To me, "my server is now..." implies there was some server, it used to do server things, but now it has been repurposed to do something else.

When I read the title, I literally thought "wow, I've seen a lot of people make servers out of old unused phones, but this is the first time I've heard someone make a phone out of an old unused server!"

> By saying "my server is now ..." implies a change

Except the original title is "my server is a phone now", not "my server is now...".

That's surprising to me. It's been a standard feature on laptops for 20 years.

Edit: Or I should say, it was 20 years ago. Maybe modern stuff is worse, but my M2 MacBook Air and Framework 13 Intel Core both power on without a battery.

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This is true but lithium-ion batteries degrade even while not being charged or discharged, and this is worse at the extremes of the state of charge (including fully charged), and at higher temperature (and often a plugged in device is on constantly and therefore spends more time at a high temperature than it normally would), so it's still not great for the battery. A lot of devices have a mode where the batter is kept at a lower state of charge if it's been plugged in for a while to try to reduce this.

Some phones bypass the battery when plugged in, but not all do. I know it's advertised as a feature of some gaming phones because graphics-intensive gaming is one use case where you'd want to use the phone heavily while plugged in.

> It will probably destroy this battery very quickly.

'Very quickly' seems to be measured in decades from what I see

Most people I know have their laptop docked, either near-permanently at home or taking it between home and a desk with dock (so it's nearly always plugged in when in use)

The 'servers' I've had were all old laptops - yes, with battery (don't have to buy a separate UPS if one is already included). I've now also had two non-server laptops that were plugged into power pretty much all the time. I treated my first laptop perfectly: taking out the battery anytime I'd be in a classroom for several hours and it was already full enough (you know, back when sliding out your battery was possible in the first place), but I'm not noticing any faster degradation on the systems I treat poorly. I'll activate the 80% cap function where it exists (that is, in the latest phones and my work laptop's UEFI config panel), but the evidence of it being helpful has yet to materialize

I have read that studies show that charging to 100% causes degradation and I trust those more than random people's anecdotes (and I'm a random person), but I'm starting to wonder if I've maybe just misunderstood the study results. Maybe it's like how smoking increases your chance for some cancers but you might also be fine in the end. I see people with plenty of much younger and better-treated batteries that can't sustain literally 30 seconds of use whereas mine are reasonably close to the new state (some haven't had many charge cycles, just sat at a stressy high voltage all the time, which was indeed supposed to destroy them), and I don't know how to explain that otherwise

Couldn't you just have it charging on a time-regulated supply e.g. smart plug?

You could throw the phone in an ammo canister, if the wifi AP is close enough. When I was building hobby quadcopters, which requires several ~half-pound batteries that are a chemistry optimized for maximum power density, a lot of guys recommended steel ammo cans for battery storage.

> but it's a lot less annoying to just accept a small risk of a house fire.

Agree! But do get one or two of those "small automatic fire extinguisher" or whatever they are, that you can attach on stuff, for electrical panels and what not, and put right next to it together with a traditional fire alarm, and you're good to go :)

How many phones have you tested this with?