by PaulHoule | 2025-10-17 14:22:40+00:00
I'm going to argue that looking at it the way you're looking at it is death and highly destructive and will at best harm your mental health and make you depressed. I've tried it. Building a good system to chronicle a "fucked up situation" leads to tears.

I keep the devices I care about charged because I care about those devices. I plug in my phone every chance I get. I've shown up at sports games with dead batteries in my camera so now I have a huge number of spare batteries, chargers, and procedures to deal with the foibles of my devices (somehow the power switch on Sony cameras seems to frequently get rotated when I put them in my bag.)

If your wife doesn't care she's always going to be having discharged devices come to her hands, so your answers are:

(1) Get her to use devices that are plugged in. When my wife wants to use the internet she uses a Mac Mini, which never gets a dead battery.

(2) Some devices are bad about charging. In particular, discard any Android devices as e-Waste. Frequently you charge up an Android and turn it "off" and come back a month later and it is discharged. Was it spying on you the whole time? Plug it into the charger for 12 hours and you'll find it is still completely discharged, probably if you disconnect it from the charger and charge it for another 12 hours it will be charged. You don't want to be that guy.

Apple now has a feature which scares me terribly, which is something that will only charge your device when carbon free energy is available. I believe in climate action as anybody but I've been so traumatized by Sony devices (cameras, portable game consoles) that only charge when they feel like it as well as those Androids that a major reason I like iDevices is I plug them in and they charge and I don't want to go back to the Google/Sony experience.

My PS4 Pro has a lot of USB ports and I like the idea of one big device with a lot of ports that you can just plug everything into but unfortunately it turns off the USB ports to save power and even if you set the toggle in the settings to not do that it still isn't reliable, which is sad. Devices that charge only when they want to and chargers that only charge when they want to charge make me pull my hair out.

And don't get me started about the $5 USB-C cables that don't really work (get the frickin' $20 cables and throw a cable in the trash the minute it shows the slightest sign of instability such as the device doesn't charge if the cable orientation is wrong) and all the bad chargers.

(3) Devices with special charging docks are golden. If you get a pair of Bluetooth headphones that plug into USB-C you will probably put them down and then pick them up and find they're dead. If you have a set of headphones that have a charging cradle you will put them on the cradle and never have dead headphones.

There's a particular bit about female nesting psychology that "special places" have a psychological meaning. A lot of middle aged women were blindsided by flat panel TVs because they got a lot of pleasure about getting some piece of furniture to house their old CRTs and when you could just stand up your TV on the side of the room or mount it on the wall they felt really empty. You can put this psychology to work by making some special space for storing and charging the devices she uses.

(4) In the end she has to take responsibility, decide she cares about some particular set of devices, and keeps them charged herself. What you can do is minimize the number of devices and make sure they all have good charging and storage situations.