Battery Health Capacity Dropped

Hello friends, i've posted a comment before in this thread and has been following all the new comments written here. Those users telling others to reset their iphone to restore that 1 or 2% battery health loss, please STOP.

Please let me elaborate more about Li-ion batteries. These batteries will decay/degrade over time. It is a scientific process that is inevitable and unavoidable. Your smartphone battery WILL degrade, it just depends on how fast or slow. An industrial grade battery tester that can accurately calculate the capacity of a li-ion batt is bigger than your iPhone itself, so yes, the accuracy for the battery measurement in our iPhone is very limited.

Your li-ion battery starts decaying the very moment you hit your 1st full charge cycle, albeit insignificant. So over the course of 1 or 2 month, it is NORMAL to lose 1 or 2%. For day to day typical consumers like most of the users here, there is NO WAY to reverse this decaying process as it is a scientifically normal process for li-ion battery. So no, your 'restore iPhone to get back to 100%' method will not work, because what's gone is gone.

Some info about wireless & fast charging below.

There are too many sources for me to cite, but these are the general ideas about li-ion batteries.

Higher temperature will cause li-ion batteries to degrade even faster, so yes wireless charging hurts the battery, albeit slowly and gently.

Charging with the new 18W charger is generally safe. 0 - 50% - super fast

50-80% - normal

80-95% - slow

95-100% - super slow

This adaptive charging helps prolong the life of your battery as it's not constantly pushing high wattage into your battery.

Obviously, the slower your charging, the better is it for your battery. But is it worth it to wait up to 4 hours (or possibly more) using the 5W charger to hit 100% for your iPhone 11 Pro Max, or a good 2 hours using the 18W charger, your call.

Another tip: the recommended power input for fast charging on iPhone is 18W. If you're gonna purchase a 3rd party charger, do not buy anything above 18W.

Anything below that like 5W, 10W, 12W etc chargers are fine. I've used a charger higher than 18W, and it's super fast. But it was what costed me 2% battery health. It's been a month since i switched back to the Apple 18W charging and there hasn't been any percentage drop.

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.

Phone batteries are mostly Li-ion, and they age over time - we have to establish this 1st so everyone will understand that these battery, regardless of how hard you try to preserve, will definitely age.

As 1 of the tech youtuber said, Apple claims that your battery will be left with roughly 80% capacity after roughly 500 charge cycle.

• Simply put it, Apple claims: 20% loss for 500 cycle.
• Assume we everyone of us charges about 50cycles in 60 days (2months).
• That's a rough 2% loss for 2 months of usage.

After reading some of the comments here, it seems like most people are facing 1% loss after 1 month. Including myself, 1% loss at 5 weeks of using iPhone 11 Pro max. I'm not a ultra geek tech person, but my numbers and assumptions are gathered from seemingly reliable sources, and it seems that such a minor drop is not an issue. Unless you're losing 4% for 4 weeks of usage, now that's terrible.

chathuranga129 wrote:

My 11 pro is two months old. My battery health is suddenly at 98%!

2% for 2 months? Man that is ********! Reading all these similar cases I can see there’s clearly something wrong with it. Why can’t you Apple? Admit it and do something about it quickly!

That's actually rather normal. I keep on repeating this, but if one assumes Apple's rating for 500 cycles to 80% is linear, that would result in a 1% loss of battery health every 25 complete charge-discharge cycles. Down to 98% is easy to achieve in 2 months.

iPhone Battery and Performance - Apple Support

A normal battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles when operating under normal conditions.

That being said, I seem to have an iPhone 7 battery that seemingly wants to live forever. At over 180 cycles it's still reporting 99% Battery Health. Even with "live" battery tools are reporting 98-99.1% battery capacity compared to new. I'm waiting for reality to set in, such as dropping to 94% overnight.

khaye26 wrote:

i have an iPhone 11, and it’s gonna be two months this coming January 6. It already dropped to 98% even though i’m taking good care of it. I refrain from overcharging and stuff like that, but still 98% within a month and a half?!

Apple doesn't make any guarantees, but the design specs that Apple touts are 80% and 500 cycles. After a month and a half? I could see that reasonably happening.

iPhone Battery and Performance - Apple Support

A normal battery is designed to retain up to 80% of its original capacity at 500 complete charge cycles when operating under normal conditions. The one-year warranty includes service coverage for a defective battery. If it is out of warranty, Apple offers battery service for a charge.

It's also subject to rounding errors and normal new capacity variations. Also - unless there's a glitch, it's impossible to overcharge an iPhone.

nessnaj wrote:

Mine is even worst. I had my Iphone 11 for only 24 days and the battery health is already at 99%. I don’t know if this is normal or I should go to the apple service center considering that some comments here are saying that apple will only replace iphones with 80% battery health. This is really stressing me out.

Yes, it's perfectly normal. Your battery starts losing capacity the moment it comes off the assembly line,

It's also important to remember that Battery Health is just an estimate. It can stay the same for a long time then drop quite a few points. Sometimes, it even goes up. Comparing it to someone else's phone is also a waste of time as, unless you're using your phone in exactly the same way, it's not a relevances comparison.

Unless you're having problems with the phone or you're getting close to the end of your warranty, there's not much point in checking battery health. As you've discovered, you'll stress yourself out for no good reason.

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.