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Tag: iPhone

January 14, 2024

Is It Bad to Fully Charge your iPhone Every Night?

With new iPhones, now you have the option to throttle back the battery’s charging limit to just 80%. Is that good? Let’s find out.

Once upon a time, rechargeable batteries, however magical at the time, came with ‘memory’ problems. If you kept topping off your device with a bit electrical juice every day without really using the rechargeable battery, it would ‘forget’ how to fully recharge.

Today, Apple says of its lithium-ion iPhone batteries, “You can charge your iPhone every night even if the battery isn’t fully depleted.”

Well, that’s progress. So, what’s the problem here?

Should You Charge your iPhone to 100% Each Night?
On the one hand, yes, our friends from Apple say it’s okay to charge up your iPhone’s lithium-ion battery every night.

On the other hand, Apple has now offered a new feature in its iPhone 15 line to limit charging to just 80% to help reduce the drain on battery life.

The reality has always been that full-charge cycles accelerate the eventual reduction of an iPhone’s lithium-ion battery’s lifespan.

In fact, fully charging up and completing discharging your iPhone’s battery… that’s actually bad. Charging up to just 80% will, in fact help your battery last longer.

The 80% Solution
Here’s how you activate the 80% Limit mode:
Click:

  • Settings
  • Battery
  • Battery Health & Charging

Choose between:

  • Optimized Battery Charging
  • 80% Limit (sometimes it still goes to 100%)
  • None

Apple’s default setting is – Optimized Battery Charging

The Value of Optimized Battery Charging
So, yes, you can choose the 80% Limit setting, but Apple also talks a lot on its support pages about how useful the Optimized Battery Charging setting can be to maintain your iPhone battery’s health.

How Optimized Battery Charging actually works… I do find confusing. Something about learning algorithms based on your use. The setting doesn’t always get your iPhone’s charge level back to 100%, and it can delay when the actual charging is happening overnight. (I think there could be some borrowed “Flux Capacitor” or “Borg” tech involved. Who knows.)

But it’s all supposed to be good for your iPhone’s battery. (And that’s all that really matters, right?)

Plus, the name implies it’s the best setting. It’s ‘optimized.’ And it’s the default setting.
What more can you ask for?

80% is Technically Better than 100%
So why is there now the 80% setting? Well, it’s not totally clear to me other than charging up to 100% is simply not optimal for a lithium-ion battery. (Yes, there’s some irony here.)

I imagine the 80% solution is technically best for your phone’s battery, but then you’re constantly denying yourself the dopamine hit when you see that 100% glow to start your day.

Optimized 100% is Better than Regular 100%
So ‘optimized’ charging is designed to minimize the inevitable long-term damage of the 100% solution.

Optimize. Yes. That’s the camp I’m in.

Live your life. Minimize the damage.

As nuanced as all this may feel, what is crystal clear is to never go with the third battery-health option – ‘None.’

Then, you’re just charging up… old school. You’ve got yourself the 100% solution with no benefits from optimization. Your iPhone’s battery will flame out (not literally) more quickly.

Optimize Me!
So where does all of this leave us?

  • Is it bad to charge your iPhone to 100% every night. YES.
  • Can Apple minimize that problem by optimizing it? YES.
  • Should you go ahead and keep charging every night in Optimized Charging mode? YES.
  • Is that better than the 80% Solution? PROBABLY NOT.

But where’s the fun in 80% of anything?
I want 100%!

Plus, I want it to be optimized, even if it’s just a word to make me feel better about making the wrong choice. Well, second best.

Happy charging.

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December 31, 2023

My Biggest Discoveries I Blogged About over the Past Year

Here’s my At Home with Tech year in review. Below are the links to my key learnings and tech discoveries.

So yes, these next few weeks can all be about looking forward. The fresh start. The resolutions. The turning over a new leaf. But I like to think of this time of year as the next chapter that builds on the past. It’s not so much ‘the new’… as ‘the next.’

I try to carry it forward. That way, I can greet these annual cycles with the perspective of my past years’ experiences. Said another way, it’s important to look back as you look forward. Otherwise, a lot can get lost across the years.

That’s why I think it’s critical to package up the story of your past year in an organized photo collection (digital or book) or perhaps an edited video-clips overview.

You might also want to perform a mental review and acknowledgement of your other notable actions and learnings.

Take it in. Then lock it in, or let it go if need be.

At Home with Tech Year in Review

As you know, I document my thoughts on technology and family life each week. So, I’ll follow my own advice and offer this summary of my blog posts that reflect my big learnings across the past year. Please check out the links below that most interest you!

My Growth as a Parent

Working in our Post-Pandemic World

My Journey as the Family Photographer

My Role as the Family Archivist

How a tiny film-to-digital converter brought new life to my father’s old analog slides
How to quickly turn a scanned negative into a positive image on a Mac
How to use SmugMug as a family photo archiving tool
How to prevent your family’s identity from being washed away by time

Maximizing your Family Video Clips

My Family Vacation Tips

Best Practices for your iPhone

My Evolving Understanding of Apple Computers

Here’s to a Prosperous 2024
As always, thank you for reading my blog. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you in the year to come.

Happy New Year!

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November 19, 2023

How to Stop your iPhone from Buzzing All Night Long

Unless you want to be kept up by your iPhone with endless updates while you’re trying to sleep, you need to give it a bedtime. Here’s how.

I am the Borg. You are the Borg. We are the Borg. Yes, humanity has already been assimilated.

Remember, those evil “Star Trek” cybernetic bad guys who kept running into Captain Picard and wanted to take over the galaxy? The Borg were all wirelessly interconnected and acted in sync like a colony of bees. Their hive mind kept them instantly updated.

Okay. Well, no… we’re not completely moving throughout our day following the constant direction of a unified data stream. But I think the scary reality is only because it’s not unified. (Well, not yet.)

Time to Put your iPhone into Sleep Mode
Our smartphones are constantly bombarding us with various updates…. from family, friends and work to various companies and organizations we’ve touched and shared our personal data with.

These ongoing texts, emails and calls can become a persistent din. It’s like the world is screaming at you. If you wear an Apple Watch with haptic feedback on your wrist, there’s a constant visceral reminder that someone or something wants your attention.

All that noise, noise, noise!

Sure, you have instant access to so much more information, but it comes at a price. (What’s a Borg drone to do?)

And the last thing you need is to have that constant drumbeat interfere with your sleep.

There’s got to be a way to turn it off.

Well, of course there is…

How to Activate Sleep Focus
I realized recently that I really needed to take some action and effectively put my iPhone 15 Pro Max to sleep while I was sleeping. Yes, it was muted, but my iPhone would wake me up with all the buzzing and screen brightening to alert me of something new in the wee hours of the morning.

I needed my REM sleep!

I knew that I could simply move my iPhone to a different room, but I like to charge it up on my nightstand. Fortunately, I can set it and forget it…if it will let me. (I usually don’t wake up in the middle of the night with the need to grab it and see how my blog’s metrics are doing.)

Instead of turning my iPhone off (whoever does that?!), I activated the sleep setting in the Focus App.

Here’s how to do that.

  • Tap on Settings
  • Tap Focus
  • Tap Sleep
  • Set a Schedule

Then you assign a lock screen for this setting. (The trick I think is not to assign it to the screen lock photo that you use throughout your day.)

You can also program exceptions to let certain contacts make it through your Do Not Disturb barrier.

Done.

Now my iPhone goes totally dark at my bedtime and does not respond to any incoming anything throughout the night.

Happiness restored.

Silence in your Sleep Chamber
It’s ironic that we now need to tame our smartphones to prevent them from overwhelming us with too much of what was supposed to be a good thing.

The simple truth is everyone and everything should not have immediate access to your attention.

Even the Borg knew that. They had those cool standing sleep chambers throughout their Borg cube ships where their drones could catch up on their sleep… uninterrupted.

And as we all know, it’s never a good idea to wake up a sleeping Borg.

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