[snowwrestler]

> Slowly degrading my user experience over time with no way of me knowing why is not a good way of handling battery degradation.

Your user experience will always degrade with battery age. This is an unavoidable consequence of using a rechargeable battery. It is physically impossible to run a Li-ion battery through hundreds of charge cycles and have it work just as well as it did the day it was new.

Without power management, the phone would turn off sooner, in some cases a lot sooner. That is also a bad user experience, especially if you need the phone to make an emergency call. This is one example of why using software code to prolong phone availability creates a better user experience, even if comes at the expense of peak performance.

[emn13]

You say degradation is inevitable, hence implying this kind of degradation is unavoidable.

But to draw an analogy: that's kind of like saying death is inevitable, so there's nothing we can do about infant mortality. It's absurd to suggest that some kind of physical inevitability caused the symptoms actually observed to any significant extent whatsoever.

Battery aging does not need to lead to any user experience degradation within the first few years at least, because you can overprovision a battery, and because such overprovisioning actually not only provides some runway, but also reduces even the relative rate of battery decay.

Not to mention there are a bunch of other things a manufacturer does that influence battery lifespan. Which design aspects are at fault here? Apple surely knows by now, but they're not saying.

But even if you do choose to allow slow degradation - entirely reasonable! - the rate of decay is largely a matter of choice for the manufacturer. You can sell em to last for at least a decade if not more, or you can push em to the limits and have em degrade in months. Sure, that might cost a few extra grams and cost a few percentage points of the maximum initial charge - but nothing a user would likely notice, let alone mind.

Apple simply sold near dumpster-level quality li-on battery integrations - whether by accident, or to save money, or to limit device lifespan - we can't really know.

[oarsinsync]

> you can overprovision a battery

Which comes at a cost, in dollars, size and weight. Which is why it's probable no phone manufacturers actually do this.

[emn13]

That's not true; every manufacturer, including apple, does this. The question is simply to what degree. Battery chargers need to decide upto which voltage level to charge, and at which voltage level to consider a cell depleted; and similarly need to decide at which temperature to throttle during discharge - and at least as importantly - during charging. And it's not like it's got to cost and arm and a leg; even small amounts of additional headroom can likely prevent problems like apple's.

Basically: you can throttle after the battery is damaged or before. And if you throttle beforehand, you need to throttle a lot less.

Finally, you imply this is costly - but don't forget that apple's phones are amongst the most costly out there, and similar sized batteries are found in devices a small fraction of the cost. Clearly the bill of materials for the battery isn't a going to be a big deal for apple, compare to those competitors, which also happened to ship higher quality batteries.

[ryacko]

That makes Li-ion pretty bad for motor vehicle use now, doesn’t it?

[_ea1k]

Not really, but its a fair question. An automotive application will degrade significantly over hundreds of cycles as well. As a result, the power output will decline a little (not quite as good 0-60 times as new) and range will decline as well.

The significance of this will vary, largely based upon the range of the car. Think about how many cycles the battery takes after 100,000 miles on a car with a 100 mile range vs one with a 300 mile range, for example.

[snowwrestler]

No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.

[mschuster91]

> No, it is simply a maintenance issue. There are already plenty of those in motor vehicles, and people are well-trained to track and manage them.

In addition, car batteries have:

a) vastly better charge controllers than the cheap crap that's put in phones

b) better quality cells to start with, or at the very least higher QA standards

c) BETTER CHARGERS. Cheap cellphone chargers can kill the battery with their unclean power, especially when linked with cheap charge controllers in the phone.

d) better thermal management with cooling and (iirc) heating, compared with a cellphone battery that has to endure anything between double-degree negative temps in winter to +40 °C when it gets held by the user or the CPU gets active.