@decryption my old iPad Air 2 is always plugged in. The battery, although not holding charge like it used to, still performs “ok-ish” for its age. Maybe this isn’t as bad as they once were 🤷♂️
@decryption Most expensive computers/phones/brains have battery management stuff that's supposed to look after this for you. They shouldn't() continuously charge the battery(/ies). Pixel phones in particular have very elegant charge control stuff that tries to preserve your battery's life too.
(): Things that come to market rapidly (like electronic hoverboards and scooters a few years ago) can often skip sane battery management. On the plus side they have a second use as firelighters!
@decryption I'm not an expert, just parroting what I've heard (and i'd expect it'd vary by device). Personally I've only had that happen to two devices: one was an old Samsung phone that had been on the shelf for some years, the other was an old Sony tablet sitting on its Sony speaker dock. The only commonality was "old", but one was permanently on power and the other wasn't.
@decryption Modern phones will simply stop charging when the battery is at 100%. The battery will not be destroyed. While a battery permanently at 100% will degrade faster than one permanently at 80%, it’s still going to last a lot longer than a battery constantly cycled between say 20% and 100% with normal phone use. At work we have an iPad mini as demonstration unit. It’s been charging and turned on 24/7 for over 3 years and still works perfectly fine.
@decryption some phones, like ASUS ROG phones, pass through power around the battery via one of their multiple USB C ports. But dropping >$1k on a phone to act as a camera seems a bit counter productive 🤔
@decryption not directly, but perhaps a useful anecdote: I kept an old Samsung semi-permanently plugged in for the better part of 4 years as a secondary Pokemon Go phone* and it hasn't noticeably degraded the battery. So you might not need to worry too much about that?
*(The GPS signal is imperfect indoors, so your avatar walks randomly around near your house as the phone tries to lock onto your location, so I used to "walk" to hatch eggs while sleeping or whatever)
@decryption Back when working on Ubuntu Phone, our QA lab had a few phones set up to run without a battery. The controller board was removed from the lithium cells, and powered directly from a fixed power supply. We also used it as a way to hard reset the phones remotely.
Add comment