All right, Jim.
We actually received a question from the audience,
and I've heard this before,
but someone specifically asked us to address this comment.
So I'm very happy to do that, to inform people
that watch these videos about some common questions.
So the question that was asked is
does wireless charging hurt your battery.
And I think we know that the answer is no, not really,
but it's a little bit more complicated
than just saying that.
So let's get a little bit into the nuance.
There's two major elements
that do harm or degrade your battery.
The first and foremost is heat.
So let's talk about heat.
And then the second one is gonna be
the depth of discharging that you're doing
and how you're cycling your battery.
So let's just talk about those separately.
Let's first start with heat.
So what causes heat in any battery charging system,
and how is wireless charging
different than wired charging when it comes to heat?
Well, heat is really anything that is a waste of energy.
As my old professor used to say in my university days,
heat is the electrical engineer's wastepaper basket.
And, as a result, any sort of inefficiencies
that you have through, in this case, the charging process,
is going to generate heat.
Heat tends to be bad for batteries
and will ultimately degrade life.
So although some of it is unavoidable,
you don't want it to be excessive.
So does wireless charging generate significantly
more heat than wired charging?
It can generate some more heat.
I wouldn't say it's overly significant,
but I think what's more interesting right now
is the battery charging technology and the algorithms
to do it are becoming much more smarter.
Almost all products that do wireless charging
have temperature sensors and will typically
do throttling back when they see the temperature
going up to help prevent degradation of the battery.
So it's kind of built into the system.
Yeah, and beyond just the temperature sensing,
these systems that we and others are developing
are being smart about the use case.
So it might slow down charging at 3:00 AM in the morning
when, based on some machine learning tools,
you know that the person's not gonna wake up
and be using their phone right now.
It's okay to charge it at a slower rate
versus if you're in an airport where you want it to be
as fast rate charging as possible.
So there's some intelligence being built
into these platforms, not only related to thermal buildup
to prevent that damage to the batteries,
but also related to user experience and being smarter
about when to go fast and when to go medium,
and when to go slow.
Yeah, you know, I think it's something that users
need to learn a little bit more on that
because I think there's an indication sometime
that you'll wake up at four in the morning
and you see your phone is charged at 60% or something
and you go, my wireless charger isn't working,
when, in fact, it's because the machine learning algorithm
knows you don't wake up until seven o'clock.
And so it's been throttling during that time back,
and it's going to go ahead and turn things back on
and top you off at 6:00 AM.
So taking it back to the main question.
Is wireless charging harmful for batteries?
It's really not, but it is a question
of how you're managing it and what we're developing,
and what we're seeing others in the industry doing
is they're actually using wireless charging
as a much smarter, more intelligent way
of charging devices to even mitigate the heat
even more so than you see in typical wired systems.
Let's talk about the second thing though.
So depth of discharge, what does that even mean?
And why does that impact battery health?
Well, you think of your smartphone
and you look at your little battery meter,
and when you're down to, you know, 40, 30, 20%,
the deeper you discharge, typically the more ultimately
reduction you get in the battery cycles
that the battery can have over its lifetime.
Okay, so deeper you discharge.
So if you go from 100% to 0%
every day of the week, you're saying that's not good.
It's better to go from 100% to 30%.
Yeah.
Okay.
So try to keep it around 50% or so,
and maintain a level of charge where you don't go
all the way down and then have to come all the way back up.
It tends to be safer for the ultimate battery life
in terms of the amount of total cycles
you're gonna get over the life of the battery
and extend the life of the battery longer.
Gotcha, and so that's really independent
of how you're charging it.
That's just if you're using a battery,
you don't want to do that deep discharge
and full charge all the time.
You'd like to keep it more topped off.
So the interesting thing about wired versus wireless
is that what user experience studies are showing
is that people are more likely to do trickle charging
with wireless chargers in their home, on their nightstand,
on their end tables, at their office, in their car.
So, whereas, if you were driving your car
and you had to plug in your phone,
and it was already at 90%,
there's less likelihood that you'll actually take the time
to plug in your phone
than set it on the charger that's in the car.
And so people are incentivized to keep their devices
topped up more often when they have a place
to put their phone at home,
a place to put their phone in the office,
a place to put their phone when they're driving.
So I'd love to take technological credit
for the battery health benefit
that wireless charging brings.
But it's really less about the technology
and it's more about the user experience that's enabled
by having these different charging stations
located in the prominent places of your life.
And the fact that people like me,
that I use wireless charging, you know,
mostly in the office and at home.
I can't remember the last time,
other than when I'm traveling,
where I have any battery anxiety,
because every time I leave the office
I'm at 100%.
Every time I leave home I'm at 100%,
and I probably don't dip below 70% on any given day
because I'm always between these different places.
To me, that's one of the biggest sea changes
that I've seen in my smartphone usage
over the last probably five to seven years or so
is I don't have that battery anxiety anymore.
I'm used to stopping at a place, putting my phones down,
and it's gonna start charging.
And so, yeah, I'm gonna pick up 10 or 20%.
And by doing that, it's like, yeah,
the battery anxiety has gone.
Agree, agree.
So thank you for asking that question.
And there's a lot of other questions
that people have about wireless charging.
We're happy to address those
if it's helpful to anyone out there.
So please put in the comments below
or send an email through our website,
asking us any questions you have about wireless charging,
and we'd be happy to address those
and give you kind of that scientific base
behind it so that you understand the physics
and the real electrical engineering elements
of what's going on in these systems.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
