Apple has added a feature which tries to do this intelligently to some extent but it's not the best at guessing what my needs are.
The majority of the time I do not need max or even half of max battery life from my devices. airpods I only use for an hour or two at a time for example and my phone is usually close to a charger.
This typically corresponds to around 7-10% capacity per ‘tik’, so to effectively triple your battery cycle count would reduce the runtime by approximately 30%.
Interesting effect here.. the amount of power in each cycle is less because you’re undercharging the battery. And for each consecutive ‘tik’, 0.05V is approximately more power because the discharge curve becomes flatter (voltage != state of charge). It doesn’t scale like you’d think. Seriously diminishing returns!
So, somewhat close at least?
I hounded Dell for months and got them to replace I guess 2 or 3 dozens of Optiplex DL270 motherboards and it felt good: forcing them to take the cost for their shoddy work.
The times I had an issue with an HP business laptop I called them and either a technician came to my office and replaced the part (a screen in that case) or they sent a spare after confirming I was capable to change it myself.
I do wish there was a little more of treating your users like adults though. If I have enough battery to make an urgent call, but it puts me under the 20% recommended, I want to make that call at the cost of long term battery life.
My products treat users like adults, I wish it was a more common consideration.
I just replaced that phone, and yes with another one because I happen to like that model a lot, and my old one did 1500+ cycles with respectable battery capacity remaining. I replaced it due to a cracked screen, not battery trouble.
My general experience has been to avoid fully charging the battery and leaving the device on the charger, plus avoiding high demand use under 15 to 20 percent adds very considerably to longer term battery health.
This has played out across a number of devices, lenovo laptop, various phones.
After, say a few hundred cycles, it's very important to avoid taking the battery below 5 percent or even to zero. When that happens, the battery capacity is reduced every time, and it's by a significant amount.
http://learningrc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Lipo-Discha...
Battery capacity is guessed by the Voltage output at the current draw when measured.
Laptops usually throttle components, reducing current draw, when they fall below certain percentages. This prolongs the battery so that last 10% really does last longer.
This article goes into some nitty gritty details if you're curious.
http://learningrc.com/lipo-battery/
Determining actually battery capacity and runtime are educated guesses because all the factors impacting them are constantly changing.
I’m not sure many reviews are checking 0-60 times at 20% battery for example.
My EV has a hilarious “miles remaining” number that INSTANTLY changes when the HVAC is on, doesn’t matter if it’s only slightly on or not, I instantly “lose” 8 or 9%. It’s pretty loose. As to what I actually get? Doesn’t really matter, never even compared to rating, mfgs know we use these cars for city travel.
The small percentage of EVs you see on long haul highway, owners already know to carefully plan their trips.
This is double true for Tesla where there are superchargers nearly everywhere. With access superchargers, road trips are roughly as complex as driving a diesel with a 5-8 gallon tank.
Also the tesla UI is very good at managing the trip so it is trivial to offload the "how do I get there including charging" task to the UI.
But it would be nice to have an option to avoid 100% yes.
Not only is this annoying, it also adds tons of unnecessary full discharge cycles.
The new wireless charging cases are also bad - they seem to stay warm even when no longer charging, which probably degrades the batteries as well.
Consider a Tesla that gets ~250 miles of range per full cycle. The battery would reach 1000 cycles after 250k miles of driving, at which point you have a pretty old car. Depending on factors like time, environmental conditions, driving style, a battery replacement might be necessary at some point in the car's life. So the batteries in EVs probably cannot sustain thousands of cycles. The battery capacity is large enough that the overall cycle count is reasonable within the lifespan of the vehicle, and the battery cooling system keeps degradation reasonable given the high demands EV batteries must fulfill.
I use my AirPods so much all day every day I do wish I could ask it to use that mode permanently.
I believe these (cutoff voltage, CC->CV switch, cutoff current point) are commonly referred to as (0%, 80%, 100%) levels respectively, if safety margins and psychological tweaks are not considered.
Which leads to an assumption that it is this Constant Voltage region that is often said to be damaging to cells, though I don’t know exactly why.
Airpods are used with iPhones that have 20x the amount of electronics, so should last 20x as long.
People's real concern is the price which is higher than they guess because they think airpods are like regular headphones in longevity.
It's the same story with trying to get rid of plastic straws.
In both cases, I don't want to dismiss the problem - it's just that there are bigger fish to fry to make a much large impact to the bottom line of plastic pollution.
Now, after reading through the "Our Story" of Podswap's website, I can see that the real selling point is: "Our batteries keep dying prematurely, and we don't want to fork over the cash for a whole new pair."
Recycling is great - keep it as a value proposition, but it shouldn't be the main marketing push here.
The plastic straw thing is not to make an impact on the environment, it was chosen to make an impact on everyone's life.
Yes, we could do something bigger, but people won't notice because they can't see the effect in their day to day life.
Ban plastic straws though and EVERYONE notices and talks about it constantly everywhere. And if even one person starts using less plastic because of that, it was a success.
If you're "making an impact on everyone's life" in the form of making their lives more annoying and inconvenient, those people are going to resent you and the cause for which you inconvenienced them.
I can buy not relying on the first order impacts of banning plastic straws for the coat-benefit analysis, but relying on second-order effects doesn’t mean you get to toss out cost-benefit altogether.
All high-capacity batteries need a management chip.
There are comments on Reddit by Apple store employees who claim there's absolutely no repair policy for Apple pods, That they go straight to the bin.