This is why your iPhone battery will also die if you don’t use it

Do you also find it so strange? You switch off your iPhone, iPad or Mac for a while, and yet the battery is empty a little later. Researchers have now found the remarkable cause of this! And the best part: the part in question can be replaced.

iPhone battery drains on its own

Batteries are probably the most sensitive part of our technical devices. When it’s cold, your iPhone battery drains faster during use. This is due to the fact that the parts of the battery have more resistance and therefore require more energy for the same. After many charging cycles, your battery won’t last as long. This is due to chemical processes that cause wear and tear on all battery parts.

And finally, there are internal short circuits that cause a battery to discharge itself, even if you don’t use it at all. Scientists from Canada’s Dalhousie University now claim to have found the remarkable cause of the latter.

Also read: iPhone tips for your battery: this way your battery lasts longer

This is why batteries discharge even when you are not using them

The research revolved around so-called ‘redox shuttles’. These are molecules that seem to occur randomly and cause an unintentional discharge. (For the techies: these molecules take an electron with them at the cathode and return it at the anode. So current flows, and battery charge is lost.)

During the investigation, it was noticed that the color of the battery’s interior (the electrolyte) changed based on temperature. At 25 degrees it remained transparent, at 55 degrees light brown and at 70 degrees blood red. According to the researchers, this indicated substances that are released by the battery and that are probably responsible for the discharge. The higher temperature showed this process accelerated.

What causes iPhone battery drain?

So a source for the red color had to be found. The battery itself could not cause this, so the other parts were examined. And as it turned out: it is due to the adhesive tape that holds the cells of the battery together. It contains PET, which you know from just about all plastic bottles. The PET gradually releases (red) molecules that discharge the battery without requiring any energy from the battery. And so the mystery surrounding the self-discharging batteries was solved.

The significance for future iPhones and MacBooks

Results of studies on batteries appear almost daily, but they usually only have an effect on the batteries that appear in ten years or even longer. In this case, however, it is different. The PET-based adhesive tape could easily be replaced by another material. And then one of the three problems of the current lithium batteries has been tackled.

At Apple, the iPhone battery department is probably busy right now to improve batteries for future products and not let them run out so quickly. That may be just too early for the iPhone 15. But for the iPhone 16, we already expect batteries that will no longer empty automatically when you switch off the phone.

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