. In any case, combining the low battery notification (which jumps when we reach 20%) with the 80% charge limit and A slow charge, we can achieve healthy charging habits. It won’t keep the battery from degrading. It will do so, because it is still a consumable, but at a lower rate.
Live with 60%. This is the opposite of this practice: it limits us to spend the day with 60% battery, something that not all mobile phones can afford, even if we use it intensively (maximum brightness, GPS on, heavy games, record a video… ). Ultimately it’s a matter of weighing both things and making decisions based on our context. That, or be proactive and disable limits on those occasions when we know mobile usage is going to be intensive.
In that sense, Apple’s method is interesting, since it allows us to configure the limit at 80%, but also in jumping from 5% to 100%. So, if we see that we are a bit tight with 80%, we can adjust the limit to 90%. The idea is to minimize the time the phone spends in those two important areas we mentioned earlier.
Picture | BDtechsupport
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