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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Amazon’s layoffs, Google’s $391 million settlement, Zoom calls in Teslas, Apple AR/VR news, and more.
Georgia in Atlanta, Georgia asked: “Under what circumstances should I experience the battery charge in my old iPhone 6 decrease suddenly or dramatically overnight? I’m not emotionally attached to the phone. I rarely use it to talk to people. I don’t want to talk on it, play games on it, watch TV on it, send or read, email or texts. I do use it as a camera. I have it for emergency use. My daily use is just to generate a six digit code frequently to get on my employer’s VPN. I try to charge it before I go to bed, then turn it off. Sometimes it’s only at 60% the next morning. Recently, when it was fully charged, I made one brief phone call to locate someone at the airport and it dropped to 1%. What is happening?”
Georgia, it just sounds like your battery is done for.
When your phone is turned off its doing next to nothing, there should be fairly little drain, and obviously a single regular phone call should not use up all of your charge.
The iPhone 6 came out in 2014, to Apples great credit its still getting security updates so it should be safe to still use to access your VPN and for anything else you need, but 8 years is a very long time and an 8 year old battery is very likely to have lost much of its ability to retain a charge.
Batteries are chemical devices, not electronic devices, and the chemicals do wear out. If youre still on your original battery, its not surprising that its not holding a charge anymore.
The good news is that if you dont want to replace your phone, you can find batteries for them online and in the kind of stores that replace cracked screens. Having said that, depending on the price youre quoted, you may want to consider moving up to another older iPhone thats a little less old.
It probably wont cost you much more than having the battery replaced and you may be buying a couple more years of security updates. An 8 year old phone wont be supported for much longer.
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