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My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

(terminalbytes.com)
447 points hemant6488 | 2 comments | 18 Jun 25 15:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.502s | source
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crazygringo ◴[19 Jun 25 14:42 UTC] No.44319142[source]▶
> The phone’s battery health held up reasonably well. After over a year of constant operation, it’s at 76% capacity.

I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.

This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.

My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.

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1. progbits ◴[19 Jun 25 14:50 UTC] No.44319210[source]▶
Most of these devices can't run "without touching the battery" because the external supply can't provide the required peak current, so during some CPU burst it would shut off.

I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.

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2. crazygringo ◴[19 Jun 25 15:12 UTC] No.44319422[source]▶
Couldn't the power management simply throttle the CPU to never go above supplied power in a battery-free mode? Don't they already implement a power threshold for degraded batteries? It seems like that would just be part of the feature I'm asking for, and easy to implement.

It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.