Is there a reason the battery on my iPhone 12 mini is down to 97% life expectancy when I just purchased it 4 months ago? I Don't do Media, I don't talk much, I don't text much and I only charge it once a day so there's no more than 120 charge cycles on it. So what gives? Anybody know?
iPhone 12 mini, iOS 15
dustyexcaliber wrote:
To date, battery health had dropped to 94% from 97% in the last 2 months. Just for general information, what happens when the battery health drops below 80%, will I have to charge my phone every 4 hours as opposed to every 12 hours I was doing since the 3% drop and every 24 hours when the phone was new in the first few months.
First I would not that battery health is really just an estimate, although one that's used by the charging system to control the battery charging. Occasionally I've heard of the number going up, but that's rare. Rechargeable batteries can only decline in battery health.
An iPhone 12 mini has a new battery capacity of 2,227 mAh. So if it's at exactly 80%, that means a capacity of 1.781 mAh. It means 80% of the useful battery charge and theoretically 80% of the run time, although there are other things that change as a battery ages/loses capacity. One thing that happens is that the peak power that the battery can supply goes down.
Apple doesn't specifically do anything unless a battery gets to under 80% health within the nominal cycles. If it's under warranty of AppleCare+, they will actually replace the battery if that happens. Other than that (outside of the warranty or extended warranty period or if the number of cycles exceeds 500), the customer will have to pay for a replacement battery.
There are a lot of really weird things that happen when battery health goes well below 80%. It may still charge and work, but short periods of time. The battery health estimation may be way off. I remember a battery that hadn't replaced in 5 years. I might get under an hour of use when it used to work for 5 hours. And sometimes the display would drop 10% of the charge level within a minute.
That sounds normal. The nominal rating is for 500 cycles to 80% battery health. It’s kind of oversimplification, but a linear interpolation would be a loss of 4% battery health after every 100 complete cycles. It would help to know the number of complete cycles though.
Hello dustyexcaliber,
It looks like you're having some issues with your battery health.
As this is a user to user community, no one here can tell you definitively what's going on with the battery. For something like that you'll want to reach out to Apple Support directly so they can look in to this.
You can reach out to them here: Get Support
Take care!
Well, gee wheeze guy, that's not a supportive response, and wouldn't it have been reasonable to assume that was what I had already done before I turned to the support communities for a possible solution. Tech support was not able to help me with that problem other than to send it in for service and let them access what the problem was. but none the less, I just upgraded to the iPhone 13 pro max. It seems to have a bit better battery. The camera is not too shabby either. So in short thank you for your reply and scaring off any potential solutions I would have gotten that may have helped me with the phone I was very much fond of.
To date, battery health had dropped to 94% from 97% in the last 2 months. Just for general information, what happens when the battery health drops below 80%, will I have to charge my phone every 4 hours as opposed to every 12 hours I was doing since the 3% drop and every 24 hours when the phone was new in the first few months.
120 cycles in 11 months
Battery On iPhone 12 mini
