Apple's 80% Charging Limit for iPhone: How Much Did It Help After a Year?

[NARadyk]

[15 Pro Max, launch day]

Am I doing something wrong? Is my battery faulty?

Comparing to other answers in here, my maximum capacity is diabolical.

This has been with 80% limit on and mainly wired charging. I have only really recently turned if off after noticing such a degrade in my battery.

 

[daabido]

So you charge to the same percentage that Apple considers battery replacement percentage for degraded batteries? That makes sense.

 

[slvrscoobie]

Ive had it turned on all the time, because I always bring chargers, and work from home. Ive got 306 cycles, on my 15 PM and have 91% health.
I have Mostly charged with MagSafe as the slower charge always feels better to me for the battery, but apparently, my device didnt help much since Im 4% lower than MR.

 

[slvrscoobie]

15 Pro using 80% limit (except on a few vacations) and almost all wired charging

98% health after 271 cycles

you win the Wednesday build battery contest lol

 

[jephrey]

I'm similar to others with 100% charging (15 pro max), mostly wired, battery usually under 20% when I start charging
283 cycles 95% max capacity

 

[jcshas]

I just recently traded in my iPhone 15 Pro and I don't recall the cycle count, but my max battery capacity was 100% at the time of trade.

An 80% charging limit definitely worked for me because I'm almost always near a charger so I've enabled it on my iPhone 16 Pro as well.

 

[rotax]

15 PM Launch Day

 

[bloodshot79]

It's fascinating that people are so hung up on this battery life FUD, especially when replacements are so cheap after a few years.

I charge my phone on MagSafe 99% of the time, almost always to 100%, after 11 months, and 248 cycles, I'm still at 100% battery life.

Use your phone, charge it to full whenever you need it, stop trying to manage your battery, it's a fool's errand.

 

[slyronit]

I am one of those who doesn’t understand this feature. If you never charge your phone above 80%, what is the remaining 20% even for, which you are saving from declining?

 

[AdamInKent]

I'm pretty sure that the extra capacity is to allow the battery to last longer by using the unused cells when necessary.

I found this:

kirkmc, neither of those articles that you quote says anything about reserve cells in car batteries. They simply state that the battery controllers limit charging and discharging of the battery to prevent 100% charge or 100% discharge. There are no unused cells. All of the cells are used, they are just used within a limited range of charge.

Happy for you to point me towards anything that I missed.

(Just to add a further explanation for non-scientists and engineers:

Car battery packs are made up of large numbers of battery cells (they are not much different to the batteries that we all buy for home use).

If I wire up two 1.2V rechargeable cells in parallel and charge them to 1V, they will both have a 1V potential difference across them.

If I wire up two rechargeable cells in series and charge them to 1V, each of them with have a potential difference of 0.5V.

Either way, both battery cells share the charge.

Car battery packs are made up of battery cells wired in series and parallel (to provide the required voltage and current, respectively). So all of the cells in the pack share the charge about equally. In a partially charged battery pack, it is not the case that some cells are fully charged and some are fully discharged.)

 

[imola.zhp]

I still don't understand why this can't be added to older phones. Apple replaced my 13 Pro with a new 13 Pro a year ago, I'm at 92%, I don't see the number of cycles in the settings. I do have "Optimized Battery Charging" turned on but it rarely works as intended. I exclusively wireless charge.

 

[Taylor2]

13 Pro max using 85% battery limit.

 

[MNWildFan]

I personally think it's silly only letting the battery charge to 80%, but that being said, since all of my devices have learned my charging habits, that optimized charging feature where it charges it up to only 80% and then the rest of the way is nice

Thanks to that, just over a year later for my 15, I'm at 92% health with 324 battery cycles under its belt

 

[MNWildFan]

I still don't understand why this can't be added to older phones. Apple replaced my 13 Pro with a new 13 Pro a year ago, I'm at 92%, I don't see the number of cycles in the settings. I do have "Optimized Battery Charging" turned on but it rarely works as intended. I exclusively wireless charge.

Yeah, I feel ya on that

I do think it's dumb how you can only do it on the 15 series and newer, when I'm sure there could have easily added it to the older ones

And on the cycle count/health note, I'm at 92% health and 324 cycles with my 15 after a year of owning it and that's with wirelessly charging with MagSafe like 99% of the time too

 

[metric152]

I have a 15 pro Max. Since launch ive had it set to 80% and only move it to 100 if I’m out hiking and set it to low power mode so the gps hiking app doesn’t kill it. I don’t play games on the phone. Mostly browsing, YouTube, work video chats on the way in and some hotspot for my iPad. Cycle count: 213. Health 100%

I hope to keep the phone for at least 5yrs.

 

[cupneverempty]

With the iPhone 15 models that came out last year, Apple added an opt-in battery setting that limits maximum charge to 80 percent. The idea is that never charging the iPhone above 80 percent will increase battery longevity, so I kept my iPhone at that 80 percent limit from September 2023 to now, with no cheating.

My iPhone 15 Pro Max battery level is currently at 94 percent with 299 cycles. For a lot of 2024, my battery level stayed above 97 percent, but it started dropping more rapidly over the last couple of months.

I left my iPhone at that 80 percent limit and at no point turned the setting off or tweaked it. There were some days when I ran out of battery because I was without a charger for most of the day, and there were other times that I had to bring a battery along to make sure I didn't run out of power. It wasn't always convenient to keep it at 80 percent, but there were days when it didn't have too much of an impact.

It was always a treat when the iPhone randomly decided to charge to 100 percent, which is something Apple has baked in to the 80 percent limit to ensure the battery level stays calibrated.

For the most part, I charged using USB-C rather than MagSafe, but there was some MagSafe charging mixed in. There was probably a 70/30 split between wired charging and MagSafe charging. I did often let my battery get quite low before charging, and it didn't sit on the charger for long periods of time too often. Most charging was done in a room at 72 degrees. I'm adding this context because temperature is a factor that can affect battery longevity, and wireless charging is warmer than wired charging.

You can compare your level battery to mine, but here are a couple other metrics from MacRumors staff that also have an iPhone 15 Pro Max and did not have the battery level limited.

• Current capacity: 87%. Cycles: 329
  
• Current capacity: 90%. Cycles: 271

I don't have a lot of data points for comparison, but it does seem that limiting the charge to 80 percent kept my maximum battery capacity higher than what my co-workers are seeing, but there isn't a major difference. I have four percent more battery at 28 more cycles, and I'm not sure suffering through an 80 percent battery limit for 12 months was ultimately worth it.

It's possible that the real gains from an 80 percent limit will come in two or three years rather than a single year, and I'll keep it limited to 80 percent to see the longer term impact.

I did set my iPhone 16 Pro Max to an 80 percent limit, but I don't know if I want to continue the test given the lackluster results I had from 2023 to 2024. Will the thermal changes in the iPhone 16 models make any difference? Maybe, maybe not. There's a 90 percent charge limit option too, and that might be more feasible than 80 percent for most people, especially those that have phones with smaller batteries.

Let me know your current battery capacity and cycle count in the comments below, and weigh in on whether you think Apple's limits are worthwhile.

Article Link: Apple's 80% Charging Limit for iPhone: How Much Did It Help After a Year?

My stats are now in a Numbers spreadsheet. I’ll check my iPhone pro max periodically.
Sept 24, 2024, 94% cap, 243 cycles, 90% charge level. At first I kept the phone at iOS 17 80%. For the recent 2 weeks I let the phone optimize on its own. After migrating to iOS 18 I’ve picked 90% as a compromise between the two previous settings of 80% and self optimize.

 

[Sora]

....how does the saying go...
"Live like no one else today so you can live like no one else tomorrow."
This life lesson applies here as well.

 

[Apleeseed84]

Get Apple Care and charge it how and when you want. Simple as that.

Exactly, I cannot have my phone at 80% at all for a full day, especially on vacation.
Considering I lease my phone from my carrier and they recycle the parts at the end of the day, what’s really the point, especially if one trades in their phone all the time.

 

[Marrakas]

15 Pro Max, still at 100%

I'm not too worried about the battery, I only keep the 80% limit on because I don't use the phone enough to ever run out of juice during 1 day, and I charge it at my magsafe nighstand every night.

 

[CoMoMacUser]

Why doesn't the iPad support this?

 

[dasmb]

Get Apple Care and charge it how and when you want. Simple as that.

Get Apple Care and if at the end of the support your battery isn't above 90%, hit it with a hammer. $30 battery replacement.

 

[Eric_WVGG]

I've been running an M3 Max at 80% battery cap (via Al Dente) for about seven months, the battery is at 8576mah out of 8579mah design capacity (so, 100% health with a rounding error). Very happy with this, will continue to cap for the foreseeable.

 

[cBraunDesign]

iPhone 15 Pro using 100% battery with optimized charging, almost always charged on a MagSafe wireless stand. 248 cycles, 98% health.

 

[Eric_WVGG]

Get Apple Care and if at the end of the support your battery isn't above 90%, hit it with a hammer. $30 battery replacement.

insurance fraud fun & games

 

[Shirasaki]

No, a shallower discharge results in greater number of usable 100% equivalent cycles. For iPhone 15, this means greater than 1,000.

So there is a discrepancy between the Definition of “cycle”. What I think is true is that shallow Charging allows user to squeeze longer time out of said battery because each full cycle takes longer to complete. Unless the person you quote defines “a charging cycle” differently, the battery charging cycle is whatever manufacturer designed it to be, from 100 to 0.

AppleCare is obviously for more than just getting a battery exchange. I buy it for all my iPhones, and I've never damaged one, though I have had two replaced because of batteries. So I probably lose out in the long run, especially now that AC is so much more expensive, but if I did break my screen or damage my iPhone in another way, I'd kick myself for not having that protection.

In fact, I had 2 recent examples that Applecare saved my day and wallet. One was a near full replacement of my macbook pro suffering liquid damage manifested as Broken touchbar and the other was fogged front facing camera for my iPad Pro which resulted in a full device replacement. If I didn’t have Applecare, MacBook Pro fix would cost me AUD$1.8k and ipad Pro would be AUD$800. Instead I only paid AUD$420 and AUD $99 respectively.

i never understand the vitriol by some in this community about letting people have options - apple loves your type, it certainly makes their job easy.

Fewer options means less confusion, but also signals more control over what user can and cannot do. Some just love others to be controlled I guess.