>1. It’s ok to keep laptop plugged in, even at 100% battery
It might be "ok" to keep it plugged in at 100%, but if your laptop has a "battery conservation" mode that limits the charge to 80% (or similar), that's even better.
Oh wow, looks like that's brand-new (from March?) as opposed to AlDente which is about 4.5 years old at this point, at least according to GitHub releases.
It looks really really sharp, the UX is definitely much more visually appealing than AlDente. I might have to check it out.
I think (though I might be wrong) charging of Apple hardware detects usage patterns and it would already not charge the battery to 100% if you’re frequently plugged in.
But that only applies if you have a "charging routine", e.g. you always charge overnight and use it on battery all day long starting at 9:15 am:
"When the feature is enabled, your Mac will delay charging past 80% in certain situations. Your Mac learns your charging routine and aims to ensure that your Mac is fully charged when unplugged."
But in my experience, the feature doesn't do anything if your Mac is just usually plugged in. It simply stays at 100% because there's no routine for it to learn for when you tend to unplug it.
I could imagine automating this to set the threshold to the current battery level, and incrementing the threshold by 1% every N minutes to control charge speed.
Right now I try to keep it at 50% max charge like this while plugged in at home.
> When I’m plugging my phone in before bed to charge for the next 8 hours it doesn’t need fast charging.
iPhones do this with "Optimised Battery Charging" turned on (which I believe is the default setting) - "allow iPhone to wait to finish charging past 80% until the time you need to use it" (which it learns over time.)
Android has something similar. A notification pops up when I plug in at night, letting me know that it's charging slowly because I usually leave it plugged in overnight, and that I can disable it (once or permanently) to switch to fast charging.
It's harder to do with a usb-c charger and laptop because the spec requires higher voltages are made available with higher wattages, and manufacturers only make products to hit sweet spots in the specs and market.
You might end up with a readily available 65W charger to get the necessary 20V, even if you don't want 3A.
i have 2 chargers near my bed, one has 3 amps, the other one has 1. i use one on another depending on how fast i need it charged. not the best solution, but it works.
I have a wireless charging cradle on my nightstand intentionally hooked to a slow charger. It works fine most of the time except on the rare occasion when the phone charge is low and I'm going somewhere in a couple of hours. It would be great if there was a charging cradle with a simple "fast/slow" charge switch.
Or even better, if phones had a built-in charge status UI that instead of just saying "NN% charged / TT minutes until full" had a slider controlling charge speed that showed a range of "time until full". That way users could intelligently choose the charge speed vs time based on context.
Yes that's absolutely the case. So it just depends on how good the cooling system is. For a phone, it has no active cooling system. For an electric vehicle, almost all manufacturers (except Nissan Leaf) have adopted active cooling and you can expect them to do a good job activating adequate cooling for the battery.
It can affect battery longevity. If you charge lithium ion at cold enough temperatures, you get lithium plating which rapidly degrades capacity and can lead to internal shorts and fires.
I disagree with your point #2 as it is written. You want to keep you battery close to the temperature at which it is rated. Cycling below that also harms batteries and shortens their life. If you really want to geek out about that, I can recommend for example a talk [1] that was given last week (you can jump to slide 15). The presentation has nice electron microscopy images of the cracking this type of abuse causes in batteries.
It might be "ok" to keep it plugged in at 100%, but if your laptop has a "battery conservation" mode that limits the charge to 80% (or similar), that's even better.