Apple has been working on new ways to let users know more about the battery life of their devices, and it looks like the company plans to add even more related features to iOS. The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple this week a patent for a new system that can alert and warn users when the iPhone battery is expected to run out.
As noted by Apple Insiderthe patent is described as a “smart advice to charge notice.” Instead of maintaining the internal battery life as some iOS features already do, this new system will help users to know how long the battery will last during the day, based on their recent usage.
On current devices, the user only gets a low battery alert when it reaches 20%, but the patent shows a way to make these notifications smarter and more personal. Although it works well in most scenarios, Apple gives an example where the user forgets to charge the phone overnight and only gets the low battery warning before leaving for work.
An indication ‘low for batteries’ based on a fixed threshold of residual charge is often not received in time for the user to take corrective action. For example, if a user charges her smartphone at night, but on one occasion forgets to do so, the user does not give the time to charge her phone before work, just before going to work the next day. .
If you’re a Mac user, you’ve probably noticed that macOS shows users the estimated battery life – but this patent describes a more complex system than that. For example, it will identify the behavior of the user on different days of the week to adjust the battery alerts for each day. The system will also work based on the user’s location, but Apple confirms that the data will be processed locally due to privacy issues.
Given the current state of charge of a computer system for an energy storage device, a notification can be sent to the user if there is a high probability that the user is unlikely to make it to the next high time with high probability. […] However, if an analysis of the current and stored charging information indicates that the user will not succeed after the next charging time with a high probability without running out of energy, the computer may give an advice to notify at 22:00 even if the current state of charge is greater than the fixed threshold of 10% remaining energy.
Although patents not necessarily filed by Apple are not necessarily used, the company recently added a new battery recalibration tool for iPhone 11 users with the iOS 14.5 beta. In addition, iOS also shows the maximum capacity of the device’s internal battery, so it’s no surprise if Apple introduces a feature like this described in the patent with iOS 15.
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