Top Tricks For All-Day Life On Your Devices

Trusted techniques to ensure your Mac, iPhone, or iPad gets you through the day.

We could all do with a few extra hours of juice from our portable products sometimes. Maybe you’re on a long journey with no charger, or maybe your device is old and the battery life isn’t what it used to be. Either way, the result is the same: you need a bit of magic to keep it going.

Well, magic is exactly what we’ve got here. Using the tips and tricks on these pages, you’ll know which power-hungry features you can do without on your iOS devices or Mac to eke out every drop of electricity. And we’ll show you how to check up on your battery, and stay topped up with power on the go!

How modern batteries work

The science behind the power supply

Though the specifics of battery technology have changed over the years, the Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries used by gadget makers first appeared in the ’90s, and the principle remains the same now.

A Li-ion battery consists of two electrodes at each end (the anode and the cathode) suspended in a solution that contains lithium ions (hence the name). The ions are positively charged, and are attracted to the cathode, so they move over to it, making it positively charged in turn. This then attracts negatively charged electrons from the anode over to the cathode — and this is how it provides electricity. Electrical flow is basically the movement of electrons through a conductive system — like water running through a pipe. The trick is to make sure that the only path the electrons can take to get to the cathode is via the processor, screen, and so on, providing these elements with the power they need along the way. When you charge a battery, you attract the lithium ions to the anode, reversing the process, ready to go again.