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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

Disappointed to see no discussion on battery. That's what is keeping me from implementing this. My old iphones are at 2+ years battery life. i.e. at the point where they're at risk of becoming spicy pillows and I'd love to not have a lithium fire in my apartment. In that context spending 50 bucks on amazon for a camera suddenly seems sound

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Can confirm that sticking an old iPhone, say, connected to power in your garage to serve as a kiosk device 24/7 will 100% result in the battery swelling up. I had it happen. Now, in my case it didn't cause any harm and I was even able to replace that 5S's battery. But tbh I would not trust an Apple device in a permanently-powered situation for this reason.

Especially since Apple, in their benevolence, software-restricts the technology of the "only charge to 80%" option to only their newest devices (14 series and up, only) so anything older than that will be torturing its battery if left on a charger long-term.

Apple itself supports using an old iPhone as a camera for Apple TV Facetime and karaoke use, so while this is a risk, it doesn't seem to be something the company is concerned about.

https://support.apple.com/guide/tv/use-your-iphone-or-ipad-a...

I'm sure whoever pitched this 'dedicated' feature in Cupertino had to make sure to state that customers would purchase a new iPhone for this role rather than... shudder reuse an old device. As we all know, Apple has a deep and abiding desire that the vast majority of used iPhones be shredded[1].

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/News/94386/the-truth-about-apples-fre...

A long time ago, I used to work at a place that decided to stick iPads onto meeting room doorways to display who had the room booked (because people are the worst). These'd last 7 or 8 months before the battery puffed up enough to be noticed, or in a few cases to crack the screens. I grabbed a few power point timer switches, and set them to only over up the charger for a hour a day. Never had another battery puffing failure - at last not in the next 2 or 3 years before I left. (As the iPads got old, charging for 1 hour per day wasn't always enough to keep them running 24x7, but I'd set them to start charging at 6am so worst case was someone needed to power up the iPad and start the room booking webapp on it in the morning. If a particular iPad got its battery into a state where that was happening regularly, we just adjusted the power point timer to charge twice a day, morning and evening.)

I've not personally tried it, but there have been people who have had success removing their iPhone batteries and getting old devices to power via Lightning.

https://www.reddit.com/r/androidafterlife/comments/zpya9p/i_...

oh that's fun. I had assumed ifruits would just decide nope if they can't see the battery

edit: that's a rather old v6 in link...think they started with their authenticating components after that

This is a product category ("battery health protection device"): https://chargie.org | https://hn.algolia.com/?query=chargie&sort=byDate&type=comme...

> 2+ years battery life

Is this considered old? I own countless devices with batteries older than this.

Not an expert on this but my understanding is that at 2+ risk starts to increase, especially that have seen high use and fast charging.

My layman understand is that dendrites accumulate over time so risk is incremental over use...and for phones use and time is basically same thing. Low use items I'd totally run for many more years.

No. We have a couple hundred phones at work that are 5-9 years old. Does failure rate increase with time? Of course. Until you hit 5 years, the phone is perfectly fine.

I think it's charge/discharge cycles more than time that gets to batteries. I've heard that a decent rule of thumb for LiPo batteries is that they'll drop to around 80% of "new capacity" in around 1000 cycles. So around 3 years to drop to 80% capacity if they're fully charged/discharged daily, or around 5 years if they're only discharged to 30-40% and topped up daily. If you only charge them once every week or month (like my Kindle), the battery will probably still be fine after 20 years. And on the other hand if you're the sort of person who talks on your ophoine for several hours a day (like my boss) or streams YouTube all day - and need to recharge your phone in the middle of the day, you'r battery could drop below 80% in a yeah and a half.

I'm currently using an iPhone 13 from late 2021, so almost 4 years old. It's showing 79% Maximum Capacity in Battery Health, and I only occasionally use more then 75% of battery over a days use.

I still have the iPhone XR I upgraded from, so a 7 year old 2018 phone, that still holds a whole day's charge too (but doesn't get much use, and doesn't have a SIM in it right now so I'd guess it's powered down the cellular radios?)

I have an iPod Touch from a bit before Covid, so 6 years old from 2019-ish - it stopped getting daily use when Covid and WFH hit, so it's battery is old, but still in reasonable condition. (Pity newer iOS won't run on it...)

Depends on how you use it, but with intensive use like 2+ charge cycles a day 7 days a week, and long times connected to charger makes 2+ years quite old.

i could be wrong but you should be able to solder/connect the battery contacts to the output of a power supply at the same voltage as the battery you're replacing and just have it plugged into the wall or a UPS, but not sure if the battery manager would still think the battery is being spent and freak out after getting to 0%

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