Linked List: September 24, 2024

Tuesday, 24 September 2024

Juli Clover Limited Her iPhone 15 Pro Max to the 80 Percent Charging Limit for an Entire Year ★

Juli Clover, MacRumors:

With the iPhone 15 models that came out last year, Apple added an opt-in battery setting that limits maximum charge to 80 percent. The idea is that never charging the iPhone above 80 percent will increase battery longevity, so I kept my iPhone at that 80 percent limit from September 2023 to now, with no cheating.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max battery level is currently at 94 percent with 299 cycles. For a lot of 2024, my battery level stayed above 97 percent, but it started dropping more rapidly over the last couple of months. I left my iPhone at that 80 percent limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. [...] You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.

Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329

Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271

My year-old iPhone 15 Pro (not Max) which I simply used every day and charged to 100 percent overnight: max capacity: 89 percent, 344 charge cycles.

I’m so glad Clover ran this test for a year and reported her results, because it backs up my assumption: for most people there’s no practical point to limiting your iPhone’s charging capacity. All you’re doing is preventing yourself from ever enjoying a 100-percent-capacity battery. Let the device manage its own battery. Apple has put a lot of engineering into making that really smart.

iPhone 16 Models Now Use an Electrically-Released Adhesive ★

Donald Papp at Hackaday:

There’s a wild new feature making repair jobs easier (not to mention less messy) and iFixit covers it in their roundup of the iPhone 16’s repairability: electrically-released adhesive.

Here’s how it works. The adhesive looks like a curved strip with what appears to be a thin film of aluminum embedded into it. It’s applied much like any other adhesive strip: peel away the film, and press it between whatever two things it needs to stick. But to release it, that’s where the magic happens. One applies a voltage (a 9V battery will do the job) between the aluminum frame of the phone and a special tab on the battery. In about a minute the battery will come away with no force, and residue-free.

Clever.