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Why Charging Your Gadgets Over 80% Is Such a Bad Idea | iFixit News
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this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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But you can still choose to charge it to 100% when you anticipate you need that extra 20%. So it's not really "already degraded" it's just "on demand".
Which has consequences. Spontaneously staying out if you didn't decide to charge to 100% the night before and running out of battery.
It's not "on demand" it's "in stock ready for dispatch."
I don't want to have to order a day ahead to get a non-degraded battery.
If you keep it at 80% it doesn't take a day to charge to full. As long as you know 1 or 2 hours in advance, it'll be full.
But yeah, if your use-case is that you spontaneously need to leave your charger and require your full battery capacity, you should keep charging it to full. Maybe even get a powerbank as well.
If anyone is living a life where they might not spontaneously "leave their charger" they've given up or have young children they have to be responsible for.
On weekdays I know what I'm doing from when I leave my house until work ends. I might have plans after that, I might not. But I'm not going to short charge my phone because I usually go home after work in case I don't.
A phone battery should last as long as I might stay awake, that way I don't have to think about it.
People generally underestimate the mental effort of tiny decisions and micromanaging things.
In general the most freeing thing someone can do to is ensure their future self doesn't have to think about something.
Anyone micromanaging their phone battery is micro-damaging their mental health.
It’s the same problem with our new disposable bag ban in Denver.
Now, if I want to grocery shop, I need to take re-usable bags with me all day: on the bus, at work, etc, if there’s any possibility of grocery shopping on the way home.
Gone are the days of deciding to grocery shop on a whim.
Of course, this law was passed by people who all have cars. For them, grocery bags are something you can keep in your car, and then the furthest you have to carry them is from your garage into your kitchen.
Oh, and the bag ban isn’t all stores. It’s just the big evil stores that aren’t allowed to use disposable shopping bags. The rule, specifically, is any store with more than three locations is banned from offering disposable bags. Small, local places are still allowed to have disposable bags.
Well guess what. You know who shops for groceries at small local places? Rich people. You know who shops for groceries at massive chains? Poor people.
By targeting “the big evil corps” they also conveniently targeted the “corps with enough volume to get prices down to serve poor people”.
Now, I don’t think it’s a deliberate attempt to fuck with poor people. I think these legislators are trying to help. It’s just that none of them has any conception of what the life of most of their constituents is like. They’ve been upper middle class for so long, they just don’t know how people live. How much of an utter pain in the ass it is to not be able to have disposable bags.
And the cherry on top is that I bought a little trash can for my bathroom with a soft close lid that’s designed to take shopping bags as its trash bags.
I won’t run out for a while, but eventually I’m gonna run out of shopping bags and have to start buying little trash bags for that bin.
Now you’re spending limited cognitive resources to try and anticipate phone battery usage.
While true, I consider it a reasonable trade. I so rarely need the 100% charge.