Battery Health Capacity Dropped

Apple has aggressively followed the trend of using higher max charge voltages with Lithium Cobalt (LCO) battery chemistry to increase capacity per weight of its iPhone batteries. Recent models charge to 4.45V compared to 4.2V for standard LCO batteries. There are a couple of technological advances which have made this possible: Cathode coating, cathode doping and electrolyte additives (Protection Features).

Still these batteries will be at high stress when fully charged - and Apple admits as much with its optimized charging feature. The best way to keep your battery healthy for extended periods of time is to avoid charging to high voltages. The above Protection Features will then allow a greatly enhanced cycle age of the battery. Say if you operate your iPhone between 20-40% you might easily get 4000 equivalent full cycles out of it before hitting 80% battery health.

The one thing many people believe though it is totally untrue is that a cycle is a cycle and everything just depends on how much you use the phone.

On the contrary how much a phone degrades depends a great deal on a number of factors.

What’s bad is:

• High temperature
• High state of charge
• Cycling over a large state of charge interval
• fast charging

The opposite is good:

• keep the phone from getting hot
• charge to as low a level as possible
• keep the difference between max and min charge small.
• charge slowly.

These factors make a huge difference. If you cycle your phone between 0% and 60% for example you can expect several times the life expectancy of a battery cycled between 0% and 100%.

Note that the literature is a bit ambiguous rg the effect of very low state of charge. Almost all studies find the lower the average state of charge the better. But there are some mostly theoretical ones which recommend not to run at very low state of charge with LCO cathodes either.

i keep my phone at 40% and try not to run it down below 15% due to this ambiguity. This works for normal days since I’m either in the office or at home. I’d go to 75% if the situation requires it (day vacation).

As others have mentioned...

• Battery health is an estimate and not an exact science. It can be less then 80% and still function fine as in reality it may be more then 80%.
• Apple says their batteries will have 80% health in 500 charge cycles. If you use one charge cycle every day you will get to 80% in approximately 18 months. All batteries deteriorate no matter how much you look after your phone.
• If the time does come to replace the battery replacement batteries even through the Apple website are fairly cheap (£49 or £69 depending on phone type), especially when you compare it to how much you paid for the phone.

People need to stop panicking about the battery health percentage on their phone and enjoy their purchase.

It's pretty normal for battery capacity to change a lot initially as each battery is a bit different and the phone needs to learn the real capacity of it in the first discharge cycles. My 12 pro max came with 105% and my MacBook mini m1 with 97% when new. As long as it then doesn't keep going down quickly it's ok.

Okay enough is enough. I’m gonna leave this comment here and if anybody who enters this thread doesn’t read this, or read this and still choose to think otherwise, that’s your problem.

This is not an Apple issue. Battery capacity dropping is a phenomenon that is not only common, but extremely normal. Unfortunately, this is a fact about Lithium Ion battery that many people still cannot grasp.

The moment you 1st switch on your smartphone, regardless whether it’s Apple or ANY other brand, and you plug in to charge, your battery will be in a constant state of decay.

Apple has reported that you should expect approximately 80% of health left after 500 full charges. That is also estimated to be around 24 months of usage.

1 charge = 0% - 100%

According to Elementary math, that gives a very rough estimation of 1 - 1.5% of battery health decay per month. The rest of it, do your math.

If you are a very heavy user with heavy screen on time - obviously expect that your battery capacity will decay faster than those who have lesser screen on time.

Other factors that contributes to faster battery decay (proven fact, not gonna cite sources, you can Google it) are wireless charging and fast charging.

Fast charging is currently the best option out there, albeit it kills your battery faster than 5w charger. I rather wait 1 hr 50 mins to hit 100% on my 11 pro max, than 4 hrs on a 5w charger EVERY SINGLE DAY. Ain’t nobody got time for 4 hours.

If you have the money to buy an iPhone in this time and age, you surely have enough money to get the battery replaced after 1.5 years of decay.

If you have the extra 2 hours per day to wait for your iPhone to charge in this time and age, you surely have earned enough money from that daily 2 hours to get the battery replaced after 1.5 years of decay.

Its clearly the way latest software is calculating battery life expectancy. It doesnt mean your battery is lagging in any way. Have you noticed any decrease in battery life? If not, relax then its just the numbers. The battery will still be fine when you go to sell it whatever. Its only the numbers!

nafas49 wrote:

Dear I am Facing this issue same like you same to same.so dont worry i am with you if you got any solution then please inform me if i got i will inform you Thanks Kind Regards

There is no solution because there is no problem. Unless you're having a problem with your phone, Battery Health doesn't give you any useful information. Check it about a month before your warranty runs out. If it's below 80%, have it replaced under warranty.

Profaniter13 wrote:

Okay, this could probably means nothing to everybody but I recently discovered this. I purchased the iPhone 11 Pro Max on the preorder day and got it on the launch day. So the battery health was at 100% but as of today, it dropped ONE percent. I tried to figure out why and what did I do wrong. so what I did was when I fully charged the phone, I unplug. I let it drains down to 20%. Prior to doing to maximize the performance, I had no clues how to get the best out of my battery life. The Apple tech support explained that I should have let the battery get down to 20% with however usage I use: normal or heavy. Once it gets to 20%, I recharge it. I even checked the optimized battery charging to ON. So, I have no idea why it dropped 1 percent to 99 now... I mean, this is a two months old iPhone and I never had this issue with iPhone 7 Plus, I remembered the battery health was at 98% after ONE year. I mean, already in two months, it dropped 1 percent.

Can anyone help me to understand what and why this happened?

What you're seeing is absolutely normal. Your battery capacity will continue to decline until the battery is no longer fit for use. That's the way it works.

There is no reason to be checking battery health unless your phone isn't working properly or you're nearing the end of your warranty. If your battery drops below 80% while under warranty, Apple will replace it.

See this article for additional advice:

When to charge your iPhone or iPad - Apple Community

Well the solution is quite simple. The new apple charger (included with your iPhone 11) is way more powerful than the previous ones. In order to preserve your battery health, you can simply use the previous 5W charger that was shipped with previous iPhones. Charging will be slower, but it will preserve your battery. Avoiding wireless charging is also the key. Indeed, wireless charging makes the phone very hot, and can lower the battery capacity in the long term. When you're at home, use your iPhone plugged in and charge it as soon as you can. Lithium-ion batteries have a limited amount of cycles they can stand. With all the prerequisites I mentioned, my October 2019 iPhone 11 Pro Max still has 100% battery capacity showing in the settings. Finally, you have to know that this battery capacity number is just an estimation. It does not reflect the true capacity of your battery but only measures the voltage that the phone can get out of it. Numbers can vary without being the sign of ageing batteries.

Every iphone batty have different actual capacity than rated capacity, most of the time battery have actual capacity 4- 5 % extract and in some cases have actual capacity and rated capacity equal , and approximately 50 recharge cycle decrease 1 % health capacity. This not any , this is how every lithium ion battery works. Nothing to worry about this and keep using more and more battery so you will reach to 80% heath early and apple will replace your phone battery with new 100% health capacity battery, may be next you will get 2-3% more battery capacity.

I reported the same issue on here in February. Battery health suddenly started to drop. After some wise words from fellow members i simply ignored it. Used my device as per usual and the only change i made was use 5w charger only. Since February battery health stayed stable at 97% even though coconut and imazing were showing higher values. In between ive been running 13.4 and 13.5 betas. Today i decided to dfu restore my device as system storage under others was showing very high value and also i wanted to save blobs before i jailbroke my device. So i erased my phone and dfu restore my device to 13.5 and then restored from iCloud back up. Checked my battery health and it up back to 100% and is in line with coconut readings. Only explanation i can give is it could be an iOS glitch. Im sure members on here are more knowledgeable than me regarding batteries.

Use a 5 watt power adapter if you aren’t already. The 18 watt fast charger should not be used on a consistent basis and avoid wireless charging. My 11 pro max is still at 100% after 7 months of use.

So Apple has addressed battery concerns in iOS 14.5 upgrade. Claims 14.5 will recalibrate the battery in iPhone 11 variants.

Call Apple and ask them to do a remote diagnostic on your phone. That will tell them if the battery has a problem or not. They will look a your battery charge cycle count and tell you if it is normal or not.

mmx166 wrote:

Today apple service call to me, he run diagnostic test, he say yes you have 99% its very ok, why? beacouse this is first run of iPhone and he can dropes 1-2% battery!

He says when battery droped to 95% you can drive to service..

I have 11 cycle.. ;(

Apple won't replace the battery until it drops below 80%.