iphone 12 pro max battery health degrading

If your personal experience is that the phone loses around 1% per month that is normal and expected. All batteries, no matter what they are used in, get used up with use. That’s why Pep Boys auto supply stores use about half the inventory space in their stores for replacement car batteries.

There are strategies to slow down the inexorable decline in battery capacity, but no way to stop it other than to shut off the device and never use it.

Well as I’ve said recently since my iPhone started draining 1% a week I decided to just charge my phone at night before bed I. Plug in to charge then switch it off. I really use it a lot during day and night but as of 4 weeks ago I’m still at 90% and has yet to drop as of this message. Not sure why it’s suddenly eased off from dropping down 1% a week to not dropping at all.

Macbrush wrote:

Of course, you can, the value is calculated base on full charge capacity when new, they're all lithium polymer batteries.

No, you can’t, because every model iPhone uses different implementations of the battery health monitoring feature. The iPhone 12 is the most accurate of all of them. Older phones estimated it based on the drain and and charge currents, and the time for each. The iPhone 12 has a chip built in to the battery that monitors full charge capacity.

franciscofromclifton wrote:

Mine is at 89% at 11 months of use. I charge wirelessly with the Apple mag safe air charger.

The average user’s iPhone will lose about 1% a month. So let’s see: 100% -11=89%. It’s exactly where it would be expected to be.

Your battery is fine. If it falls below 80 percent, it's time for a new one.

Health is an estimate and the algorithm changes based on any of a number of factors. But, a loss of 11 percent of health in 9 months isn't exceptional in any way.

Screen on for seven hours twenty, and off for 21 minutes, per that display.

Just below what was posted there, there’s a section on app usage. Are the active apps there as expected, or has some app gotten busy?

It’s expected that the first day or two after an update will have some background power usage. Usual recommendation after that, for post-update weirdness, is to force a restart with the buttons, and if the problem persists to then contact Apple.

The people who tell you that the degradation on the 12 series is absolutely wrong. You’ll find a few threads ago that I was told my degradation was normal. And as you can see, with just under a year of ownership (362 days), my 12 Pro Max is at 80% battery health with 345 cycles. There’s no way this battery is going to last at 80% health by the time it hits 500 cycles, anyone with half a brain can see that. However, much like the geniuses defending the degradation on this thread, Apple support finds that my battery is in good condition, even when it is severely underperforming. They won’t honor their own claims.

As someone who paid a little over $1800 (₹1,39,900) for their phone, I can just as well pay $79 for a battery replacement, which I will. But the point is that it shouldn’t be happening, and to make it worse, Apple doesn’t even acknowledge that their product is defective. Unethical practices at its finest. Here’s evidence that those defending the degradation on 12 series are absolutely wrong. I have to charge this phone 3 times a day, which is ridiculous for a phone which is under a year old.

Horrible customer service from a company that only cares about making money and doesn’t give a **** about its customers.

crystal_star wrote:

So you're basically saying that optimized battery charging doesn't force your phone to be at a certain percent for it to charge at the "right" time?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. And what Lawrence has said.

Here's the question: Did you spend ~$1000 to get a battery meter to fuss with all the time? Or did you spend the money to get a device you could use for things like making calls and sending messages?

Here's what you do: Put the phone on to charge when you go to bed at night. Take it off in the morning. And stop worrying about it.

crystal_star wrote:

that's what i'm worried about.

Why are you worrying about it? If it bothers you so much, turn off Optimized Charging. It is obviously not working for you (though I suspect it's working fine for your phone).

crystal_star wrote:

yeah i don't think it can see a routine for me either, but if it tries to determine one, it's going to have to use other details, like the unplugging time, right? since for the last week, i've been unplugging at around 10 PM to go somewhere until 1 AM, it tried to charge faster on a day that i didn't need to unplug that early afterwards? this is so inconvenient.

If you keep an inconsistent schedule when it's charging at night or unplugging in the morning, the programming is never going to figure out a right time to stop charging at 80% or a right time to start charging in the morning. Might as well just turn it off and let whatever happens happen. But again, it's of limited benefit if it's going to be charged to 100% every day anyways.

Some have advocated for more user programmability of the battery settings than just "Optimized Charging". I have a non-Apple laptop computer that can be programmed for maximum longevity by pretty much halving the charge range. Electric cars can be programmed to limit their maximum charge, and I heard of one battery researcher who believes that a Tesla battery might last 20 years given that one user he's been consulting set the max charge level to 80%. However, Apple has never chosen to implement such features in its battery management.

crystal_star wrote:

By “maximum,” do you mean the maximum fastest rate?

So what I do is, I plug my phone in and turn it off. Exactly 7 minutes later, I turn it back on to see if it’s charged 3% higher than what it was when I plugged it in. It’s fine if it hasn’t reached 3%, but if it’s more than that, then that’s a problem because it’s trying to keep up with some schedule, right? Today this happened, but thankfully, my battery capacity didn’t drop. Previously, when it had charged from 60-64 in 7 minutes, my capacity went from 94% to 93%, which was very upsetting. Just two weeks ago, it went from 58% to 64% in 7 minutes! That averages to about 1.2 minutes per percent, which is really, really fast! And that caused my capacity to drop from 91% to 90%, which was even more upsetting.

All I want to know is; is it supposed to be that way?

There's going to be maximum charging current depending on the model. I believe the iPhone 7 has a maximum charge current of 2.1A (10.5W). Then then when it gets to something like 70% charge level it will taper off. But if you've using something like the 5W cube (1A) it's obviously not going to charge at that maximum charge current, but rather at a flat 1A until it gets to the charge level where it the charge current would have dropped to 1A with the 2.1A power adapter. So it might take twice as long to get to that same 70%, but beyond that it might be able to charge about as fast than more powerful power adapters from 80% to 100%.

Here's an article on it. It doesn't assume anything like the device is being used in any way, but just charging the battery. The chart shows how a lithium-ion battery is charged at a flat rate very quickly, but where it takes twice as long to finish the last 30% of the charge than it did to charge it up to 70%. I'll post the chart, where I believe this is reasonable fair use. The dotted line is the charging current.

https://batteryuniversity.com/article/**-409-charging-lithium-ion

Not sure what the deal is as there are way too many variables when charging portable electronics. There are also a bunch of weird things including that 100% isn't necessarily a full charge on an iPhone. You could theoretically be using more than the power adapter can supply and it's actually tapping into the battery.

If you have a Mac and a tool called coconutBattery, it gets under the hood by tapping into a live reading of the battery health, giving the number of battery cycles recorded, and giving a (more or less) live reading of the charging current. For instance, if my iPhone is displaying 100% on the display, coconutBattery will show that it's fully charged and internally at 97% charge level. This is what I mean by 100% isn't necessarily a full charge. There are things that are done to reduce stress on the battery since constantly topping off a battery is not a good thing.

It's really difficult trying to explain all these things. There's a lot of math involved.

All batteries lose capacity with use and over time. Your numbers don’t look out of line.

For the average user a phone will lose about 1% of capacity a month. So you are doing great at only 0.5% a month. Your XS Max performance is well above average; consider yourself lucky.

1% per month is normal.

So, six months means (100 - 6) = 94.

Completely normal.

You can't compare old devices to new ones.

That precisely follows Apple's assertion that a drop of 1% of battery health per month is normal.