Wired vs. Wireless Charging

[alarmguy]

Wireless charging is unanimously agreed to be much worse for the battery than wired charging. It's interesting that your initial research gave you a different opinion. However, it's agreed that it doesn't make much of a significant impact to the typical device life cycle of ~3 years.

Wireless charging is much less efficient, and waste heat goes directly into the device and battery.

That being said, the real enemy of your battery is charge wattage, heat and cycles. A 5W wireless charger will do less damage to your phone battery than a 30W wired fast charger. Using your phone for rigorous use cases like gaming or video editing also put excess heat into the phone battery. There's lots of people who use their phone in a phone mount in their car, with the screen on, charging, in summer heat. They don't realize that's a nightmare scenario for their phone's battery. It's difficult to compare your phone battery to your aunt's phone battery because we don't have all of these metrics for an apples to apples comparison. Pun intended.

^^^ Wow, I like this post.
1. Agree, slow charge is better then fast, heat IS the enemy of batteries. I use a 5 watt charger on my Christmas 2019 iPhone XR which was standard at the time.
However Using this theory I intentionally bought my wife a 5 watt charger instead of Apples 25 watt when I bought her an iPhone 11 Christmas 2020 even though its meant to use a 25 watt.
2. Agree again on wireless charging, though I certainly can see use for it with some people, for us, we dont need it and question how it may affect battery life. We just plug in our phones at the end of the day, I unplug mine the next morning, my wife unplugs hers before its fully charged and normally stops it around low 90s %.

So my Christmas 2019 iPhone XR battery that gets a fair amount of use is at 92%

My wife, who has the Christmas 2020 iPhone 11 will actually only charge her battery on purpose to around 90% charged because she read its best not to fully charge it. Battery life is still at 100% over 8 months later. Her phone doesnt get used as much as mine during the day.
We both use 5 watt chargers.

3. I agree on the life cycle whether it will matter or not but some people do keep their phones a long time, my wife one of them as long as it still works and looks perfect that is. She will keep a phone up to around 4 years.

 

[Astro14]

I appreciate all the comments. Bought an IPhone 12 Pro a week ago.

Had planned to use my Anker nano 20w Charger (brilliant little cube the size of the Apple 5w) but I think I’ll just plug the phone into the old 5w cube…