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The battery charging thread to end all battery charging threads.

TurboSC

TurboSC

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 4, 2007
1,361
0
California
alright.

I've read and heard many opinions on this issue with charging your iPhone and all these various theories are really starting to confuse me. Here's the question:

Is it better for your iPhone battery to charge it every night even when you have more than say 70% battery left... OR... Should you charge your battery when its out of juice thus preserving the lifetime of your device?

State your opionions or better yet your facts. Let's put an end to this issue. If someone disagrees with you, fight them. :)
 
TurboSC said:
alright.

I've read and heard many opinions on this issue with charging your iPhone and all these various theories are really starting to confuse me. Here's the question:

Is it better for your iPhone battery to charge it every night even when you have more than say 70% battery left... OR... Should you charge your battery when its out of juice thus preserving the lifetime of your device?

State your opionions or better yet your facts. Let's put an end to this issue. If someone disagrees with you, fight them. :)
Click to expand...

While your question may be straightforward, I don't think we'll see a straightforward answer here.

One somewhat unrelated tidbit I found out... Apple only covers your batter under warranty (Applecare or not) to 300 cycles. I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a cycle (one plug/unplug? a full 0 to 100% charge?), but even if you reach that within a few months, your battery is out of warranty. Found that out when my girlfriend's battery completely died at 307 cycles. Ha.
 
pdpfilms said:
While your question may be straightforward, I don't think we'll see a straightforward answer here.

One somewhat unrelated tidbit I found out... Apple only covers your batter under warranty (Applecare or not) to 300 cycles. I'm not sure what exactly constitutes a cycle (one plug/unplug? a full 0 to 100% charge?), but even if you reach that within a few months, your battery is out of warranty. Found that out when my girlfriend's battery completely died at 307 cycles. Ha.
Click to expand...


A cycle is a full 0-100% charge(atleast that is what I was told by the guy at my apple store). How did your Gf have over 300 charge cycles so quickly??!?
 
Telp said:
A cycle is a full 0-100% charge(atleast that is what I was told by the guy at my apple store). How did your Gf have over 300 charge cycles so quickly??!?
Click to expand...

She had reached that many cycles after about a year and a half- but had Applecare. Didn't mean to mislead you.

**Also, it was her PB battery, not her iPhone battery. Should have mentioned that.
 
pdpfilms said:
She had reached that many cycles after about a year and a half- but had Applecare. Didn't mean to mislead you.

**Also, it was her PB battery, not her iPhone battery. Should have mentioned that.
Click to expand...

hahaha yeah I was gunna say, 5 months and already 307 charges, and then you said a year and a half. Haha through me off there:D

Anyway though that is interesting. I wonder if that is like a real policy or if it varies like most of there other ones.
 
Telp said:
A cycle is a full 0-100% charge(atleast that is what I was told by the guy at my apple store). How did your Gf have over 300 charge cycles so quickly??!?
Click to expand...

that's kinda of scary, because every night before bed I plug up my iPhone for charge even if it still has 90% battery...

I hope Apple won't be douches about the whole battery problem, I think they've learned from the iPod fiasco...
 
TurboSC said:
that's kinda of scary, because every night before bed I plug up my iPhone for charge even if it still has 90% battery...
Click to expand...
You have nothing to worry about if the criteria stated above are correct, which I believe they are. If you top up your battery by 10% per night that equates to a full cycle every 10 days, so 300 cycles would take 3000 days, over 8 years!

Or am I missing something here? :)
 
CD3660 said:
You have nothing to worry about if the criteria stated above are correct, which I believe they are. If you top up your battery by 10% per night that equates to a full cycle every 10 days, so 300 cycles would take 3000 days, over 8 years!

Or am I missing something here? :)
Click to expand...

Yeah your missing something :p

As far as i am aware as soon as your battery hits 90% or below in charge remaining as soon as you connect it to a power source thats an extra hit on your cycle counter. It's certainly how the Apple laptops work.
 
Also from that page:

A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle.
Click to expand...

Seems pretty clear that a full charge cycle is just that, a cumulative 100% charge/discharge of the battery.
 
alFR said:
Also from that page:



Seems pretty clear that a full charge cycle is just that, a cumulative 100% charge/discharge of the battery.
Click to expand...

So does that mean 10 charges of 90% to 100% add up to a full cycle? It still seems somewhat ambiguous to me.

And to rablat- yeah, it shouldn't. Definitely a hardware failure that has nothing to do with the cell life. I'll be getting on Apple's case about that when I get back from break.
 
eenu said:
Yeah your missing something :p

As far as i am aware as soon as your battery hits 90% or below in charge remaining as soon as you connect it to a power source thats an extra hit on your cycle counter. It's certainly how the Apple laptops work.
Click to expand...
I think not, judging by the quote above from Apple's own documentation (repeated herewith):

A charge cycle means using all of the battery’s power, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a single charge. For instance, you could listen to your iPod for a few hours one day, using half its power, and then recharge it fully. If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two, so you may take several days to complete a cycle.
Click to expand...

Take it back or I'll sue! :p :p :p
 
CD3660 said:
Hey eenu, you never did say whether O2 came up trumps with the deal they offered you in September, or are you sworn to secrecy to prevent rioting in the streets! :D
Click to expand...

They still haven't responded yet. I will be chasing it up next week. I would think they are looking into it given that it was cc'd to Apple Executive Relations and Trading Standards
 
pdpfilms said:
Care to enlighten us with the thread?:)
Click to expand...
Nothing to get excited about as it's strictly U.K. related and to do with a special tariff that was promised:

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/4199384/

I just wanted to know how it all unfolded. Sorry to go completely off topic.

Back on topic: let's hope the battery in the iPhone holds up well. I have to say that my iPhone is very power-hungry.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48a Safari/419.3)

My usage is between 4 and 5 hours a day. And every night(as in right now) I'm in the red. Is this the norm? And just as an add on there's no way I do use it for that length of time. How does it work this out?
 
eenu said:
They still haven't responded yet. I will be chasing it up next week. I would think they are looking into it given that it was cc'd to Apple Executive Relations and Trading Standards
Click to expand...

You've got two hopes, mate. No hope and Bob Hope. And Bob Hope's DEAD.
 
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