NC_2024_10_02
This episode discusses iPhone 15 battery management, Apple's 80% charging limit, and user experiences with battery health. We share insights and tips for optimizing battery life while balancing usability.
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Long Summary
In this episode, we delve into the nuances of battery life management for iPhones, especially in light of the innovative battery-saving features introduced with the iPhone 15 lineup. The discussion kicks off with my exciting announcement about an upcoming family trip, which necessitates an earlier podcast release this week. As a result, I emphasize the absence of a live show this Sunday, with a return scheduled for October 13th.
We then transition into the world of iPhone battery management, where I share insights into the implications of Apple’s decision to allow users to limit their battery charging to 80%. This fascinating feature develops as a response to the well-documented issues regarding lithium-ion battery longevity. We explore the historical context behind battery changes—both aesthetically and functionally—highlighting how Apple's design decisions can create waves across accessory manufacturers who must adapt to these shifts.
A pivotal component of this episode centers around an exploration of user experiences, particularly from Julie Clover’s article at MacRumors. She conducted a year-long experiment where she limited her iPhone’s charging to 80%, resulting in a battery health of 94% after 299 cycles. This spurs a broader conversation regarding diverse anecdotal evidence from other users, including notable figures like John Gruber and Glenn Fleischman, who reported varying battery health percentages and charging habits.
Through further analysis of data compiled by Nick Heer of Pixel Envy, a deeper understanding emerges regarding average battery capacities, cycles, and user habits. The findings suggest an intriguing pattern: users who limit their charging tend to experience fewer cycles but only slightly better battery health. This nuanced conversation leads us to consider the implications of well-intentioned battery care versus the joys and realities of daily device usage.
As we prepare for a closing discussion, we weave in tips for optimizing battery longevity without compromising usage, such as leveraging Apple’s optimized battery charging feature, which intelligently manages charges based on user behavior. This episode serves not only as an exploration of the science behind battery management but also a nod to the cultural shift surrounding our devices and how we care for them.
We wrap up reflecting on the overall findings, emphasizing that while Apple’s 80% battery feature may be beneficial for some, it could also create unnecessary obstacles for everyday users. The essence of the conversation rests on balancing battery care without disengaging from the very devices we rely on daily. Join us as we navigate these intriguing discussions about technology, user habits, and the underlying science of battery life.
We then transition into the world of iPhone battery management, where I share insights into the implications of Apple’s decision to allow users to limit their battery charging to 80%. This fascinating feature develops as a response to the well-documented issues regarding lithium-ion battery longevity. We explore the historical context behind battery changes—both aesthetically and functionally—highlighting how Apple's design decisions can create waves across accessory manufacturers who must adapt to these shifts.
A pivotal component of this episode centers around an exploration of user experiences, particularly from Julie Clover’s article at MacRumors. She conducted a year-long experiment where she limited her iPhone’s charging to 80%, resulting in a battery health of 94% after 299 cycles. This spurs a broader conversation regarding diverse anecdotal evidence from other users, including notable figures like John Gruber and Glenn Fleischman, who reported varying battery health percentages and charging habits.
Through further analysis of data compiled by Nick Heer of Pixel Envy, a deeper understanding emerges regarding average battery capacities, cycles, and user habits. The findings suggest an intriguing pattern: users who limit their charging tend to experience fewer cycles but only slightly better battery health. This nuanced conversation leads us to consider the implications of well-intentioned battery care versus the joys and realities of daily device usage.
As we prepare for a closing discussion, we weave in tips for optimizing battery longevity without compromising usage, such as leveraging Apple’s optimized battery charging feature, which intelligently manages charges based on user behavior. This episode serves not only as an exploration of the science behind battery management but also a nod to the cultural shift surrounding our devices and how we care for them.
We wrap up reflecting on the overall findings, emphasizing that while Apple’s 80% battery feature may be beneficial for some, it could also create unnecessary obstacles for everyday users. The essence of the conversation rests on balancing battery care without disengaging from the very devices we rely on daily. Join us as we navigate these intriguing discussions about technology, user habits, and the underlying science of battery life.
Brief Summary
In this episode, we examine iPhone battery management, focusing on new features from the iPhone 15. I share a personal update about an upcoming family trip, affecting our podcast schedule. We discuss Apple’s 80% charging limit and its effects on battery longevity, alongside user experiences, including Julie Clover’s successful year-long trial that maintained her battery health at 94%. Analysis of Nick Heer’s data reveals patterns in charging habits and their implications. The episode wraps up with tips for optimizing battery life without sacrificing device usability, highlighting the need for a balance in battery care.
Tags
iPhone battery management
iPhone 15 features
family trip
podcast schedule
Apple charging limit
battery longevity
user experiences
Julie Clover
battery health
charging habits
battery optimization
device usability
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_10_02
[0:00]Music.
[0:15]And I are off to see the grandkids in Texas this weekend, so you're getting the show early. And you know what that means. No live show this Sunday. You're going to have to wait an extra week. And let me check my calendar. That will be October 13th. You'll see us in the live show again. So don't show up and be sad this weekend.
[0:34]
Comparing iPhone Cases for Camera Control - Beats & Spigen
[0:34]Over the years, we've had iPhones shrink in thickness, maybe get longer in another year. Connectors have changed. And once in a while, we get a new button. When Apple added the toggle to mute and unmute your phone, every case manufacturer had to come out with a new version that had a cutout so you could get your fingernail in there to toggle it on and off. Apple added the action button last year to the pro versions of the iPhone 15, which meant yet another case redesign. I used to feel sorry for the case manufacturers until I realized, yeah, but they get to sell it to us again. So if you find a case you like, you end up buying them another case from the same company. So I don't feel so sorry for them.
[1:12]In any case, all models of iPhone 16 now include a new challenge, the camera control. Case manufacturers have different strategies to deal with this fancy new don't-call-it-a-button button. Most third-party manufacturers have a cutout of some sort of the case around camera control, but the Apple and Apple-owned Beats took a different approach. Instead of a cutaway, Apple and Beats, well, Beats is part of Apple, I don't know what we call it. I'm going to call them like they're two different companies, but I know that Apple owns Beats. Anyway, Apple slash Beats designed their cases with a sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer to communicate finger movements to the camera control. Okay, I'm quoting them exactly there. Anyway, I was worried when I heard about camera control that a cutaway would be clumsy in some way, like the old cutaways for the mute switch. However, I swore off Apple cases years ago because they simply don't last. Now, I don't mind trading out an iPhone case that I paid, you know, $15 or $20 for a couple of times a year, but at $50, I really expect a case to last. In my experience, the silicone cases start to peel on the corners around six months in. Even though Apple says they have a one-year warranty, when I tried to get mine replaced on a warranty, they refused.
[2:25]I had even brought the case in a few weeks before it peeled because it was starting to get sticky on the corners. They claimed, the person I talked to claimed, oh, I can't feel it, but I'm telling you, it felt like my granddaughter had been playing with it after eating one of her peanut butter and jelly dia's. It's a quesadilla made with peanut butter and jelly. Anyway, she gets very sticky and that's what it felt like. Well, two weeks later, it peeled right where it was sticky. I took it back and Apple said, nope, they wouldn't honor the warranty. So I was out.
[2:55]Now, when Apple announced their $50 Beats case with the same sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer to communicate finger movements to the camera control, I thought maybe I'd give it a try. Plus, it came in sandy and my new favorite color, sunset purple.
[3:09]Steve decided to go a different route for his iPhone 16 Pro for different reasons. Apple's silicone cases have too much friction for him to get the phone easily in and out of his pocket, so he doesn't like them either. He was pretty happy with his $20 Spigen case on his iPhone 15 Pro, so he went with them again. He bought the $20 Spigen Ultra Hybrid MagFit case on Amazon. He buys everything he owns in black so that he can never find anything. He has a black car, black headphones case, black phone. Yeah, it's a whole thing. Anyway, so of course, he bought the Spigen in black as well. Now, the back of the case he got is actually a translucent gray, but since he bought a black phone, it still looks black. It looks maybe like a smoky black. It does look pretty cool. Since his case has a cutaway for the camera control, and mine has a sapphire crystal coupled to a conductive layer to communicate finger movements to the camera control, and my Beats case was $50 while he spent $20, I thought this might make a good comparison.
[4:10]Both phones are compatible with MagSafe, which is really important these days. I bring it up because the first case Steve bought, he bought it kind of accidentally. He didn't realize it didn't have MagSafe, but Spigen let him swap it out for the MagSafe version. Now, I know it bothers some people if a phone wobbles when you type on it sitting on a table. I have to say, the Spigen case lays perfectly flat on a table, which is really nice, but I'm afraid the Beats case does have a little bit of a wobble to it. The Spigen case has something odd. Next to the cutout for camera control are two holes very close together in kind of like a little rounded rectangle I'm not really sure what they're for the only thing I can think of is for Mary maybe a very thin tether to like put it around your wrist.
[4:54]The Beats case has a completely open bottom for the USB-C connector and the microphone slash speakers, whatever those little holes are down at the bottom. However, the Spigen case has three cutaways for those three separate things. I like the open bottom a lot better for two reasons. With my iPhone 15 Pro case, I found that the cutout wasn't big enough for some USB-C connectors. I plugged the phone in but not realized the connector hadn't actually seated properly and so it wasn't charging. With an open bottom, that's never an issue. The Spigen's cutout for the USB-C connector looks pretty big, so I doubt Steve will experience any of the kind of problems I had with his. Now, the other advantage of the open bottom is that it's more pleasing to swipe up to get to the home page. You don't run across this little ridge, and I don't know, I really like that a lot better. I mentioned that the Apple silicone cases are hard for Steve to pull out of his pocket, but that sure wouldn't be an issue with the Beats case. It is super slick. I love the feel of it, but I'm not going to lie to you. This thing is slippery. The bad news is that I dropped my brand new phone onto the concrete sidewalk from three feet up. It bounced on the corner and it flipped over and off the curb. The good news is that I only got a very tiny scuff mark on the corner of the case and zero damage to the phone. I can testify that the Beats case did the main job it was designed for. It protected the phone when I dropped it.
[6:18]Now, for more than a year, I've been using the Anker Magnetic Phone Grip Ring that Sandy reviewed for us, and it's really helped me to keep from dropping the phone. However, when I got this new phone, I really wanted to see if I could go without it because it does make it thicker and heavier, and I really liked how it felt without it. But now I've got a much, much slippier case, so I think I was wrong, and I'm going to have to use the Anker Magnetic Phone Grip Ring again. It does have a lot of utility. I use it to stand the phone up and things when I'm eating lunch and watching something, so it's not the worst thing in the world to put it back on. I do really like it. All right, let's talk about camera control access on the two cases. The Spigen case leaves the ledge around the screen, leaves it there as it goes by the camera control, but it's missing most of the ledge on the back side. So that's a great design because it's very easy to get your finger on the camera control, especially since the cutout is a bit longer than the button itself, and it has kind of like slanted sides to go into it. So it's very smooth to fit your finger in. But on the front screen side, it still has the ledge, so it's still going to protect your phone. Now, you're interacting with the real button, so this, well, wait, it's not a button. It's called camera control. Camera control is just as responsive as it's designed to be. I word it that way because camera control does take some getting used to. It's very easy, for example, to take a picture when you don't mean to. Getting the touch gestures and a muscle memory is going to take some time.
[7:46]Now the Sapphire Crystal on the Beats case works really well too. It's just about flush with the side of the phone, actually just slightly indented, so it's reasonably easy to find with your finger. The bare iPhone is easier to find the button, but it's not that much harder, and I think it feels nicer than the cutaway on the Spigen. But not enough nicer to say that the Beats accommodation of camera control is better than the Spigen.
[8:11]I would have to say that camera control is just as easy, or just as hard, to use on both cases. I had one thing I didn't like on the Beats case that I wanted to mention. While the action button on the left side has a distinct click to it, the side button on the right was pretty mushy. I use the side button often to put my phone to sleep, and when it's on its side, I like to go into that clock mode thingy. I know there's an official name for it, but I can never remember it. The button worked, but it was kind of annoying because I couldn't tell that I'd clicked it. I had to look at my phone to see, did it turn off? Then I had an idea. What if I just got a bad case? I posted on Mastodon asking if anyone else had the Beats case and how their side button felt. Barry Sullivan responded, and he told me that it clicked just as well as the action button. Armed with this information, I trotted over to my local Apple store, let the sales rep push the two buttons, and immediately he said, yeah, that doesn't feel right. We tried on the demo case, and it felt much better. So I walked out with a new, identical Sunset Purple Beats case. Except this one doesn't have that little scuff on it where I dropped it. But don't worry, I'll drop it again soon, so I'm sure it will. Now, the funny part was that after doing the swap, Apple System told him that I owed 24 cents tax. Now, I knew that was wrong because I bought it in the same county and in the same area, but I paid the tax just to get out of the store.
[9:30]The bottom line is is that Steve and I are both happy with our decisions since we had vastly different criteria. I love that the Beats is purple. I love that it's a bottomless case that lets me swipe up without distraction. I have good access to camera control, and I love the slick feel of the case, though I gotta admit it does show fingerprints. I'm kind of blessed with really dry fingers, so it's not too bad for me. It's thin, and it's light, and it even protected the phone in a fall. At $50, I sure hope it wears better than the Apple silicone cases.
[10:02]Steve is delighted likewise with his $20 price tag on his Spigen case. He likes the grippier feel, and he's come to terms with the smoky gray look on the back. He finds that it holds on really well to magnetic mounts, which was another important feature for him. The cutaway for camera control works great, has no sharp edges or anything to annoy his fingers when he's trying to figure out how to use it. Now, if we can both figure out all of those gestures in camera control and commit them to our muscle memory, we'll be even happier.
[10:34]When Kurt heard that we were going out of town and I could use a little extra help, he stepped in with another one of his amazing reviews.
[10:42]
Strongbox Password Manager – by Kurt Liebezeit
[10:42]Hi, this is Kurt Liebesite, also known as PDXKurt, bringing you a review of the Strongbox Password Manager system from Phoebe Software at strongboxsafe.com. Thank you. I kind of fell into strongbox through the back door, so to speak. For about a decade, I'd been using a pair of open-source password database programs, namely KeePassXC on the Mac and MiniKeePass on iOS, to save and manage passwords. I was manually syncing the shared database through a USB cable, like a caveman. But, a few years ago, the developer of MiniKeePass decided to call it quits, and so I went looking for a new iOS password manager that could interoperate with the KeePass database format. The one that I eventually settled on was Strongbox, partly because at that time the developer actually published his source code for inspection.
[11:43]Now Strongbox wasn't free like MiniKeePass, but you could purchase it outright without a subscription. I could also see that the developer of Strongbox was consistently and actively improving it, which is important for a security-related app. That early version of Strongbox had a way to read and update a shared database that you could keep on a cloud service like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, or even iCloud. But I was far too paranoid to do that. I continued to manually copy my master database from my beloved Mac Pro to my iPad and iPhone via the USB cable.
[12:23]I carried on like this for a couple of years without too much trouble. The most annoying thing, of course, was updating the master database when I signed up for something while out and about on my phone. I would end up writing an Apple Note or texting myself or scribbling the credentials on a slip of paper and then have to remember to update the master database back at home on the Mac Pro and then sync the database back out to the devices again through that USB cable. Now, as you know, Allison occasionally requests content from her listeners, and that prompted me to look through my catalog of apps to see if there was anything that might be interesting to the other listeners.
[13:06]Strongbox came to mind since I thought that perhaps listeners might want to consider an alternative to the subscription model that's most common for apps like 1Password these days. So in preparation for writing the review, I decided to check the Strongbox website to to see if they had new features. To my surprise, I found that Strongbox has added a ton of useful new features that even a computer paranoid like myself would use. I'll get to those in a minute, but first I want to cover the basics for you. Strongbox meets a lot of the basic needs of a password manager. You can organize your passwords into categories that you can name. It will generate long and strong passwords using customizable rules. It has a field to record notes about the credentials and you can even use Markdown in that field. It will tell you if you're reusing passwords on more than one website and it interoperates with Safari on iOS and macOS to supply stored passwords to sites that you visit. There are also browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome to autofill passwords, and you can protect the access to the database with a master password and a key file.
[14:21]Strongbox also has a macOS app, and that comes with some benefits, which I'll explain in a minute. The major new feature that Strongbox added this year was dedicated syncing through iCloud. Formerly, you could store your database on iCloud using files and direct Strongbox to use it, but it turns out that iCloud is not very responsive when it comes to syncing that file out to other devices. Apple's file-based iCloud apparently uses a, quote, when-I-get-around-to-it syncing model, and this led to complaints when people changed passwords on one device and then didn't see the change on their other devices for a while. The new syncing mechanism is called Strongbox Sync. It still uses iCloud, but it uses dedicated Apple APIs that are much more granular and responsive. So you won't see your database through the Files app or the Finder, but under the hood, Strongbox is updating the database out to all of your devices connected through your iCloud credentials very promptly. So, this is very competitive with the other big-name password managers.
[15:30]The Strongbox developer also implemented another method of syncing for the slightly more paranoid crowd, like myself. This is called local Wi-Fi syncing, and the way it works is this. You can have the macOS app on your computer advertise this Wi-Fi syncing method over Bonjour on your local network. Then, when one of your iOS or iPadOS devices connects to that same local network, a synchronization and resolving operation is initiated between your Mac and your portable device. But while your devices are disconnected from that same network, they're not sending any data to each other, which means that there's no possibility of a monster-in-the-middle attack to steal your database. I say synchronization and resolving above because this method allows you to make changes independently on your iOS and macOS strongbox apps while they're not connected on that same network. And then when you bring them together on the local network, the apps merge the changes into one unified database that reflects changes made in both places. It's really cool tech.
[16:44]Another feature that I really like about Strongbox comes from its KeePass database heritage. A KeePass database not only has a password to unlock it, but it can also require a key file. Key files are like a super long, super strong password that has to be present on the device before the database can be unlocked. So how does that help you, you wonder? Well, a key file should be managed separately from the database file. Strongbox doesn't sync the key file automatically between devices, so when the password database is in transit through iCloud, it's missing two crucial pieces of data necessary to unlock the database. One is the password, which might be guessed, but the other is the key file that is very unguessable. This means that even if the database is stolen from iCloud, or intercepted en route from iCloud, it's very, very unlikely to be unlocked with brute-force password attempts. I would strongly recommend that you always associate a key file with your Strongbox password database. The most secure way to distribute that file to each of your devices is with the USB cable caveman method, but you only have to do that once.
[18:03]Strongbox goes even further with the key file concept by allowing you to integrate a YubiKey as a second hardware factor using a challenge-response model. I'm already segregating all my super important passwords for email and financial sites in a separate database, and I might add the YubiKey second factor to that database for extra security.
[18:27]So, at the end of the day, who do I think would be most interested in Strongbox as a password manager? Well, first and foremost would be data security nerds. You know the type. If you know what year the SHA-1 hashing algorithm became crackable, then this is the app for you. By the way, SHA-1 fell into disfavor in 2005. If you want complete control over the encryption algorithm, where and how your password database gets stored and synced, with controls on the number of iterations, have I been pwned auditing, two-factor YubiKey support.
[19:04]Hosting it on your own server with secure shell access, and more, then you can really nerd out with Strongbox. The second group of people who might be interested are people who want a streamlined, full-featured password manager at a fixed, buy-at-once price. It's not cheap, but it's competitive with the other providers. By the way, the Pro version, which covers iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, is a $90 one-time purchase price, or available at a very reasonable $20 per year as a subscription. And you might be surprised at who I think the third group of people are who might benefit from Strongbox. These are people who are too cheap to pay for a password manager at all and are using iCloud Keychain. Here's why. iCloud Keychain works, but it doesn't provide that many controls or features, and it doesn't work for Firefox at all. Strongbox solves both those problems. You can use Strongbox in a free mode, which includes all the basic features like syncing, browser autofill, password generation, and key file support.
[20:14]The major pain point in the free version is that you can't auto-fill browser interactions with Face ID or Touch ID. It's going to want your master password every time. But, you can get away with a very simple passcode of just a couple characters if you're using a keyfile, since the keyfile would be long and strong and pre-shared to your device. I think that this arrangement would be very secure, and you would gain most of the other nifty features of Strongbox. In summary, I'm personally so glad that I decided to do this review. I'm now getting a lot more utility out of my previous Strongbox purchase because I'm using both Strongbox Sync and local Wi-Fi syncing with different password databases. Check out the features of Strongbox Pro at strongboxsafe.com and then make your purchase in the macOS or iOS App Store.
[21:14]
Support the Show
[21:14]You know who appreciates the work we do here at the Podfeet Podcast Empire? Tom Cooper, that's who. He enjoys the content so much that he decided to help financially. He used his fingers to go over to podfeet.com slash Patreon and decided on a dollar amount that showed the value he gets out of the shows and matched what he could afford. I can't thank Tom and all of the other patrons enough for their support. You're about to hear another episode of Chit Chat Across Cross the Pond. And I forgot to say the episode number. And guess what? It's episode 800. That's crazy.
[21:48]
CCATP #800 – Adam Engst on Limiting iPhone Charging to 80%
[21:46]Music.
[21:55]Well, it's that time of the week again. It is time for Chit Chat Across the Pond with Adam Angst. And we've spent 50 minutes playing with audio problems. So that's super fun. How are you doing, Adam? I'm doing fine. I don't know very much about audio. So for me, it's really the troubleshooting is like, well, what if we poke at this? What if we change that cable? Like restart. It never hurts to restart, does it? I think we could zoom a couple of times. We switched from Audio Hijack to QuickTime. We did, let's see, you changed microphones. We both rebooted. You're on your AirPods Pro, and they seem to be audible now, so we're going to stick with this.
[22:35]We're going with audible. There you go. All right. It was sounding like we were from the 50s. I mean, like we had static. Yeah, yeah, that wasn't good. But we are using Audio Hijack, so this is very exciting. Paul Kafasis will be happy. Well, let's see. This week we have a couple of subjects, but the first thing I want to do is kind of circle back on what we talked about last time, which was the annoying pop-ups every month about do you still want this thing to record your screen? Yeah, right. And the reason I wanted to bring it back up was actually something that John Syracuse said on the Accidental Tech podcast. I had all the pieces of information, but I didn't put them together in a way that gave the information that he pulled together. So since we last talked, people have been able to reverse engineer this pop-up. They found the plist file that has the reminder that says, okay, in a month, go bother this person again. And it got to the point now where a guy named Jordy Bruin has written an app called Amnesia that will let you fix this problem for you and the piece that John put together there was after saying all that that means that the bad guy who just put that stuff on your on your computer to cyber stalk you or whatever or control you in an abusive relationship bad person they can do this too.
[24:01]Yeah. Yeah. This whole thing is just like, it's just clearly gone, gone off the rails at Apple, because if they're doing it to prevent all sorts of bad behavior, it can't be this easy to work around. You know, like, I mean, I did it by, by simply setting the date forward. I mean, I figured that out before I saw about saw the app and the playlist stuff. I was like, Oh, well, you just set the date forward a year. year and then it won't won't prompt you for a year um and so uh you know but again that would be super easy to do and then you know it turns out it's just a text file um and it's even easier to find an app that will edit the text file for you so yeah the whole thing has become.
[24:46]Ill thought out at best theater theater yeah i mean i guess um because yeah it is it is security theater um but i don't know security theater yeah there's nothing good about it just like i'm like i got nothing here like this is a stupid prompt it should just go away mama taught you if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything nice at all right yeah pretty much pretty much i was like no that's just This is just a worthless thing Apple has done in nation style. Okay. My only hope is that by seeing people find the P-list, people writing shell scripts to change it, people changing their dates, people writing apps in order to fix this problem, Apple's going to notice and go, okay, well, so that didn't work so good. And then it'll go away.
[25:38]Yeah, so when I when I covered the, you know, the sort of how to do this, I mean, the UI is terrible in its own right. But really, from a security standpoint, because this is meant to be a security feature. But it's problematic, because it's going to cause user fatigue in a big way. And you know, that everyone, you know, who does this, like, I don't want to see this anymore. They stop overall, just paying attention to security prompts. Like, yeah, they're all, you know, all crying wolf. They're all big, mash, you know, click this to get your work done buttons. And then people start getting into the circumventions like what we've seen. Once people are going to major circumventions, it's game over. You're not doing anything useful. Yeah, you've lost. Go back and rethink it until you can do it better. I mean, okay, I'm glad they tried to fix something that they saw was a problem. But okay, bye-bye. Go do something else now.
[26:36]Work on that AI stuff. Yeah, so I actually got a new version of it, 15.1, since then. I have to go look. I can't remember. I think I might have gotten a new 15.1 that I should go look at and see if anything's changed. Okay. Not beta? When I did look at 15. Oh, still beta, yeah, yeah. Beta, okay. But they keep releasing betas. Let's see. Did I say what? What they changed? Beta. Okay, yeah. I think I was using beta 4 before. So I have to see if I'm on beta 5 now. I can't remember. But my hope was because beta 4 was still showing actually a different interface, it still had the continue to allow button, not the pause for a month. Oh, it does have that. Yeah. Right. So instead of allow for one month, it had continue to allow. So basically, my point is they hadn't synced up 15.0 and 15.1. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that's good. Thank you. Right, because that leads me to believe that they're still thinking about it, right? You know, it's not fixed. They haven't given up. But continue to allow is better than continue for a month.
[27:47]Continue to allow is what it was before. The allow for one month came after. Continue to allow was when it was happening weekly. Yeah, so it's not better, actually, so much as it's just indication. It's just indication they have not, like, fixed this in that source code that's being built into 15.1 yet. Okay, I got all excited thinking. Fingers crossed. Continue to allow meant continue to allow, not continue to allow until you decide to bother me again. No, I don't think so. It's continue to allow for some random period of time, which we're not going to tell you. Awesome, awesome. Well, all right, we ate our vegetables. Now we're going to enter into a super scientific, data-driven, predictable modeling modeling to talk about iPhone batteries, right? And how to preserve your battery percentage.
[28:43]Yeah, yeah. This is definitely one of those ones where the word anecdata was just designed for. Well, I hear that if. This is what I'm getting into. Some people say, I mean. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pretty, pretty close. Yeah. So you wrote an article in Tidbits It's on September 25th about an article that Julie Clover of MacRumors wrote about the effect on changing to the limiting your battery to only charge 80%. Yeah, this was a funny. I actually didn't know about this feature. It's new in the iPhone 15 line last year. And basically what Apple did is they added a feature where you can just say never charge the battery over 80%.
[29:28]So, what we've been used to before this is optimized battery charging, which, you know, like if it uses machine learning to figure out your schedule, it's like, oh, he always plugs it in at night when he's sleeping. So, you know, I'll charge it to 80%, then I'll stop charging and hold it until, you know, 7.15am when I can finish off that last 20% in, you know, before he gets up. Yeah, so it's only really going to 100% at the last minute. It right right and and that's to keep it from staying staying hot and and you know really irritating it all night long for no reason right lithium batteries don't like being held at 100 on power they don't like being you know fully discharged either which is another issue but um so so yeah so this so so this is a slightly funny feature you know i almost wonder if they added it because like well here you have a tesla don't teslas do this you know like you can say they don't charge over 80%? Yeah, and on every charge, you can look at it and see whether the, set the charge limit. So in general, you don't want to go above 80%, but you're going on a trip, you just slide it up to 100 and then you charge to go. And in our discussion, we'll probably talk about that a little bit more too.
[30:40]So what I liked about Julie's article was she was nearly as tongue-in-cheek as you and I are being right now. She didn't pretend by any means that she had scientific data, But explain what the experiment that she did that got everybody all excited.
[30:55]So she got an iPhone 15 Pro Max on day one, as one does when you're in this world. And she knew about this feature. So she turned it on on day one and did not turn it off for a year. Talk about taking one for the team. Yeah. Wow. And she actually said, she said this was not, you know, it wasn't a huge problem, but there were definite times when it was bad. And she did not ever go over 100%, 80%. Like she left it there the entire time, even when it was going to be annoying and she had to charge more during the day and things like that. So, and then she reported her numbers, basically that after exactly a year, she was at 94% battery health with 299 cycles. Now a cycle is an important thing to keep in mind because that seems to be one of the really key variables. This is a two axis problem maybe three axis so so so basically what she's saying is okay you know by by by limiting my charging to 80 and using the phone normally otherwise so i had to go 299 cycles um um it fell to 94 after a year and she checked with a couple of other people at mac rumors who had the same model. One of them was 87% for 329 cycles, another one at 90% for 271 cycles.
[32:21]Um, they were not using the 80% check. We have three data points, two in the 80%. Good, good. Wait, wait, can we, can't you triangulate with three data points? Absolutely. You can get a fact, you can get a number.
[32:41]So, so when I first wrote about this is right after her article came out and a couple of other people had like, you know, posted on social media and whatnot and written little things. So I pulled out some numbers from other people and looked at mine. And basically, it wasn't clear this made much of a difference. You know, people like John Gruber had 89% battery life with 344 cycles. Glenn Fleischman was at 91% with 411 cycles. I was at 92% with 346. And Nick here was at 95% with 273. Like, it was all over the map, frankly.
[33:18]Claim yeah so you can't really come up with any answer from that right no no conclusions can be really arrived no conclusions i mean because i mean look at nick here's i mean i mean he's using well he's a 15 pro not a pro max i think but he was at 95 with 273 cycles so he used fewer cycle just slightly fewer cycles but pretty close to what julie clover did and was was actually a percent better so you know without without worrying about it and plus oh wait we're at more multi-variables you don't know how people charged so i charge almost entirely via magsafe now which you know is supposed to be not is not as good and yet i was at 92 with way more cycles than she had so you know it wasn't clear this was a this was a this was a big thing um and uh so So, yeah, so, I mean, I kind of threw up my hands initially and said, you know, like, I don't think there's anything here that justifies the annoyance of running out of battery more frequently because you're not using your last 20%.
[34:26]Yeah, well, what I like about her article, though, is she didn't pretend that this was a scientific study. It was just more like a, I did this, and here are some numbers. What can I do with that? um but you sent me another article um uh who was the other article where they took more they added more data to the anecdata yeah nick here of pixel envy um so he did that he basically just scoured all the comments and on any any article that he could find where people had reported their information and he built a number spreadsheet i forget how many wouldn't he get like a hundred numbers or something like that something like that um, Yeah, numbers isn't telling me for some reason. Let's see, how did I get a click in the cell? Let's see, how many was it? 121 or 115. 121. So now we're up to anecdata, you know, even more anecdata.
[35:19]In this case, you know, we really have no idea other than battery percent and cycles and whether or not they use the charge limiter of what the deal is. We just don't know, like, how they charged, what other conditions. Because, I mean, the other things that may play a role in battery lifespan are, well, one, they're analog systems, right? They're chemicals, so they may not be identical. You know, there's just no telling if they're the same. And, you know, a little bit of that charging method really may play a role in temperature in general. You know, that if you leave your phone in a hot car a lot, it's going to do bad things to it. So, you know, you have no idea what people do. Let's get back to Nick's anecdata. So I took his anecdata, and it's a well-known fact of science that if you do a pivot table on it, then it's data. It's no longer anecdotal data, right? It's actual data. That's how you turn it into data. Yeah, I'm an engineer, right? I know these things. So I read a pivot table on his data, because it was just a list of battery capacity, battery cycles, and whether or not they had the limiter enabled.
[36:25]And what I found was that the, let's see, limiting the battery increased the average capacity by 3%. So on average, the battery limiter people got 98% and the non-battery limiter people got 95%. So you got a gain of 3% on average. However, if you look at the number of battery cycles that people had in those two categories, the battery limiters, let's see, oh, shoot.
[36:57]Sorry, the people who didn't limit their battery had 21% more cycles. So they were exercising their battery 21% more, or an increase of 21%, but they only lost 3% in the battery. So therefore, you should never limit your battery. Try again. No, Siri, I didn't want to talk to you.
[37:20]So see, it is science. it well it was interesting to me that the people who were the most interested in limiting their battery used their phones the least maybe they used their phones the least because they never had enough battery well no because they they weren't even getting charge cycles so a charge cycle because we should explain this a charge cycle is the equivalent of using 100 of a battery, So if one day you barely use your phone, you only get down to 70%, and the next day you charge it back up and then you get down to 50%, that's 30 from the first day and 50 from the second day. And then sometime the next day you'll go over that 20% to remaining. That's one cycle. So it doesn't matter how many times you plug it in. It's the 0 to 100 that counts as one cycle. And so, you know, most people seem to have somewhere in the 200 to 400 range of cycles, which means they're basically plugging, you know, using a phone, using the phone up about once a day, you know, give or take.
[38:33]So, no, my point is, like, let's say you're going to a conference, you know, you're going to be doing all kinds of really fun stuff. And you're bad, you're going to lose a battery before the end of the day, because you're going to be talking to everybody. buddy. So you go in and you do things to change how much battery you use. I mean, you start doing things like, okay, I'm going to make sure I turn off cellular because I know I'm going to be inside this building where I don't have a good cell signal and I'm going to go on a Wi-Fi and I'm going to use, you know, you can do all, you change your behavior based on the fact that you know you're not going to have enough battery. So it's possible that it's not a driver. It's actually the result of using 80%. Those people are like miserly with their battery because they know they They only have 80%. Well, and there was one guy who posted to this talk. He had something like 79, 97 cycles, something like that. I was like, you've got to be kidding. This has to be wrong. How could you possibly have only charged your phone, you know, like every third day in essence? Yeah. And what he said was that he, um, he, what he gets up in the morning, he leaves for work. He takes his phone with him. Um, he unplugs his phone, takes it to work. As soon as he gets home from work, he plugs it back in again. So it is only off the charger for eight hours a day oh so wait a minute so that wouldn't count as part of your charge cycles if you were using it while it was charging.
[39:55]Nope i don't think it's staying still i mean well and he's not using it right i mean if it's charging you're basically not using it right no the point being that he only uses it you You can have a MagSafe adapter. You can, but most people don't. But most people, my guess is most people aren't. I mean, like, it's just annoying to have a cable attached or like if it's a MagSafe adapter. I mean, yes, you could have a battery attached or whatnot. But my guess is most people, when they're using their phone, it's just sitting loose. They need to goof around more. What are they doing? Concentrating on work or something? I mean, that's weird. Well, no. He's only goofing around at work. It's at home he's not goofing around.
[40:32]Oh, it's on the charger at home. Yeah oh oh oh yeah so i mean this this kind of makes sense like in the old days like if you had the old cell phones that did nothing but be a phone right that's how you would use it like you'd you'd go to work you'd take your cell phone off the charger with your keys and your wallet you'd leave the house you know you'd have it in your pocket all day long because you might get a call while you're out when you come home you'd pop it back on the charger because you've got an you've You've got a landline there. You've got a landline sitting on the wall. Why would you need the cell phone thing? Exactly. Exactly. You know what? I need to check. My mother-in-law uses an iPhone, but it is really more for like emergency kind of thing. She carries it with her when she leaves the house, but she rarely notices that it's doing anything when she's at home and it sits on a charger. I should check and see her cycles as a function of time. She's had it for a while, but my father-in-law has a flip phone and he keeps it turned off in the glove compartment of the car. So that's handy.
[41:33]Yeah right hopefully remember how to turn it on if he ever needs it yeah yeah well i had some fun looking at um let me find my notes on this i i sent you a link to a wonderful site called battery university it is such a wonderful nerdy fabulous site i i used it for for a lot of information but they talked about cell phone batteries versus electric vehicle batteries and the difference between the two and even when they have the same battery chemistry and things like energy density of gasoline versus a battery. And my favorite thing in there was there's a table that tells you the energy by mass of different kinds of fuel. So it turns out hydrogen has the highest energy by mass at 39,000 watt-hours per kilogram. As you go down, so 39,000 gasoline is between 12,000 and 13,000. Body fat is at 10.5,000.
[42:38]So, after body fat is black coal, wood, and then lithium-ion batteries at 100 to 250. So, body fat is like 14 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries. You just got to get your body into ketosis, you know? Just burn that fat. Just power your iPhone. It's made of people. Anyway, I got a big kick out of that. And one of the other things, this has nothing to do with Apple stuff, but I thought it was really interesting, was they talked about, because of this energy density problem, there's a limit to how big of a battery you can make before you actually don't gain range in the car. Because it's just getting so heavy that you're not gaining any range. And that limit is at 350 miles. So that's why you don't see 400, 500, 600 mile cars. You've just run into a limit. Until we get a hold of these solid state batteries that Toyota is trying to make, I think we may have a limit that you're just not going to see battery cars going farther.
[43:42]Interesting. I'd always assumed that it was partly related to just like, you know, that was a distance that, you know, most people, few people would want to drive more than that in one session. So that was kind of, they picked that. But it makes more sense that, you know, like, oh, yeah, it's just not worth it, you know, putting in a bigger battery at some point. I mean, what about like the big trucks, like the F-150 Lightning? I think that might have a significant range because they put in a honking number. The battery is twice the size of mine in my Tesla Model 3, and it's the same range. It takes twice as long to charge because it's twice as big because it's in this massive vehicle.
[44:25]Yeah, there's a limit, apparently. I don't know the exact numbers, but roughly 300. But the other thing that's more relevant to the conversation we've been having is they have a graph. Now, this article was from 2018, so some of this might not be true. But the um there's a graph on battery capacity retention as a as a function of number of cycles and then the different lines on the graph are what was the charge pattern so for example the worst is if you charge an ev to 100 and then down to 25 you lose the most number of of um the most percentage of battery uh with the number of cycles that's the worst thing you can do the best thing you could do is 75 to 65. So only charge to 75 and then at 65, plug it back in. So you might get back to that guy that's just got his phone plugged in all day, right? You drive to the store, you drive home. Plug it back in. The kind of a sweet spot looks like 75 to 25%. So charging up to 75 and down to 25 is pretty good. 75 to 45 is even better. And looking at these graphs, I usually let it go down to like maybe 15% and plug it back in. But I charge at home, I could charge every couple of days and keep my battery in better shape, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Well, I mean, one of the things that it was also a little telling about this, this whole investigation is, of course, the people who are talking about this the most are people who get new phones every year.
[45:55]And the people who care are the people who don't get new phones every year. Right right i mean the you know it sounded as though if your goal is to prolong the longevity of your phone as much as possible that this setting might be worth it but you also want to like not use your phone as much as possible because like that using it uses it up quite literally so it's it's the analog of uh of the the the grandma in the 1950s who had plastic on her couch cushions so the seat would stay nice that you never got to sit on her seat. Precisely it is exactly that yeah um so yeah you can you can have a nice iphone but you're not allowed to use it if you want it to last forever that's also like you keep it in the box it's it's really good if you put on a screen protector and then uh and and it gets shattered but you leave it that way you know it's really nice under that screen screen protector right, but i think the sweet spot in between is that i forget what the setting's called but the one that lets you optimize battery charging. Because I have seen that if I get up at 4 in the morning, it's not charged. But by the time I get up at 6.30, it is charged. Important to shut off when you're going to be getting up at the crack of dawn like I am going to tomorrow. So I need to turn that off.
[47:21]Yeah, no, it is definitely one of those situations where it's usually a very good feature, but every now and then it can bite you. I actually run into it more with my MacBook Air where there's times when I'm like, it's again, holding at 80%. I'm like, no, no, I really need this to charge the rest of the way for, you know, for something I'm doing tomorrow. So before I leave. Yeah, it is good to know those settings are in there and you can and you can fiddle with them. But I think this whole conversation was just fun, right? Because we all this is sort of like, I always complain about sleep metrics, because I think sleep tracking is stupid. Because sleep tracking is just like weighing yourself every day. It doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you weigh more or less, measuring calories, burned or consumed, that does change it. But anyway, but it's like people love the quantified self. We love to know, oh, all these numbers about me or they're fascinating, therefore Alison's wrong. Sleep tracking isn't stupid because look at all this data I have and it's about me. And I think this falls into the same category, right? As you're looking at batteries and you want to go, oh, well, look at my percentage, look at my cycles. What does that mean?
[48:29]Yeah. I mean, the main thing that I sometimes get sucked into the battery life on, I've been dealing with, and actually it did not get significantly better with the iPhone 16 Pro that I've now got. But when I go to look at my battery, one of the top two, one or two items every day is no cell coverage. I had thought that my iPhone 15 Pro had weak antennas. But it's possible that there's something going on with the T-Mobile reception here. I mean, I don't know why it's these phones because my wife's iPhone SE, third generation SE, does not have this problem. Where do you see that? So there's something about them. Where do you find that? Because that's not in battery usage, is it? You scroll down. Yeah, settings, battery. Just battery usage. Okay. So I'm using battery. You probably live in the first world where there is cell coverage. No, we actually have terrible AT&T coverage at our house, and that's what I have. I mean, it's really, really bad. Yeah. Oh, but I use Wi-Fi calling and whatever that is that, you know, so I still get my phone calls. I have Wi-Fi calling on, too. So, better usage by app or show activity? By app. I mean, it'll show up in both, but when you say show activity, it does not tell you the number of minutes.
[49:50]So, I don't ever see that. Background activity. Find my. Hmm. So you see that as though it's an app, this metric of low cell? Yeah. Huh. And as I said, today it's 12% of my battery life has gone to no cell coverage. Wow. That's really interesting. I have never seen that in there, and I would have thought I would have. Huh. In the last 10 days, yeah, it's 10% of my battery life over the last 10 days. Wow. So it's really, it's kind of shocking, frankly. I am not wildly happy about this. And, but I do, you know, like I don't, I need to, I need to like call T-Mobile. We're actually vaguely contemplating switching carriers for other reasons. So, you know, it's, there may be some other variables in play here, but it just seems like, you know, no cell coverage because I do have Wi-Fi calling on, right? We shouldn't be looking for cell coverage at all during the day. It's in Wi-Fi range, right? Right, right. Right. Why would it ever? Yeah, it definitely shouldn't. I bet you could write a shortcut that says, based on your home location, turn off cellular.
[51:04]Oh, but then you wouldn't get phone calls, would you? Would you? Oh, you can turn off cellular data separately, can't you? Well, hmm. I'm band-aiding the problem, not solving it. Yeah, right. Well, right. And I don't quite know. Like, I don't have, it's not like I have, yeah, I don't know how, I don't know quite how the Wi-Fi calling works in the sense of, like, if you have cellular turned off, will it still get anything? So you can turn off cellular data without turning off cellular. Yeah right but will that but that that might not make the difference because it would still be looking for the basically the radio is saying where's the tower where's the tower where's the tower right yeah but why is it looking for the tower i think overall i would like a lot more information about what's sucking battery i'd like a lot more on the mac because i constantly struggle with batteries that die when the machine is asleep so i would really like better ways to diagnose that and say, what is using this? So you want sleep tracking for your batteries? Yes.
[52:12]Right, right, right. But I don't want, but I don't want, yeah, no, that's exactly right. Because what I have right now is I only have sleep tracking. It died overnight. The battery died because it was asleep. I don't have the why, and it's the why that I do want. So I do have, That's a perfect example. I have sleep tracking and it's stupid. I don't have the input to why is it dying. That's it. and you remember you're you're you probably do remember this that long ago i mean this is like 80s level um ladies um when you print it to a laser printer the printer driver would come up and it would say looking for laser writer and and the laser was almost always just sitting right there you're like it's right there can't you see it possibly even plug into a radio thing They're like, the cell tower, it's right there. See? See? Actually, they should give us utility. I can see it, Gavin. Have you played with the SOS feature where you have to find the satellite? They should give it to you for cellular. Yeah. We're pretty close, right? Yes. Your best tower is in this direction. It's right there.
[53:27]I do have played on a bike ride fairly shortly after the beta of iOS 18 came out. I actually did go into one of the areas where I know there's no coverage whatsoever. And yeah, it popped right up. It was super cool. I still got to write an article about that. Okay. Messages via satellite. Yeah, the SMS or messages via satellite. Yeah. I have not gotten to play with that. I haven't been out of satellite area. Maybe I can do it when I'm in a plane. That would be interesting that might be hard yeah I, I don't know. I'm betting no. Well, I'm closer to the satellites. Yeah, right. But you also can see all sorts of towers.
[54:12]It has to not be able to see cell towers. I don't think you can force it to turn on. You can't go into airplane mode and then get it to turn on. I don't think. Yeah, I wonder. I need to do some experiments. I'm on a plane tomorrow. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. When they turn off your phone, they may turn off. I mean, phones work with satellite Internet, so they must be able to use it. I think so. I think so. I mean, the real I mean, my understanding is the reason why the big reason why they have you turn off your phone on airplanes is actually that you're lighting up multiple towers. Towers you actually confuse the cell network more than anything else because you're the same distance from every tower on the ground in your in a nearby radius right the distance is very very small but if i'm flying over like oklahoma i'm probably not going to be lighting up so many towers.
[55:10]I don't know. Yeah, probably not in Oklahoma. But, but anyway, that's the, that's apparently the big reason that, you know, for the most part, the airplanes really can, can handle a little bit of, a little bit of extra radioactivity near them. They're not going to, their systems don't just go, go kablooey because someone turned their cell phone on. Right right well i thought this was fun adam i know we uh we walked into it knowing it was going to be silly and uh and i don't know i just always enjoy talking to you so this was fun, as usual people can find your writings at tidbits.com, and indeed indeed we've got some articles about both the stupid screen recording dialogues which people should keep submitting feedback to apple about how they're stupid open um and uh and also on this battery thing which again you know it's neat that apple added another feature i guess but i'm just thinking unless unless you know eek in the last little every little bit out of your iphone lifespan is important to you just go with optimized battery charging there you go we have the final answer the definitive answer from all the scientific evidence and calculations we've had going thanks for joining us again adam.
[56:17]Uh thanks for having me talk to you again soon Well, that's going to wind us up for this week. Did you know you can email me at allison at podfeet.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, send it on over. I love getting email from people. Remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon like Barry Sullivan does at podfeet.com slash Mastodon. And if you want to listen to the podcast on YouTube, you can go to podfeet.com slash YouTube. If you want to join in the fun of the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely new Scylla castaways. You can support the show like Tom Cooper at podfeet.com slash Patreon, or maybe a one-time donation is better suited to your finances. You can go to podfeet.com slash PayPal and do just that. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, you're going to have to wait until October 13th and then head on over to podfeet.com slash live at 5 p.m. Pacific time and join the friendly and enthusiastic.
[57:14]Music.