Unplug Your Laptop Now, or It Will Stay Plugged in Forever

The problem isn&#x27;t plugging it in, the problem is naive control software and non-communicated expectations.<p>In contrast, at night I plug in my phone, and it &quot;knows&quot; I won&#x27;t need it until the morning alarm goes off, so it avoids unnecessarily charging the battery too soon or too rapidly.

It&#x27;s rather unfortunate that many laptops still do this to their batteries. The last time I bought one I made sure it has a smart charging feature: It charges the battery to a configurable upper level, then stops charging until the battery has dropped to another configurable lower level. Defaults are at 80% and 20%.<p>Also, the discharge takes a very, very long time when plugged in, as it feeds directly from the power supply.

Apple took this out of Mac OS somewhat recently. You can try to rely on their power management, but given battery decay is a common reason to buy a new machine I don’t trust them really.<p>If you have an Apple Silicon Mac I can recommend Battery [1]. It can keep your Mac at 80%, and even force discharge while plugged in to get there. It’s a CLI and status bar utility, I love it.<p>[1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;actuallymentor&#x2F;battery">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;actuallymentor&#x2F;battery</a>]

Please explain like I&#x27;m five: if continuously charging and drawing power at 100% hurts my laptop&#x27;s battery, why doesn&#x27;t the laptop bypass the battery circuitry, keeping it idle, and use the incoming juice directly?

The article&#x27;s advice isn&#x27;t the best. It&#x27;s better to not cycle your battery whenever possible. Set your battery up to only charge when bellow a certain threshold (I do 70%) lower than the max charge (I have it set to 80%). This optimises for not over straining the battery (by not going to 100%) and it reducing cycles to a minimum for my everyday use only travelling between (desk) locations. I set this up through the power manager of KDE, without much effort. I expect this to be available to most Linux distributions and moderately modern laptops. I think I could also set this up on Mac OS when I was using that in the recent past (and I think it comes with something similar out of the box, but less conservative).

That&#x27;s more annoying than the consequence, so I won&#x27;t do it. I am not so poor and unskilled that a $79.99 macbook battery swap in a 10 years is worse than the daily annoyance of thinking about a plug every hour of my life. But that&#x27;s all moot. The latest MacOS already accounts for this, and lets the battery drain while plugged in, instead of topping off to 100% <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;102338" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;102338</a>. So it&#x27;s not even a real issue anymore.

It seems like laptops should treat 80% like its 100% and have a separate &quot;overcharge&quot; feature that can be activated manually or automatically on a schedule or when not on home WiFi.

The article doesn&#x27;t explain the why here... it&#x27;s because 2 things impact lithium ion lifetime - voltage (both high and low) and temp.<p>&quot;In terms of longevity, the optimal charge voltage is 3.92V&#x2F;cell.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;batteryuniversity.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;bu-808-how-to-prolong-lithium-based-batteries" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;batteryuniversity.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;bu-808-how-to-prolong-...</a><p>That maps out to roughly 65% charge state.<p>There&#x27;s a great app called AlDente for MacOS that allows you to set the charge limit while plugged in.

Is there a good reason why we can&#x27;t tell our devices to charge the battery to say 70% and then internally disconnect the battery, so it&#x27;s neither charging nor discharging?

Dell has advanced power management options in the BIOS, I set it to keep the battery charged at 70%, which is ideal for lithium batteries. And you set a custom schedule on days you need the battery charged at 100% so that you can take the laptop with you at full capacity. It&#x27;s not rocket science, and definitely something anybody reading this site should be able to figure out for their make&#x2F;model. For MAC there is a similar app that resides in top system tray where you can also define max charge. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apphousekitchen.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;apphousekitchen.com&#x2F;</a> )

A lot of this advice strikes me as folk theories. Just treat batteries as consumables and use the device as you see fit. Replace the battery as necessary every few years. There&#x27;s no similar advice for avoiding doing an oil change for cars. Why treat laptop and phone batteries as if they&#x27;re precious resources?

<i>Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance</i><p>Because the manfacturers made the firmware defaults downclock the CPU if it was on battery power.<p>Also, is it just me or does this article have an &quot;AI generated&quot; feel to it? The arguments it makes are somewhat in the &quot;uncanny valley&quot; between truth and fiction, and the phrasing of some of the sentences seems very unusual, especially this last one:<p><i>Stop charging your laptop past 100% today, so you can free yourself from being plugged in tomorrow.</i><p>Stuff like this also raises some red flags:<p><i>It’s when hen[sic] there are too many lithium ions on one side that the battery gets stressed.</i>

Personal anecdata:<p>- Work MPB which I got 2021-12, 99% of the time plugged in because I was WFH, last time I unplugged it to return it to my employer, the battery was at ~95% of max capacity (as reported by MacOS)<p>- Personal MBP bought 2021-12, only plugging in when battery was low, and 1.5y later the battery was at 80% of max capacity<p>It was then that I investigated a bit and learned the trick of charging only up to 80%, which is something that MacOS does automatically when it&#x27;s constantly plugged in which preserves battery life.<p>Since then, my personal laptop also stays plugged in most of the time, its battery is almost always at 80% and the battery hasn&#x27;t decayed further.

I can confirm from my own experience that this happens.<p>First laptop at work, always plugged in (except for maybe one or two hours a week). After two years of use (maybe a couple more from a previous employee) the battery lasted 30 minutes.<p>Personal laptop. Mostly plugged in (except when traveling maybe 3-4 weeks per month) but with the charging at 80% capped (it&#x27;s an option from the manufacturer). Almost 10 years later still holds around 1-2 hours (disclaimer: I don&#x27;t use this laptop anymore except for occasional tests)

&gt; Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance.<p>Various things have different default behavior when not plugged in to the power (e.g. iTerm2 disables GPU rendering by default). This is just the one place I know that&#x27;s a counterpoint (and there&#x27;s a setting to disable that), but it&#x27;s actually something that I&#x27;ve hit a few times while developing Ratatui.

Why not to implement a feature on all OSs that stops charging your battery once it gets at 100% and start the charging again at about 50%? It&#x27;s healthy for the battery (aka it doesn&#x27;t degrade it if it doesn&#x27;t charge) and it&#x27;s not letting you remain at 10% - from where it goes instantly at 0%. The dingus remains at how to make it happen, even if i&#x27;ve seen it getting into iOS and Android.

Chargie solves this problem for smartphones: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chargie.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chargie.org</a><p>Next month, they will release a version for laptops: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chargie.org&#x2F;product&#x2F;chargie-for-laptops-preorder" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chargie.org&#x2F;product&#x2F;chargie-for-laptops-preorder</a>

If you use your laptop as a laptop, the ideal charging habit is 100% and stop worrying about it. You paid for 100% of the battery, you want to use 100% of the battery. It doesn&#x27;t make sense to artificially cripple the product to extend the life of the device for a questionable period.<p>Unless it&#x27;s a desktop with ups, in which case it should stay at 50%-80%.

I do this with my phones. Notification pops up at 80% and I unplug it if I see it. If not oh well<p>Hard to tell if it max a difference but judging by battery health stats others are reporting I’d say yes.<p>Would be nice if device had a built in way to cap it for daily use and only go to 100% if travelling etc. I’m rarely away from a power socket day to day anyway

This is why modern laptops don&#x27;t stay at 100% if the detect that they&#x27;re always plugged in, no?

Note that this advice is wrong if you have a device with good software and settings. (aka maximum and minimum charge settings). Smaller more frequent charges are easier on a battery than less frequent larger charges of the same magnitude. Better to go from 70% to 80% five times than to go from 30% to 80% once. Especially on a laptop that doesn&#x27;t have battery cooling.<p>Even worse, unplugging your laptop makes it use battery charge, adding additional wear to your battery.<p>Virtually all EV&#x27;s have good software, so your electric car should be plugged into a charger as often as possible. It should be the same for laptops, unless you have one that is poorly configured; most are.

I usually shut down my computer when not in use. If the laptop remains plugged in even in its unpowered state, does the battery still degrade?

My previous Intel MBP which I&#x27;ve used for every day charging to 100% and discharging to 20% or so has 600 cycles now, battery health is at 81% and has been hovering there. It&#x27;s still fine, but my point is if you think of relying on applecare+ to replace your dead battery, they will only do so if it&#x27;s under 80% reported health and my conspiracy is that there&#x27;s some reported value stickiness around 80%, it will have to be really bad for it to go below, and without it going below no applecare+ replacement.

I disagree. 2022 mbp. Always plugged in... 5 charge cycles in total.<p>It seldom charges while plugged in. Even when down to 80% it alerts me it&#x27;s not charging because I seldom use the battery.<p>Apple could change this behaviour silently and mess it up but for now it&#x27;s perfect for my needs.

No one:<p>Gizmodo: &quot;Somewhere down the line, many of us got the idea that our laptops should always be plugged in to improve their performance.&quot;