[rzimmerman]

This is an excellent answer and explanation. It’s helpful for people that want a deeper understanding of what’s going on with lithium batteries and where the 80% recommendations come from.

But in terms of general advice that does the most good for the average person, I strongly recommend just doing whatever the manufacturer says. Just use the device and charge it when you want. Live. Some team at Apple, Tesla, Google, whatever, spent 9 figures plus figuring out how to charge the battery so that it meets lifetime guarantees under normal use. There’s too much bad advice out there. Don’t discharge fully every cycle/occasionally (that was NiCd specific, and it was bad advice then). Don’t obsess about turning things off, force quitting apps, putting your car in neutral, or whatever dumb thing your neighbor said.

That being said, the answer here is correct, but keep in mind how that works with the battery management your device already has. Tesla explicitly recommends a lower limit. Do it. Apple phones limit charge cap to 80% until before you wake up. That’s great.

[moffkalast]

I for one would at least like it to be configurable as much as possible so I can pick if, say, I want my laptop to only stay on storage voltage when I keep it constantly plugged in, or say my phone shutting down at 15% instead because the morons designing it have glued in the battery, or alternatively allow going lower for a bit more damage if I'm lost in a forest and need every mW I can get before it dies. Call it consumer choice.

I'm so fucking tired of every affordable BMS on the market being hardwired to cut charge at 4.3 V (beyond what the charger will even reach per cell, so you get no top balancing lmao) and allow going down to 2.5 V like bruh what are you even protecting at that point, staying at those extremes for any amount of time will destroy the battery anyway. It would've cost them 2 cents to replace fixed resistors with those screw potentiometers for range adjustment.