iPhone 16 Pro Max battery health: 5% drop in 2 months?

Your Battery Health is only able to be updated when your device has been able to charge to 100%. Even when using a Charge Limit, the phone will still charge to 100% on occasion in order to perform the update the battery estimates. Users who attempt to manually control when their phone is being charged and never let it charge to 100% will find that the Battery Health will drop a higher percentage then what they expect when it does fully charge, since it previously was unable to perform the updated calculations.

With that said, the Battery Health drop is not linear, so you should not expect a gradual decrease and some months may not drop at all and other months may drop more. Also what any drop in the last 2 months is not an indicator of how much it will drop in the next 2 months. Your iPhone battery is expected to last 1000 charge cycles before it should be replaced at 80%, so on average that works out to be about 1% for every charge cycles. For you that would mean on average, you would be in the 94%-95% range, so I would not be concerned with yours showing 93%.

My recommendation for charging on a regular schedule is to use the Optimized Charging option and charge your phone all night, every night. That way you are not using battery power overnight to maintain a cellular connection, along with WiFi and there are also background processes that are performed during that time when you are not actively using your phone. You will find that doing that actually reduces the number of Charge Cycles.

the battery health has decreased relatively quickly in a short period.

Battery decline is not constant or linear. The battery might decline very slowly for a few months, then drop 2-3% the next month. Nothing to be concerned about.

the battery health dropped from around 98% to 93% within the last 1–2 months, which feels quite fast.

On the surface, most people would look at this and see a 5% decline. But....Apple does not display tenths of a percent and they always round the numbers down.

So, the battery might have been at 98.1% and it declined to 93.9%.....a drop of 4.2%.

Apple's support documents on the battery state that the battery in the 16 Pro Max was designed to go up to 1,000 Charge Cycles under ideal conditions. Yet "ideal conditions" are not really well defined, so it's difficult to interpret what "normal" might mean.

That 1,000 Charge Cycle number works out to about a 1% decline for every 50 Charge Cycles before the battery reaches a Maximum Capacity of 80%.

So, your battery has completed 282 Charge Cycles. So 280 divided by 50 = 5.6%. Call this roughly 5-6%. So, 100% Maximum Capacity less 5-6% = 94-95%.

I would be very happy with this type of performance. If you want to take the iPhone in to the Genius Bar to have the battery tested, I think that they will confirm that the battery is doing very well.

Apple does recommend that you use Optimized Battery Charging in their support documentation for the best chance at long battery life, so you should use that setting on your iPhone. Connect the iPhone to the power supply at night and leave it connected all night.....every night.

About Charge Limit and Optimized Battery Charging on iPhone - Apple Support

My opinion.....Charge Limits are more of a gimmick than anything else, but that might be another discussion.

Don't try to babysit the battery. It won't help, and it will just make you anxious if you are checking the battery all the time. All that you really need to remember is to replace the battery when it drops below 80% Maximum Capacity.