Not just laptops, but all of your wireless devices (and that even includes your smartphone) use batteries, as well as others such as your car or motorcycle battery. If you’ve ever been interested in specs, you’ll have noticed that battery capacity is usually measured in mAh, a term that most understand as “more is better”, but do you really know what it means and what it implies? In this article we tell you.
The term mAh stands for milliampere per hourbut if you don’t have a great idea about electronics, that’s something that won’t tell you much other than what’s already been mentioned, that a larger quantity implies the battery has a greater large capacity and that, therefore, the autonomy should be greater (although later we will see that this is not always the case because it depends on other factors, the capacity of the battery is not the same as autonomy).
What does battery mAh measure?
As we just mentioned, mAh stands for milliampere hour, a unit that measures electrical charge. To better understand, “milli-” is a prefix that means thousandth, so a milliampere is equal to 0.001 amperes. The suffix “-hour” means that this current is multiplied by one hour, the unit of time that we all know. Since current equals electrical charge divided by time, the amount of electrical charge is obtained by multiplying mA by one hour.
In batteries, mAh is a measure of battery capacity and uses the three concepts (electrical charge, current, and time) to estimate how much electricity a battery can hold. To give an example, if a battery has a capacity of 1000 mAh, this means that when fully charged it is capable of maintaining an electrical flow of 1000 mA for one hour, although it is important to note that that doesn’t mean it’s capable of sustaining those 1000 milliamps constantly (if that were true, all batteries would last exactly one hour). As we said, it is a estimate.
To put this into perspective, imagine you have a standard alkaline battery (regardless of capacity). That same battery would last much longer if you used it in a wall clock than if you installed it in a PC mouse, despite having the same capacity. For this reason, we have previously indicated that having a greater capacity is not always synonymous with offering greater autonomy, since then it depends on the consumption of the device to which we connect the battery.
Another concept that needs to be considered for this reason is that there is a difference between capacity and the maximum electric current it is capable of delivering (this is called discharge capacity). For example, imagine a cell or battery with a capacity of 5000 mAh, but whose discharge capacity is 15 Amps. From what we explained to you previously, if you constantly discharge those 15A (15,000 mA), the battery would last well under an hour.
Does more capacity mean more autonomy?
With what we’ve covered so far, you should already know the answer to the “million dollar question”, but let’s make it even clearer and explain why below…a battery that has more than mAh battery will provide longer battery life? The answer is that it depends.
Let’s explain it with the simplest possible example: imagine the PS5 controller, whose original battery has a capacity of 1,560mAh, and SONY specifies that its autonomy is 8 hours if all the functions of the remote control are used. Regardless of the discharge capacity, and if we take into account that the consumption of the controller would always be the same, if we installed a battery of, for example, 2000 mAh in the PS5 controller, the autonomy would be prolonged. In other words: putting a larger capacity battery in the same device will increase battery life.
However, if we used this same 1560 mAh battery whose autonomy in the PS5 controller is 8 hours in another device with higher consumption, the autonomy would be less. For example, imagine that you install this battery in a drone, a device that has a fairly high consumption: does this mean that you will be able to fly the drone for 8 hours? Obviously not, since its consumption is higher, these 1,560 mAh will run out much faster.
