> What's the typical circuit found in a laptop or phone? They all have to deal with this stuff internally.

Most phones and laptops operate at the "micro-cycling" mode that the author describes, it's part of why portable devices regularly end up in the news for swelling batteries. There's no brand that didn't have complaints by people.

Additionally, the power quality of shoddy chargers [1] makes life even worse for circuit designers - voltage ripple or, worse, spikes that rise fast enough to hit the battery... the list of problems is quite endless.

[1] https://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-a...

I always see recommendations on /r/HomeServer for using a laptop and I always shudder a bit. I had a battery swell on a Macbook. The thought of leaving a laptop running unattended for months at a time, possibly stuffed in a garage or closet where you won't be watching it for awhile just sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

The other thing is that if you have a laptop worth using as a server then you have a laptop probably worth selling. Use that money to buy a proper UPS and cheap server and you may even have money left over. You also can't plug routers or cable modems into a laptop, so it's rather pointless anyway.

I have a UPS because I'm hit with short brownouts every summer (yay, California). But if my grid was better and I only saw outages every few years then screw it. Let the server crash. This isn't the 1980s. Nearly all filesystems and databases (ACID, anyway) recover just fine today. Use ZFS if you're truly paranoid.

That depends on the amount of stuff you're running, and how much you care about the UPS working. If the answer to both is "very little" or "not much", I'd take the Pi setup any day.

It also depends on how often you expect to lose power. If that answer is “somewhat often” or worse, then even a minor annoyance can be worth avoiding. There’s a reason laptops used as a server were known as “California servers”. (aka a server with a built in UPS)