First off, thanks for veering back on-topic. I think this is much more beneficial for the thread and the discussion forum in general.
Kayswah wrote:
I was just stating what apple has on their battery page. Stating that letting the phone completely drain once a month. It states that if you keep charging the phone when it gets to half a charge, it will eventually "see" this as the normal and you lose battery life.
This goes to the asymmetry in percentage reporting. Modern lithium chemistry batteries have no memory effect, so if this is happening it's because of history logs kept in software. The phone's auto-shutdown should be based on the instantaneous voltage of the battery, so what you'll experience is not shorter battery life, but perhaps earlier "low battery" alarms but the same actual run-time before auto-shutdown. IME, even this doesn't happen. Every iPhone I've owned is plugged in anytime it can be, and have rarely if ever been allowed to drop enough to trigger the 20% alert, and the two and three-year-old phones have 80-90% of their original charge capacity and reporting.
I'm not trying to quib with you either.
Fair enough. It's hard to tell tone over the internet.
I'm just offering suggestions to people that are having battery issues.
Yes, but again, modern li-poly batteries do not need full-capacity-discharging to maintain their charge capacity (these are not sintered-plate Ni-cads we're talking about), and doing so actually reduces the full charge capability, despite what the software may log between partial charges. So if suggestions are being offered that are incorrect/detrimental, they may get called on it. Again, don't take it personally.
Charging a phone anytime it gets to half a charge makes no sense to me. Why short change yourself?
I don't see any "short change" here. A partial charge does not "count" as a full-charge for purposes of charge cycle lifetime. Two half-charges counts as one full charge (or even ever so slightly less, if you take into account the deeper discharge of the full). If you have an opportunity to keep your phone at 100%, I see no reason not to take it. If at any point you need to be away from a charger for a long period of time, you've got a phone with a full charge, rather than one at 70, 50 or 20% because you habitually run it down to near-zero before charging it. If you don't have access to a charger most of the time, c'est la vie, that's what the battery is for. If your goal is to be off a charger as long as possible as an end to itself, then so be it. I'm not saying you have to do it, just what is best for the health of the battery.
Yes, many people have recommended deep-discharging the battery. It's often-repeated and taken for granted, but it's a legacy of long-outmoded battery chemistries and is not what should be done for modern batteries.
