Yep, I would agree with that. I'm charging my iPad less than once a week based on how often I use it (reading a few hours a day with my current work load). I'll never see 1000 cycles. Nice post and nice to see eye to eye on this.
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iPhone XS An iPhone battery can last much more than 1000 cycles!!!
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You see, I may disagree with the vast majority of the forum on the importance of battery care, or on iOS updates, but I am not totally unreasonable 😂Yep, I would agree with that. I'm charging my iPad less than once a week based on how often I use it (reading a few hours a day with my current work load). I'll never see 1000 cycles. Nice post and nice to see eye to eye on this.
If you really keep the battery in between those percentages, it is possible that the battery gets hopelessly miscalibrated percentages. In order to get accurate battery % it needs to calibrate by having a full 0%-100% charge from time to time in my knowledge. By the way Apple battery % works - always a lower estimate it is possible that your iPhone overestimates the number of discharged % and thus charge cycles.
If I got your phone I would discharge it fully and then charge overnight with an evil hope that the battery recalibrates and your battery health tanks
If I got your phone I would discharge it fully and then charge overnight with an evil hope that the battery recalibrates and your battery health tanks
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I also have a shortcut that alerts me at when it goes above 80% (not when it reaches 80% because if I let it go over 80 then it will alert me again when it goes back to 80). I keep my phone for a long time. The last one was a 6. Now I have a 13. I use the 6 like an iPod Touch for music. It is still at 87% capacity.
Battery Calibration
All newly-installed smart batteries should be calibrated as soon as possible. This helps your phone or laptop get an accurate reading on the battery’s state of charge.
www.ifixit.com
Yeah, I am sure you are fine sticking to the original firmware, but is unsafe and you are limiting your user experience for that device. It is not something I would recommend to anyone for a device that is connected to internet.
What’s the alternative? I keep devices for years, even after upgrading. In fact, even though I have an iPad Air 5, I’m writing this from a 9.7-inch iPad Pro.
Newer devices, like I said in the comment you quoted, are fine. Update them a couple of times, sure, they’re fine. But if you keep devices for a while, they’ll be inevitably obliterated.
I am limiting my user experience, sure, but the drawbacks are too many: this iPad is on iOS 12. It was forced by Apple from its original version, iOS 9. I get extremely infrequent, once-in-a-blue-moon keyboard lag. I never had that on iOS 9. Apart from that, honestly performance is perfect. I tried an iPhone 6s on iOS 13. It was pathetic. Keyboard lag was almost intolerable, battery life fell apart, it was unusable for me. If I were to update this iPad, yeah, maybe some websites would start working again, maybe I could install a couple of apps... and then what? Battery life would plummet, and performance would be unusable. If I already find an A9 intolerable on iOS 13, I can’t imagine how terrible it would be on iPadOS 16.
And coming back to the topic, had I followed through with both of these approaches (updating and taking care of the battery health by some method of partial charging), battery life would still be abhorrent! Folks on 1st-gen iPad Pros are straining to get 5 hours, maybe even less. I am comfortably getting over twice that. A 9.7-inch iPad Pro user on iPadOS 16 with a new battery wouldn’t be anywhere close to my battery life.
I’ve seen a 10.5-inch iPad Pro with a degraded battery on iPadOS 16 and it got 1.5 hours. That iPad is simply better than mine. It’s more efficient, it is faster, it even has a larger battery. None of which helped, at all.
You can have all of the theoretical security in the whole world, but frankly, if battery life is pathetic and performance is abhorrent, then I don’t even want the device. And in extreme cases like this one (which was my main point), of a device that’s several years old (over 7 by now), no amount of battery care - or even replacing the battery - can make up for increased power consumption of new iOS versions.
In fact, I’ve been the only comment I’ve seen of anyone saying “I have the 1st-gen iPad Pro and I love it”. The vast majority of mentions it has pertain to very poor performance and-or battery life. Most ask what’s the best upgrade path.
People have normalised this. I commend OP for trying to find a way to increase longevity. It simply isn’t right that a device that perhaps is used for mere content consumption has to be thrown away just because Apple chooses to obliterate it through iOS updates. It can’t be that I have to buy a new device to watch Netflix because my device has been so obliterated that I can’t even watch one movie without the battery dying, especially when some of us have shown that it is possible to maintain battery life (note: life, not health), by the most basic, hassle-free of practices: avoid heat, charge slowly, don’t update iOS.
With iPhones, it’s even worse. They cease to be useful. Battery life ends up being so poor that people have to upgrade, because phones are required to have a half-decent battery life for many people.
I have an iPhone 6s on iOS 10. Original battery. I’ve used it extensively. With light usage, it gets 6 hours of outdoor brightness and full LTE. Yes, it isn’t fully compatible, and yes, I have problems with that. But I can use it. 7 years later, 63% health. Somebody can take extreme care of the battery, but let me tell you that even with a new battery, if you have iOS 15 you aren’t anywhere near those numbers. Half. At best. Maybe 60% with some luck and managing some setting correctly, with a new battery!
I have a 6S Max that's been sitting in a cupboard for about 3 years.
By chance I'd replaced the battery and then inherited a new phone just before putting it away- which is the the main reason I kept it. I know it was almost at 100%
I fired it up yesterday and the maximum charge capacity is 87%
The point being, even if you don't use or charge your phone you are still going to see a massive drop in capacity over time.
Suppose I'd used the phone any old how. Charged it to 100%, discharged it to 0% every day how much worse would it have been than leaving it in a cupboard? What are we talking about, 10%? 20% over 3 years?
Even the newer batteries are only $100 so 20% is $20 over three years compared to leaving it in a cupboard.
Is it really worth worrying about?
By chance I'd replaced the battery and then inherited a new phone just before putting it away- which is the the main reason I kept it. I know it was almost at 100%
I fired it up yesterday and the maximum charge capacity is 87%
The point being, even if you don't use or charge your phone you are still going to see a massive drop in capacity over time.
Suppose I'd used the phone any old how. Charged it to 100%, discharged it to 0% every day how much worse would it have been than leaving it in a cupboard? What are we talking about, 10%? 20% over 3 years?
Even the newer batteries are only $100 so 20% is $20 over three years compared to leaving it in a cupboard.
Is it really worth worrying about?
I am not saying it is great, but the older devices I still use (iPhone 7 for music playback and iPad 6 for browsing, Apple Watch 3 for tracking when my Ultra is charging) are reasonably functional and have the latest security patches. I'd rather have the security updates than a faster performing device. In an ideal world, Apple would continue to patch older versions of iOS/iPadOS/WatchOS, but I don't think that is realistic.
Edit: spelling.
Don’t know about the Apple Watch, but I can comment on the iPhone and iPad.
Some updated iPads, as far as I’ve seen, have usable battery life. The 6th-gen iPad has a large battery (larger than my 9.7-inch iPad Pro). Note that usable isn’t good, it’s just usable (i.e., just to go to that example, you can use it to watch a movie or read for a couple of hours without it dying). On iPadOS 16, it is... what? 6 hours of screen-on time with fairly light use? (Brightness not too high, content consumption). It can’t be a lot better than that.
A family member has an iPad 6th-gen. As you can probably guess, I instructed them never to update. So it runs iOS 12. I tested it recently, it got 14 hours. And the funny part is, updated iPads will degrade and that one will not. As batteries degrade, the load on new iOS versions ends up being too high, so batteries last less time when they’re degraded. Logical. Don’t ask me why, but this doesn’t happen on original iOS versions. My theory is that they’re so well optimised that they don’t strain the device, so they keep working well even with reduced capacity. So that iPad can reasonably expect to get 14 hours for that usage for many years. And when say many, I mean it: iPads on efficient iOS versions are still great as far as battery life goes even a decade later.
Use the iPhone 7 for music, because it is unusable otherwise. A friend had an iPhone 7 which was updated and they charged it all the time. It’d be full by 8 am and by noon they’d need to charge it. Unlike the iPads, the iPhone 6s and 7 have had the worst longevity ever as far as battery life goes. They are simply abhorrent when updated. No battery care can help much, even with battery replacements they’re poor.
Performance should be quite poor as well. Usable if you have tolerance, but poor.
I ask Apple for one thing: leave me alone. I don’t ask for security updates for every outdated device I have, because like you said, it would be unrealistic (and funnily enough, all of my devices are outdated in the sense that they’re not the latest, barring the iPad Air 5, which runs... iPadOS 15, because of course it does). But Apple forced my iPhone 5c into iOS 10 after it randomly bootlooped, and it forced my 9.7-inch iPad Pro from iOS 9 into iOS 12 and my iPhone 6s (another one) from iOS 9 into iOS 13 due to the absolutely pathetic activation bug that happened with A9 devices on iOS 9. Don’t give security updates for every device on iOS 10, 12, 13, etc. I don’t ask for that. Just leave me alone.
I guess my conclusion from all of this is that I think that OP’s approach has to be complete. I respect it and I am nobody to say that they’re wrong for doing that (I’m in fact not saying that), but it feels a little like a half-measure. You’re preserving battery health whilst at the same time chopping off like 25-30% of the battery life out of the device while updating (as of iOS iOS 16), whereas I am writing this from my main iPhone, an iPhone Xʀ on iOS 12, and yes, my cycle count to health ratio is far poorer, but battery life is astonishing. And interestingly and most importantly, it will be astonishing, regardless of what that little number in settings says.
Well, a little too long, but I wanted to address the devices you mentioned. I haven’t mentioned the Apple Watch because I’ve never used one, I have no idea how this works over there.
If your first post was 90% after 1000 cycles the responses here would be lower.
But you do raise the idea of having an app that just says battery health is 100 percent no matter what you do. Just a static screen that says battery health is 100%! Everyone would relax and be happy and proud of their iPhone.
Don’t worry about heat and fast charging. Don’t worry about wireless charging. Slap it in the charger at night and take it off in the morning and use the phone as intended!
I would price the app at 100 dollars (the cost of one replacement battery) and become a rich man…
Frankly you aren’t wrong, but this is literally hassle-free. I occasionally charge it overnight, but when I don’t, I just charge it. There’s absolutely no difference or drawback in me using a 5w charger. Yeah, it takes a little longer, but it’s fine. I don’t need it to charge quickly because battery life is so good that it’s fine. Avoiding heat is also very easy. It’s far easier than going 30-70%, especially because I am not limiting my battery life.
Seeing hard evidence that Apple battery technology is best-in-class is always appreciated. This is why iPhone is the best investment you can make in a smartphone.
Well, having my fair share of problems with an iPhone 6 with the power-offs whenever it was cold outside, I would disagree with that. I also don't think today's expensive iPhones are a great investment and as a result I have not upgraded my iPhone 11 Pro Max yet.
My wife had one of the 6s+ phones that would shut off near 50% and drop 30-40% upon reboot while my 6s+ would last for many hours. Despite showing this very behavior to an Apple Store, we were told the battery was "green" and had to pay for a battery replacement out of pocket. Course, after the media found out what Apple did, we eventually got a refund from Apple on this but not till they got caught. (Apple got caught reducing CPU voltage to keep flawed flawed batteries from being found out).
Still, I find Apple's hardware to be industry leading - their batteries too. Back when I ran a certain android maker's flagship phone, I lost 50% of my battery's capacity in 6 months. I think people forget where we've come from and how much we use our phones today - more than ever.
Putting the health % has caused a lot of undue stress. 80% health and 500 cycles is what is normal after several years. Yet people think they have a defective phone when their device hits 90% health after 1 year. But I'm all for battery longevity so if this helps Apple work harder at producing better batteries, maybe it's a good thing.
So I agree the iPhones are way better phones than any of their Android counterparts for quality of parts and general engineering. Still, the iPhone has become too expensive in my view for what you are getting for it.
Edit: spelling.
Either coconut battery or Apple is inaccurate, since I always get very different numbers for both. The fact that Apple's number doesn't fluctuate for me and yours says 100% after over 1000 cycles, I think Coconut is wildly inaccurate.
Completely agree. I traded my old phone in for my current 1TB 14 PM but good grief, that thing was insanely expensive. You can get a nice MacBook for the price of that thing now.
Only thing I can say is that coconutBattery pulls from Apple's own internal stats - and yeah they vary a lot throughout the day/charge %.
Example, my MBP:
You can get these values via Terminal (or a shortcut on iOS):
So much #1. Add in what apps are in use (looking at some of the known hogs like Facebook, WhatsApp) and wifi vs cellular usage, the "I don't use the phone that much" is probably a bit of fib.
When I retired my 2020 SE, it was at 88%, 992 cycles, after three years. Replacement 13 Mini is still at 100% after five months and about 110 cycles. Even with "small" batteries, have had good life. 5W charging primarily and using them as iPods that can make phone calls and a few other things occasionally during the week. And averaging only about 1.4GB/mo of cellular.
Started to feel that way with the X. Felt I "overpaid" for the Mini but had no options for small, basic, and FaceID enabled phone.
I just plugged it in a few minutes ago. It said 81%. But then it jumped up to 89%. I unplugged it and relaunched the application, and then is said 99%. So yeah, I don't trust it much.Only thing I can say is that coconutBattery pulls from Apple's own internal stats - and yeah they vary a lot throughout the day/charge %.
Example, my MBP:
You can get these values via Terminal (or a shortcut on iOS):
It would take me at least 10 years to get one of my devices to the 1000 charge cycles my iPhone 11 Pro at 90% after 4 years 320 cycles.
iPhone 12 Pro Max at 95% 200 cycles
iPhone 14 Pro Max at 98% 120 cycles
iPhone 12 Pro Max at 95% 200 cycles
iPhone 14 Pro Max at 98% 120 cycles