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Battery life is one of the things that people look for when buying any device. After all, your phone goes everywhere you go, and it is expected to last you all day. For a lot of people, a laptop is the same — another device that is expected to last. However, over time, you might have noticed your device’s battery draining more quickly and even dying on you sooner.
This is normal. Over time, batteries degrade. But for some, getting a battery replacement can be an inconvenience, and getting a whole new phone is costly. However, while battery degradation is inevitable, there are many ways to extend any device’s battery life. In fact, just by changing a single setting, your battery could last much longer before needing replacement.
Before going into how to ensure your device’s battery longevity, it is important to understand how most device batteries work. The most common type of battery used in electronics is the lithium-ion battery. These are rechargeable batteries that are great for powering electronics because of their high energy capacity. However, like all things, they degrade over time. Battery life is how much charge your internal pack currently holds, and battery lifespan is how much total charge can be stored inside the battery.
When looking at your system settings, you may have noticed that your device uses a metric called “battery capacity” to indicate your battery’s health. Battery capacity is an estimate of how much charge the battery can hold compared with when it was new. Your device’s battery capacity can be influenced by your charging habits. Since charging and discharging cause ion movement (which allows energy storage and release), various side effects such as side reactions, structural changes, lithium plating risk, impedance growth, and electrode/electrolyte aging mean less energy can be stored and then used by your device.
This is why charging to 100% and letting your device go as low as possible isn’t recommended, and why most people recommend charging to 80% and discharging to 20%. Other things that cause degradation include high temperatures and fast charging. Lithium-ion batteries will also degrade over time by default, so there is no reason to speed up the process.
A few years ago, I received a used iPhone. When I got it, its battery capacity was 79%. Of course, this isn’t good, but I didn’t feel like getting my battery replaced. Just under two years later, my battery was just over 60%. At this point, my battery only lasted a couple of hours. Since I was thinking of buying a new phone anyway, I decided to ditch the iPhone and go with a phone with a bigger battery (the OnePlus 15 has a 7300 mAh battery, while the iPhone 17 has a 3692 mAh battery). The OnePlus 15 is also a silicon-carbon battery, which is a different type of lithium-ion battery that can hold more energy.
However, even though silicon-carbon batteries hold more energy, they can actually degrade and lose more of their capacity more quickly than lithium-ion batteries. Therefore, I decided to do my best to prevent battery degradation in my new phone and all my other lithium-ion-powered devices. To do this, I decided to follow the 80-20 rule. That is, I charge my device to 80% and let it drain to as low as 20%. However, I recently started letting my device charge when it dropped to around 40% or 50%. Both of these rules are effective at keeping your battery percentage as high as possible, and, in effect, all my devices that use this rule have 100% capacity, though your mileage will vary.
On Windows laptops, the process is more complex. For MacBooks, Chromebooks, and phones (it works for both iPhone and Android), go to your device’s battery settings. Then find the setting that controls the maximum charging limit. Set this to 80% (which is usually the lowest most phones will let you go). Of course, depending on your schedule, you might need more battery life, so it’s up to you when you want to charge your device. A lot of devices also have adaptive charging, which adapts to your schedule and makes sure your battery lasts a full day while still maximizing its lifespan.
It may surprise you to learn that wireless chargers heat up more than normal wired charging. As previously mentioned, high temperatures can cause faster battery degradation. Wireless charging is convenient and generally safe, but because it is less efficient and can create more heat, wired charging is a better option if your priority is long-term battery health.
One of the easiest ways to preserve long-term battery health is to enable an 80% charge limit or adaptive charging, should your device support such a feature. Not only am I speaking from experience, but this is scientifically proven (and recommended!) to extend the battery life of your devices. Just remember that this protects lifespan, not per-charge runtime, because starting from 80% provides less usable charge than starting from 100%.
Instead of using a wireless charger, make sure to buy a good wired charger, such as this one!