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RonHC

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 27, 2010
996
7
100% - September 10th; 2019
99% - Unknown
98% - February 4th, 2020
97% - May 17th, 2020
96% - May 21st, 2020
95% - May 27th, 2020

I let my iPhone go to 20% before charging and only charge it up to 80-83%. I use the fast charger that came in the box at home and an iPad USB charger at work. As you can tell by the dates, I went down from 97% to 95% in 10 days. The biggest change from launch to today was using Discord more often. As of recently, using either of the charging methods, causes the iPhone to heat up. Not sure if the heat was common and only realizing now. Anyone else experiencing a quick drain in battery health recently?
 

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now i see it

macrumors G4
Jan 2, 2002
10,689
22,398
Ignore the battery health % estimation until you notice that the battery isn't lasting as long as it did in the past — a few years from now.

Then take a peek at it. If it reads 80% health or lower, THEN consider maybe replacing the battery if gaining an extra hour of run time is important to you.

But remember — a battery replacement isn't risk free. A small percentage of iPhones get irreplaceably damaged when the screen comes off badly and the entire iPhone has to be replaced.
As quoted by an apple repair tech, " removing the screen on new iPhones is like open heart surgery on a human. It's not risk free."
 
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Jimmy James

macrumors 603
Oct 26, 2008
5,488
4,067
Magicland
It’s an estimate.

My battery replacement was worse than the original. Showed 100%. It fairly quickly reduced to 95% and stayed there for over a year despite radically degraded performance. It’s an estimate of a chemical reaction.
 

EM2013

macrumors 68020
Sep 2, 2013
2,480
2,309
I let my iPhone go to 20% before charging and only charge it up to 80-83%.
You’re doing all this extra work to charge the battery and you still lose capacity. That should tell you something.

My XS Max of Sep. 2018 is at 90% and I do none of these things. I just charge overnight.
 

ericwn

macrumors G4
Apr 24, 2016
11,868
10,484
You’re doing all this extra work to charge the battery and you still lose capacity. That should tell you something.

My XS Max of Sep. 2018 is at 90% and I do none of these things. I just charge overnight.

Very well said. All the extra effort to keep the battery fresh and healthy and it still degraded when it wants. Tells us all you need to know about battery best practices so commonly discussed here.
 
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now i see it

macrumors G4
Jan 2, 2002
10,689
22,398
Nope-
Partial discharge and partial charge IS better for the battery, but I'll betcha it confuses the Battery Health estimation if done all the time.
The estimator needs to know where zero and 100% charge is (occasionally) to guess how healthy the battery is.
 

joeblow7777

macrumors 604
Sep 7, 2010
7,072
8,845
Don't worry about it. It's an estimate, and 2% is nothing considering there's some margin of error. It's mostly likely that you didn't lose 2% of your battery health over 10 days, but rather, the software just made a new estimate.
 

Fred Zed

macrumors 603
Aug 15, 2019
5,055
5,956
Florida Unfortunately
I always use the approx 80-40% charge method. Just a habit.
One thing I don’t understand though is that even with 5W charging the device gets warm. None of my previous android devices would feel warm when charging slowly.
 

MartyvH

Contributor
Sep 16, 2017
529
379
Partial discharge and partial charge IS better for the battery, but I'll betcha it confuses the Battery Health estimation if done all the time.

I did this for my 2016 SE over a year and a half. It had gone down to 88%. I then did a full Restore to the latest iOS at the time using iTunes and without loading any backup from iCloud so as not to weigh it down. After that it was and still is 93%! So it looks like that’s true.
 
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