Tips on extending battery life from the New York Times

Very helpful article. Thanks for the tip!

Although there's a lot of good information in that article, (I was reminded I need to install an ad blocker, safari for an hour a day can easily be 50% of my battery usage) I was astounded to not see any mention of bluetooth. I turned that off a month ago and noticed a massive improvement on battery life.

I had turned it on to use my new bluetooth speakers in my truck, but I left it on, and my battery was dropping like a stone. Now I turn it on only when in the truck. It's a bit inconvenient, but has almost doubled my battery life.

With my old iPhone 4 I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly about the effect of bluetooth on battery life, but I now have an iPhone 6 Plus and my wife an iPhone 6 and both of us have Apple watches. Because the Apple watch loses 95% of its functionality without a bluetooth connection to our iPhones, we never turn Bluetooth off — except when we turn on Airplane mode, which we do using the Apple watch (I still have not figured out how the watch turns Airplane mode on the iPhone off when Bluetooth is off, but it does???).

The point is, as far as we can tell the effect of bluetooth on battery life on our iPhone 6's is unnoticeable. My only explanation is either much more efficient Bluetooth transceivers (it almost has to be to work in the Apple Watch), perhaps an ability to switch to a low power mode except when actually transmitting or receiving data, or maybe both.

The iPhone 4 used a Bluetooth 2 chip. Starting with the iPhone 4S, the chip used was a Bluetooth 4.0 part. Bluetooth 4.0 implemented the new Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) standard, which uses a tiny fraction of the power of older Bluetooth chips. Bluetooth LE is, as the name suggests, way easier on the battery.

HAH! For a change I guessed right!

I was referring to my iPhone 5S.

Also, I finally upgraded my iPhone to iOS9 since it was required for iBlocker. WOW. Huuuuuuge difference in web browsing. I usually go through BBC and Gizmodo while I eat lunch, and it's not unusual to lose 30-35% of my battery in 30 minutes, with all of their animated and poorly done ads drowning the pages. I think I lost 5% yesterday at noon, it was great. They've also started adding these ads that are basically full-screen (very close to it) that if you tap on them, even to scroll them it still triggers a new tab to pop up after the scroll finishes. It's almost impossible to look at their entire page without triggering at least two of those to load. Now they just don't show up at all

And then they wonder why we block their ads, and hate on us for doing it.... Cry me a river!

Better get a big box of Kleenex, or save up for subscriptions. An increasing number of sites is blocking access to visitors using AdBlocker or some such, and that block may extend to users blocking certain trackers (read: Ghostery etc.). I suspect the majority of free (commercial) sites will implement this within a couple of years, and probably sooner rather than later.

This MacNN article has a couple of good tips on improving the battery life of iOS devices I thought worth passing along.

This is a hoax, right?http://petapixel.com/2016/05/02/breakthrough-battery-tech-mean-never-replacing-battery/

I don't see anything that would make me suspect this to be a hoax. The paper the article is based on appears to be well written and documented, and follows sound experimental methodology. The test results are from work in rechargeable alkaline batteries and whether or not it would perform as well in Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) or Lithium-Ion (LiON) batteries with their very different chemistries and much high power densities was not tested and remains unproven.

If and when we see this in production is the real question. Note the closing line in the article..


A lot of really amazing technology exists in labs all over the world but it is a long journey from the laboratory to the production line. Many really promising technologies in the lab never make it to market because no one could figure out how to manufacture the product in sufficient quantities, the cost benefit ratio wasn't sufficient to make it pay, and sometimes by the time the technology reached the market the market no longer existed. (Carbon fiber buggy whips would have been absolutely superior to any other buggy whips but by the time they figured out how to make carbon fiber no one needed buggy whips.)

No, this is a real thing. The biggest problem we have right now with portable batteries is plate degradation during the recharging process. Basically every time you charge the battery, you damage it a little, even when you're doing it exactly the right way. This damage accumulates over time, showing up as reduced capacity, and possibly ending in catastrophic failure. ("battery ballooning" usually)

A battery's ability to store power is directly proportional to the surface area of the plates, where they are exposed to the electrolyte and can store a differential in (somewhat of a static) charge. Roughing up the surface texture of a plate is one way to increase total surface area, a bit like how there are cilia in our intestines to greatly increase the absorption surface area of our intestines. It works the same way with batteries. But when you reduce it to a thin wire, the charge is spread out and isn't very strong in any one particular spot. But because of the enormous increase in area, it more than makes up for it in capacity.

This "soft" charge over a wide area is helpful because when batteries discharge deeply, some of the plate dissolves. When it's recharged, the plate material precipitates out of the electrolyte and back onto the plate... somewhere. Over many cycles of uneven redeposit, structures build up that resemble crystals, which grow toward each other and eventually can make contact with neighboring plates, causing a short. They can also puncture the insulating membrane between electrolyte areas of different potential, and that's where you get ballooning. The softer charging and discharging of nanowires still does this dissolve/deposit, but to a much smaller degree, and on a much smaller scale. This makes the charge and discharge processes far less destructive to the plates.

But this also means you aren't storing as strong (deep) of a charge in any one area, so you need to find a way to manufacture the wires densely enough without making them too delicate, and get them to combine electrically gradually to the external contacts, so the battery has a large total capacity. (a very dense storage battery isn't very useful if it's the size of a poppy seed and cost $10,000 to produce) If you can figure that out, you can create a very durable battery. This is where we're at right now. We know what the problem is, and how to avoid it, but we're still working out how to manufacture it efficiently and on a larger scale. It's a bit like carbon nanotubes and buckyballs. We need to start making more breakthroughs in nano-scale manufacturing. We've got the drill down for photolithography of chips, but that's about the only place where we've made any serious progress.