So it's -23 outside right now, actual temperature, not wind chill, and I just watched my phone shut itself off after about four minutes on the porch taking a picture of the thermometer. Wind chill here in Minneapolis was somewhere around -45 last night and I've seen people saying parts of Wisconsin hit the -50s. My in-laws in International Falls apparently hit -46 without the wind factored in at all, which is a number that doesn't really mean anything to your brain until you try to breathe outside for ten seconds and it hurts.
I work from home most Wednesdays anyway so this wasn't a huge disruption for me personally, but it's been a weirdly tech-heavy few days because of it. Everything with a battery in this house has had an opinion about the cold.
The phone thing first, because it's the most annoying. My iPhone XS dropped from 71% to a dead battery icon in under ten minutes outside yesterday, and then powered back on fine the second I got it warm again, sitting at like 60-something percent like nothing happened. Lithium-ion batteries just do this in extreme cold, it's not a defect, its chemistry, but nobody writes about it in phone reviews. Every review site benchmarks battery life in a nice climate-controlled office and calls it a day. I'd love to see one actual cold-weather battery test from DXOMark or Tom's Guide sometime instead of the same indoor screen-on-time chart every single phone gets.
My 2015 MacBook Pro handled it better, mostly because it never left the house, but I did have it near a drafty window for an hour yesterday and watched the battery percentage visibly drop faster than usual just sitting there idle. Nothing dramatic, just a little reminder that these things are basically chemistry experiments we carry around and expect to behave like light switches.
The bigger story going around the last two days has been Tesla owners in Chicago posting videos of Superchargers not working right in the cold, charge ports freezing shut, cars needing a good soak at room temperature before they'd charge at a normal rate. I don't own one so I can't speak to it firsthand, but it's been all over Twitter and it's a good reminder that "it's a computer on wheels" cuts both ways. Computers hate cold. So do their charging cables, apparently, and so do the little sensors that check whether the port door is safe to open.
Our Nest thermostat has been fine, for what it's worth, though it's been running basically nonstop for three days and I don't want to look at the gas bill this month.
Small aside, not really cold-related but tech-related and I feel like I have to mention it: I turned off Group FaceTime on both my phone and my wife's phone yesterday after reading about that bug where a group call could let the caller hear your mic before you even answer. The part that actually annoyed me wasn't the bug itself, bugs happen. It was reading that the teenager who found it, and his mom, apparently tried for like a week and a half to get Apple's attention through the normal channels before anyone official responded. That's the part that should change, more than any single line of code. A big company with an actual security disclosure program should not be harder to reach than customer service for a pizza chain.
Anyway. Back to the cold. I've got hand warmers from the hardware store, the cheap $1.50 kind you shake and stick in your gloves, and I bought like a dozen of them Monday because the whole aisle was nearly empty by Tuesday morning. School's been cancelled here two days running, which as a kid growing up in Minnesota felt like it basically never happened, and now apparently happens if the wind chill dips low enough to cause frostbite on exposed skin in under five minutes. That's the actual threshold they use. Five minutes.
I don't have a neat wrap-up for this one. It's just been a strange, quiet, extremely cold week where the most interesting tech news in my own house was watching a battery percentage number lie to me and then apologize for it once it warmed back up.