What is the electrical reason some devices like mobile phones require a working battery even during times when they are plugged into a wall?

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If the battery fails on a mobile phone, why is it unusable even when it’s plugged in to the wall?
There are many older electrical gadgets that can work with either batteries or being plugged in. Take an old fashioned alarm clock or stereo. If there’s no batteries in it, and you plug it into the wall it will work. If you unplug it, it won’t work unless there are good batteries in it that are charged. So why can’t a mobile phone work when plugged into the wall when the battery has failed?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Some can but more and more newer devices can’t because of a few reasons (all of them being true in some devices).

Companies are starting to demand a reply back from the battery to even complete the basic boot cycle. If it doesn’t get an OK back from the battery it won’t boot at all.

To piggyback off that, more and more logic is being added inside of the battery itself. All lipo batteries are just that but now a lot have logic inside (on boards) that are there to not just manage charging but answer back to a bootrom or such. Some kinda take over for the old CMOS batteries that allow hold data like time and such. In this they incorporate that into the general operation of the device instead of just being a mindless battery. So the battery cells can be good but if that internal logic board is bad the whole battery is bad. This happens a lot in Nintendo Switch batteries where, in my anecdotal experience in repair, about half the batteries themselves are fine but the boards died.

The general answer, IMO, is planned obsolescence. At the end of the day I think it’s a bonus to add more failure points for them to fix at a fee or have you buy a another of their devices (APPLE).

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