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spockz 3 hours ago

That had me thinking as well. What if the manufacturer says that to get to that number you are only allowed to charge it to 80% ever? My iPhone pro battery is at 92% at 417 cycles over 20 months.

sokoloff 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do what EVs do: make 100% on the display not 100.0% electro-chemically and 0% not be 0.0% chemically.

This is a serious suggestion, as I think it’s actually net beneficial for the consumer.

Semaphor 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is already the case and has been so for a long time. But it's a trade off between longevity and capacity

LeifCarrotson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem is that consumers want to buy a phone with 24 hours of runtime and an EV with 200 miles of range, and they want the phone to be thin and light and the car to be fast and light, and manufacturers want to achieve those capacities with as little electrochemistry as possible. The number of charge cycles at full capacity will be a big deal a year or two in, but on the sales floor it's a secondary concern for typical buyers and sellers.

Playing fast and loose with the numbers, I'm sure that if 100% on the display was 80% in the battery and 0% was 20%, you'd have an amazing number of charge cycles. You could program that 40% of unused capacity to be reduced as the battery ages very slowly, and by the time the used capacity is only at 80% of its original revealed capacity you're at many thousands of cycles. But you'd have a phone or car that weighed 40% more and cost 40% more than one that had no buffer and ran at the bleeding edge on day 1.

Absent breakthroughs in battery chemistry, this basically regulates the amount of buffer capacity that manufacturers are required to include in their ~~lies~~ marketing materials.

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
creaturemachine 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There's no coming back from 0% chemically. Running li-ions that low results in physical damage.

wmf 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In that hypothetical scenario they should advertise 80% as the full capacity. Competition generally prevents this kind of "underclocking".

c0n5pir4cy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So as far as I can tell, they can't do this as it's based on equivalent full-charge cycles - so that's nice at least.