News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by askafriend on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @12:53PM (#20451730)
Because that will wreck the battery capacity.

Li-Ion batteries aren’t designed for that use-case.

Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

With a full charge, you’ll get 2+ months of usage.

Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

That’s why the battery port design is both really smart and elegant. Unfortunately people don’t take the time to understand the purpose of design choices and jump to the easiest meme that reinforces their beliefs.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by kstenerud on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:14PM (#20451943)
I've never understood why companies force the battery to charge the whole time it's plugged in for things that charge quickly and discharge slowly.

If a full charge lasts 2 months, then why keep it topped up while plugged in? Just charge it to 85%, then let it discharge to 50%, then charge it again. The circuit to do this can't be that hard to design.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by habitue on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @03:02PM (#20452915)
So my understanding is that all Li-Ion batteries come with circuitry that explicitly keeps track of the battery condition and minimizes charging when unnecessary, even if it's plugged in. I don't think it's just "juice goes in until it's full"

Can anyone more knowledgeable confirm?

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by andromeduck on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @03:41PM (#20453198)
Usually that just means it lets the charge level drop to ~98% or something before topping it off again which I'm sure they do but having doing anything with a lipo slowly kills it to some degree including simply being near high and low states of charge so it's no silver bullet.

What they would need to do is detect when the port has been has been connected regularly for days and let the charge level drop to some announcement proportionate to the frequency and duration.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by adtac on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:01PM (#20451808)
Is it not possible to disable battery usage completely using circuitry if connected by wire? Draw and use all power from the cable? What impact could that possibly have on the battery? I imagine it'd be similar to keeping a mouse unused.
Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by FireBeyond on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:09PM (#20451896)
>Also the Magic Mouse has fast charging. You’ll get a full day of battery in 2min.

> With a full charge, you’ll get 2 months of usage.

> Do the math. You’ll most likely charge this thing less than 20 times in it’s entire life.

These things don't make sense as a whole.

Why put a fast charger in (to get your day's worth of charging) if your use case is "charge it to full, get 2 months", so you "likely charge this thing less than 20 times in its life"?

Most likely, you'll go to one extreme or the other, and I think the "less than 20 in its life" is entirely optimistic, and based on a use case that the design doesn't represent.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by askafriend on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:34PM (#20452671)
A full charge to 100% takes longer.

Fast charging is more intensive on the battery - you don't want it to be running on fast charge the whole time.

It's for scenarios where you might forget to charge or it's been sitting unused for a while but you still want to get to work quickly. It minimizes failure scenarios.

It's meant to be a wireless mouse. Emphasis on wireless.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by spronkey on Wednesday July 17, 2019 @06:23AM (#20458000)
Ignorant comment. Very easy to design a) a dual power circuit and b) charging hysteresis to not mame the battery.

There simply is no good reason for the port placement.

Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by pier25 on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @01:12PM (#20451928)
You are assuming that when plugged the mouse would run from the battery, which quite frankly would be a terrible decision.
Re:Jony Ive: 8 hits and 8 misses from 20 years at Apple by askafriend on Tuesday July 16, 2019 @02:41PM (#20452726)
The mouse is designed to never need wires except for charging. The solution is to minimize charge time, not add more features to let you use it in a wired fashion; that's regressive.

It actually works really well. I still don't like the mouse because my hands are big and the ergonomics are absolutely terrible for me, but the charging design is well considered.