I am doing research on best practices for my lithium batteries and lifepo4 powerstation. There’s some conflicting opinions and variation for cycle numbers.
Will leaving my things plugged in at 100% hurt it more than constantly unplugging at 80% and replugging at 20%?
That’s not true.
Lithium batteries have a longer useful life if not allowed to drop too low or charged too high. 20% and 80% are typical values. Ideally they would be at 50% SOC and that’s why most batteries in new devices will arrive charged to around 3.6-3.8v.
This creates a problem for device manufacturers because if they force the device to treat the battery well, users won’t get as long between charges. They will sometimes give you options (most laptops will have a setting to stop it charging beyond 60% or 80%, some phones will have a setting to stop it charging to full) but they’ll advertise the full battery runtime they can squeeze out while damaging the battery and that will be the default setting.
Convenience dictates that you may need to charge above, or discharge below, the recommended levels. Which would be much less of an issue if batteries were easily replaceable. But increasingly, they’re not.
tldr; manufacturers have zero incentive to make sure their devices treat the batteries well
as long as they survive the warranty period
iPhones figure out when you usually take your phone off the charger (e.g. based on your wake up alarm setting, but I think it also does some machine learning) and when you charge your phone it only charges it to 80%. Then, just before you are expected to take it off the charger in the morning it charges it to full. That way the battery spends less time above 80% charged.
My android pixel does the same.