[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Apple 'Must Fix' iPad Battery Issue, Study Warns here

[crosswordbob]

I'm not going to claim to know enough about batteries to know if this really is a problem, but if so I wonder why it's only a problem now, given that the FAQ for the Battery Doctor app says the following in its FAQ (and has done since long before now):

Quote

▶ Why does charging continue after it has reached 100%?

100% battery level does not mean that your battery has been fully charged. To maximize the charge capacity, about another 40~80min is needed from 100% to full charged. If the battery has been aged, more time is needed for this process.

[SierraHotel]

Sigh... another tempest in a teapot?

First, we need to determine if Dr Raymond Soneira is just another hit *****, or has legitimate concerns. Good luck with that.

Does Apple really say that not taking your device off the charger as soon as it reads 100% charge will damage the battery. I guess idiots like me that have gotten 4+ years out of their batteries with overnight charging are living on borrowed time!

[nonseq]

SierraHotel, on 26 March 2012 - 08:09 AM, said:

Sigh... another tempest in a teapot?

First, we need to determine if Dr Raymond Soneira is just another hit *****, or has legitimate concerns. Good luck with that.

Does Apple really say that not taking your device off the charger as soon as it reads 100% charge will damage the battery. I guess idiots like me that have gotten 4+ years out of their batteries with overnight charging are living on borrowed time!

Yet another "expert" vying for public eye? Looks that way to me.

PC World needs to look for better experts in my opinion.

[djdjohnson]

If the charging circuit isn't smart enough to shut off the charge after it reaches the real 100% there is a real problem here. But it also doesn't sound like that is an issue if the wattage being used drops from 10W after it reaches its real full charge. Apple's comment makes no sense.

[WGuyFinley]

djdjohnson, on 26 March 2012 - 08:19 AM, said:

If the charging circuit isn't smart enough to shut off the charge after it reaches the real 100% there is a real problem here. But it also doesn't sound like that is an issue if the wattage being used drops from 10W after it reaches its real full charge. Apple's comment makes no sense.

If you watch the report it's not really Apple making comment, it's a reporter paraphrasing what Apple allegedly said. I think we all know what happens when business reporters start paraphrasing technical issues.

[42n81]

I tested mine over the weekend and power draw from mains dropped from approx. 11 Watts to zero within minutes of the indicator showing 100%.

Total charging time from 0 to 100% took 5h 50 min.

This post has been edited by 42n81: 26 March 2012 - 08:40 AM

[42n81]

double post

This post has been edited by 42n81: 26 March 2012 - 08:40 AM

[KLanD]

"knows that it is fully charged then it should automatically stop the charging"

Doesn't nearly every modern device do this?

[xyberviri]

So basically what they are saying its, a car has a 10 gallon tank, you put 10 gallons in it to get a "full tank" which is also indicated as such on the gauge.

how ever the iPad users are basically getting those extra two gallons of gas into their tank.

which ends up leaking because gas expands when it gets hot.

[crosswordbob]

WGuyFinley, on 26 March 2012 - 08:34 AM, said:

djdjohnson, on 26 March 2012 - 08:19 AM, said:

If the charging circuit isn't smart enough to shut off the charge after it reaches the real 100% there is a real problem here. But it also doesn't sound like that is an issue if the wattage being used drops from 10W after it reaches its real full charge. Apple's comment makes no sense.

If you watch the report it's not really Apple making comment, it's a reporter paraphrasing what Apple allegedly said. I think we all know what happens when business reporters start paraphrasing technical issues.

I suspect you're probably right—that statement attributed to Apple would make no sense. Who designs a battery-driven device that is damaged if you don't pull out the charger the second it reads 100%? Not a company that quite clearly puts battery-life at the forefront of their overall design decisions.

What I suspect they said is that were you to continue to "fast charge" all the way up to its maximum charge you could damage the battery, so instead, they fast charge up to somewhere below full, then tail off, or "trickle charge" to full. Rather than taking (say) 4 hours to go from 0-95% then another hour for 95-100%, they simply call 95% of maximum charge 100% and continue to trickle charge it in the background.

As far as I can tell from a couple of hours research, this is pretty much standard procedure for Li-ion batteries.

[Nuke61]

crosswordbob, on 26 March 2012 - 11:36 AM, said:

As far as I can tell from a couple of hours research, this is pretty much standard procedure for Li-ion batteries.

It is, that's just how they need to charge. The same thing happens with my Droid Incredible 2 phone, and I read quite a bit about it by doing searches. The difference here is that it's Apple, so it's front page news.

I suspect that what Apple said was that if you overcharge Li-Ion, it will damage the battery cells, and that's true. But that does not imply that leaving the charger attached to the device will cause an overcharged/damaged condition, because it's designed so that it doesn't do that.

For all the information you could probably desire about batteries of all types, batteryuniversity.com

http://batteryuniver...m_ion_batteries

[QUADICON]

If the battery indicator is showing the battery is charged and it stops charging, but the battery isn't fully charged, even tho it isn't a problem per se, shouldn't Apple just make sure its reasonably correct?

If we are going to lose 1.2 hours of usage I dont see that as being a big deal; unless you plan to be away from a charging source of more than 10hrs.

This post has been edited by QUADICON: 26 March 2012 - 12:58 PM

[nonseq]

There is another article on these forums (iPad Battery Allegations Unwarranted http://www.pcworld.c...nwarranted.html) that challenges Soneira's allegations.

Kudos to Lex Friedman for fact checking and backgrounding for his story. Here are some interesting passages...

Quote

iPad Battery Allegations Unwarranted
By Lex Friedman, Macworld Mar 26, 2012 1:49 pm

Your new iPad's battery is fine. Despite some media reports suggesting that Apple's newest tablet suffers from a pair of battery-related issues, --Macworld's own research concludes that the third-generation iPad's battery works as designed, and that customers needn't fear harming the battery by over-charging it.

Dr. Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies first sounded an alarm about the new iPad's battery because he believed that it wrongfully indicated its battery was 100 percent charged when in fact it was closer to 90 percent full. He wrote that if you unplugged your charging iPad at the first moment the battery meter ticked over to 100 percent, "you get 1.2 hours less running time."

But worse still, Soneira further alleged that Apple says leaving your iPad plugged in for too long--when you wanted to, say, top off the battery--could "harm the longevity of the battery."

It's unclear where Soneira's Apple-attributed quote about overcharging the battery harming its longevity comes from. Macworld has found no statements from Apple to any press organization on the subject, and the company declined to comment for this story. All references to such a claim seem to trace back to Soneira's report, or CNBC's coverage of same. And Apple's own guide about charging the iPad's battery makes no reference to an over-charging risk.

Carl Howe, the vice president for data sciences research for mobile-focused market research company The Yankee Group, told Macworld that "There is no damage caused [to the iPad's battery] by leaving it plugged in. ... There's a charging circuit that makes sure that doesn't happen." ...

...That charging slowdown is referred to as trickle-charge mode--"it's like trickling in the water from the pitcher, to make sure you don't go over the lip of the battery," Howe explained. In fact, that trickle charge mode explains Soneira's other concern regarding how full the battery is when the new iPad first reads 100 percent. Howe agrees that, at that point, the battery can indeed get fuller, but says that's not a problem. "The capacity that [Apple is] advertising is based on when the iPad first says 100 percent--everything you get over and beyond that at the trickle charge stage is just kind of gravy....

...That means you can safely plug in your iPad at bedtime; even if the battery meter hits 100 percent at midnight, it's no problem for your tablet to keep on charging until the rooster crows. The new iPad boasts the same 10-hour battery life that the previous two iPads claimed, though it needs a bigger battery to pull that off--specifically, a 42.5 watt-hour battery, compared to the iPad 2's 25 watt-hour model. That larger battery unsurprisingly takes longer to charge completely than the iPad 2's.

This post has been edited by nonseq: 26 March 2012 - 01:39 PM

[42n81]

QUADICON, on 26 March 2012 - 12:54 PM, said:

If the battery indicator is showing the battery is charged and it stops charging, but the battery isn't fully charged, even tho it isn't a problem per se, shouldn't Apple just make sure its reasonably correct?

If we are going to lose 1.2 hours of usage I dont see that as being a big deal; unless you plan to be away from a charging source of more than 10hrs.

Who says the indicator isn't correct? As long as the indicated 100% charge delivers the advertised battery life, then no correction is necessary ... and I haven't seen any claim to the contrary.

[Nuke61]

QUADICON, on 26 March 2012 - 12:54 PM, said:

If the battery indicator is showing the battery is charged and it stops charging, but the battery isn't fully charged, even tho it isn't a problem per se, shouldn't Apple just make sure its reasonably correct?
If we are going to lose 1.2 hours of usage I dont see that as being a big deal; unless you plan to be away from a charging source of more than 10hrs.

I don't know if this is why Apple has done this, but as long as the iPad gets near the advertised battery life, I don't see a problem.

Quote

Avoiding full charge has benefits, and some manufacturers set the charge threshold lower on purpose to prolong battery life.
http://batteryuniver...m_ion_batteries

[42n81]

xyberviri, on 26 March 2012 - 11:21 AM, said:

So basically what they are saying its, a car has a 10 gallon tank, you put 10 gallons in it to get a "full tank" which is also indicated as such on the gauge.

how ever the iPad users are basically getting those extra two gallons of gas into their tank.

which ends up leaking because gas expands when it gets hot.

It's not quite that simple. According to Dr. Soneira:

Quote

The battery charge indicator on all mobile devices is based on a mathematical model of the charge rates, discharge rates, and recent discharge history of the battery. It uses this information to estimate how much running time is left. It's actually rather difficult to do because most batteries degrade slowly as they discharge and then tend to surprise with a precipitous decline near the end. Note that batteries are based on complex chemistry so there is no practical way to measure the charge level “in hardware.”

So it's not like you can put a battery gauge on the device and read the charge.

The equivalent for a car would be for the gas gauge to indicate fuel level by estimating consumption depending on how the car is driven. Then, after allowing the tank to be replenished based on a fixed flow rate of gasoline from the pump over a measured amount of time, the gauge would indicate a full tank. Gasoline would then be allowed to trickle into the tank until added resistance indicates that the tank is full and the algorithm hopefully resets the 100% setting at that level. If the pump shut-off mechanism is working properly, then no damage (i.e. spill) occurs.

So, just as a full tank will stop receiving gasoline, I would suspect that a fully charged battery will stop drawing charging current when battery voltage and charging voltage reach equilibrium. But seeing that these are Li-Ion batteries, things might be more complex than that.

This post has been edited by 42n81: 26 March 2012 - 05:59 PM

[42n81]

The article, and the headline are misleading.

Here is what Dr. Raymond Soneira actually said: (at http://www.displayma..._ShootOut_1.htm )

Quote

While Apple’s remark (As reported by Jon Fortt of CNBC: "Apple is saying... if you charge it more than [when the battery indicator reads 100%], you could actually harm the longevity of the battery.") might apply to recharging dumb battery operated toys, the new iPad is a very sophisticated and expensive computer device that is fully capable of properly controlling and managing its own (rudimentary) battery charging process. Perhaps Apple should instead graciously accept my interpretation and rescind their own remarks, which sound like very poorly thought out damage control. Otherwise they need to immediately fix the iPad battery charging algorithm or they may be held responsible for replacing all iPad batteries. Which one will it be?

• Notice that the text in blue is contained within square brackets (red), so it might not be exactly what Apple said. Continuing to charge the battery after it is fully charged is NOT the same as continuing to charge the battery after the meter indicates 100%.
  
  
• Notice that Dr. Soneira appears to be more concerned with the wording of Apple's remark than the possible existence of an actual defect.

Compare what Dr. Raymond Soneira said to what is stated in the PCW article:

Quote

Apple needs to immediately fix the new iPad’s battery charging algorithm, or it may have to replace batteries for all users, a study by DisplayMate Technologies warns. The new iPad's battery needs an extra hour of charge after it shows it is fully juiced in order to get the maximum life on a charge. But this could damage the longevity of the battery, Apple said, so what are users of the new iPad meant to do?

I'd like to see Apple's ORIGINAL remark and not a third hand, edited version of a remark reported by another journalist, but I can't seem to find it anywhere.

If anyone at Apple was actually dumb enough to let it be understood that battery damage could occur if the iPad was not unplugged when the meter showed 100%, they have probably since been escorted out the front door with their personal belongings and advised to leave town.

This post has been edited by 42n81: 26 March 2012 - 06:33 PM

[no]

I think the author obviously stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

[bensthebest]

What kind of journalist makes these claims without proof? "But this could damage the longevity of the battery, Apple said"..where and when did they say this? Then again later, "Apple reportedly said"...where and when sir?