In another months time Apple will hold the keynote for the next generation iPhones. The new iPhone is now the old iPhone and there is a lot of conversation on Twitter about iPhones and battery health. I saw a screenshot of an iPhone 14 Pro that had 90% of battery health. 10% of drop in less than a year is concerning and you would not expect to happen on a phone that costs a grand.
I looked at my 14 Pro Max and it stands on 96% which is not that bad. I recall when I sold my 13 Pro Max last year it was around 96% too, and the 12 Pro Max before was on 100% – which I am pretty sure was a bug on how these things are calculated – but if it wasn’t a mistake well done to me I guess.
I don’t worry too much about these percentages as I tend to get a new phone every year, the only time I’d worry is when selling the phone. Some buyers, understandably, don’t want to buy phones with lower battery health percentages. I haven’t had this happen to phones I have used, but I have bought and sold phones for others and battery health is always a starting point of conversation when discussing about the condition of the phone. It is quite an important metric to consider when buying an used iPhone, as iPhones can get a performance hit if the battery is not in good health. And for people like me who average about 7 hours of screentime every day, both a long battery life and peak performance of the device is important.
I’ll list my methodology in charging my iPhone, I do not follow this religiously but I do believe that as part of taking care of my devices these things do contribute to battery health, and they may help you too:
- Always have optimised charging on
- Try not to charge more than 80% if you can avoid it.
- Try not to let the battery drop more than 40% if possible.
- Use low power mode when you can. You can even set a Shortcuts automation to turn on low power mode when your battery drops down to a certain percent. I haven’t done this but when I open the app Waze, I have an automation turning low power mode on. Helps save battery when and if I am going for a long drive.
- Try not to charge every night if you can. I have a day job and I work from home a lot. The days I work from home I’ll not put the phone on charge the night before, but the days I go into the office I’ll make sure it’s charged to a full 100%.
- On working from home days I have a 7.5w Qi charger on my desk which charges my phone – very slowly – while I work. And on these days I’ll remove it from the charging pad when the battery percentage gets close to 80%
- I use a MagSafe Duo charger next to me on my bed, so almost all overnight charghing happens via this – I don’t necessarily give into the idea that wireless charging is bad for the battery, now is wireless charging effieicent or not, that’s a seperate conversation.
- Heat is bad, hot temperatures don’t help batteries. Try to move to the UK 🙂
These are few pointers I follow as part of taking care of the battery health on my phone, they are no way scientifically proven but if my last 3 iPhones haven’t dropped more than 5% a year, I’d like to think I am doing something right.