That's one way of putting it, I'd say it's at best not very transparent how Apple comes up with wildly different capacity estimates and I actually think their tools are incorrect and coconutbattery is correct: Not sure if this counts as evidence, but I have now seen multiple Macbooks, for example this one I am typing on right now, that's over a year old, over 100 cycles so moderate use, and is down to 97%. However what Apple's own system preferences spit out is still 100% and has been since day 1. Nobody can convince me that a battery after more than a year has no degradation whatsoever.
Like I said on an iPhone thread discussing this, I think that battery health is just a number and the only thing that matters is battery life. I don’t think that whether an iPad shows 50% health or 100% is too important, that’s just a number. Why do I bring this up? Because most times there’s no correlation. I’ve seen some iPads drop in battery health extremely quickly, with no battery life degradation. In fact, I created a thread many years ago, asking what could the reason be for iPads not reaching battery specifications. I haven’t seen an iPad reach 1000 cycles with 80% health, most of them drop far quicker than that.
For example, I’ve seen an iPad Air 3 with 310 cycles and 85% health. My own 9.7-inch iPad Pro had 85% health with 454 cycles right before being forced out of iOS 9 into iOS 12 in 2019. Original iOS version, no significant battery life drop, regardless of health.
Some online results show some 10.5-inch iPad Pros in the mid 70s after 300 cycles. While some of these models have very poor battery life, I am absolutely certain that the reason is iPadOS 16, not battery capacity. Even if they were allowed to be replaced, battery life would still be atrocious.
While Apple’s numbers almost always sound too good to be true, Coconut’s numbers are oftentimes too pessimistic.
I’ve always stated that the only relevant number for battery life on iPads (which is ultimately the only thing that matters) is the iOS version.
I still haven’t been able to ascertain whether an iPad’s screen-on time drops if all conditions are properly met. It’s something I’d like to know: make the only variable battery health. Leave it on the same original iOS version forever, and use it heavily for years. What would battery life be? Would it eventually decrease? Would battery health eventually matter enough so as to affect an iPad (with its large battery) on an original iOS version? Based on experience, I think that the answer is “if it does affect it eventually, it requires too much usage for it to matter”, but I haven’t been able to determine whether that hypothesis is correct.
My 9.7-inch iPad Pro is nearly 7 years old, but I’m not a heavy enough user, and to top it off, it has been forced into iOS 12, so while I know what was its battery life right after being forced and I can assess it based off of that, I’d still have the question mark: would iOS 9 be better? (This is obviously after far more usage than what I’ve put it through so far).
And it's not like tools such as coconutbattery just make something up, they take directly what MacOS itself reports over the command line: ioreg -l -w0 results in "DesignCapacity" = 6075 and "AppleRawMaxCapacity" = 5931. If the design capacity is higher than the current maximum then the end results must be less than 100%. In this case it would be 97.6%...which is exactly what coconutbattery shows.
On iPhones it does seem to be correct, at least from what my iPhones show, it's actually identical with coconutbattery there. So at least there's no discrepancy. Yet on iPads it's again totally intransparent at best since there is no internal value you can read out. Apple just decided not to give us any battery health info at all, even though they do it on the iPhone. What could possibly be the reason other than the fact that it's literally impossible to get an iPad battery replacement even if you already notice reduced battery life?
I am sure Apple isn't outright lying when they do the iPad battery check in the store, but the basis for calculation is unknown, they just produce a number above 80% out of thin air and there is no way to challenge it. The iPad batteries are rated for 1000 cycles, I charge mine daily, sometimes twice daily, which should mean that after about 2-3 years the battery will be at the end of its lifetime. I'll be interested to see what they end up telling me, good as new?
I think it’s more stringent because they replace the whole device. They can’t give them away like candy. Batteries are replaced a lot on iPhones, and I guess they think “we can’t have that with whole iPads”. I’m not typically a “conspiracy-minded” person, but then your point remains: I can confirm that Coconut matches battery health on iPhones, whereas it’s 9% higher on my 9.7-inch iPad Pro (84 vs 93%).
iPads are far more resilient, but then again, as updates obliterate them now (at least as far as the oldest supported iPads on iPadOS 16), people naturally gravitate to the “solution” they find on iPhones: a battery replacement.
But yeah, they do produce a number out of thin air, and it’s annoying to those who see their iPad’s battery life fall of a cliff. Now, then again... do they help? They’re so rare that we don’t have many data points. We know that on iPhones, if they have been severely updated and battery life is poor enough, battery life is unusable. Replacing the battery helps a little, but it’s nowhere close to original iOS versions. Now, on iPads... I don’t know. I know people have severe complaints about the oldest supported iPads on iPadOS 16, like I said, but does replacing the battery help? Nobody says they were able to replace it.
I don’t know which model you have, but I am absolutely certain that you won’t be able to replace it after three years. Battery life will most likely not be absolutely abhorrent, though (not enough updates).
