Your battery is the beating heart of your iPhone. It powers your phone up and keeps your device at ready for anything your need. So, it’s very important to know more about your iPhone battery and how to take care of it. In this post, we went over commonly asked questions about iPhone batteries.
What Kind of Battery Does An iPhone Have?
iPhones make use of Lithium-Ion battery, a new type of the rechargeable battery commonly used in portable electronic devices and vehicles. Compared to the traditional batteries, lithium-ion batteries charge faster and keep the charge longer. Lithium-ion batteries are also lighter which means that you can keep using your iPhone for hours without having to carry heavy batteries.
iPhones are powered by high-density lithium-ion batteries made by Apple and use the benefits of the latest technology to extend the battery life of your phone. For example, advanced fast charge saves the time an iPhone battery needs for a complete charging cycle and extends the life span of the battery. The battery is designed to charge 80% of its capacity quickly, then switches to what’s called “trickle charging” for the remaining 20%. At this time, the iPhone reduces the electrical current in the battery and makes the battery last longer.
What Is Battery’s Maximum Capacity?
Like any electronic device, iPhone batteries are consumable items and become less effective as they’re used. When a battery ages its capacity for holding electrical charge diminished. with a weakened battery, you will have to plug your phone to the charger more often. When battery’s capacity decreases, its ability to deliver the maximum instantons power to your iPhone may decrease too.
This creates some performance issues or causes your iPhone to shut down unexpectedly. In extreme cases, shutdown can occur time and again which makes the device unstable or useless. The self-balance feature of iOS monitors the condition of the battery to decide when it is necessary to manage the maximum performance of the phone to prevent unexpected shutdowns so that your phone can be still used. However, in severe conditions such as when the battery’s maximum capacity is too low or when you’re using heavy apps for a long time the operating system of your phone has no solution other than shutting down your iPhone device. That gives you a very good reason check iPhone batteries maximum capacity frequently (measured relative to when it was new) and replace them in time.
How to Check iPhone Battery Health?
iPhone 6 and later come with a feature that let you know where your phone battery stands. To check the battery health status, open the Setting menu on an iPhone device, then go to Battery, then to Battery Health. Then, you ‘ll find the capacity of your battery in percentage which shows the capacity of the battery compared to when it was new. The lower the capacity, your iPhone’s battery is closer to the end of its life. But shouldn’t wait until the battery drains completely to get it replaced. It’s recommended that you buy when the battery capacity is much below 80%.
You might notice that the capacity of your iPhone battery is always less than 100% even when using a new iPhone for the first time. The reason is that, whether it’s used or not, the capacity of the battery diminishes by time. Therefore, depending on the time when the iPhone was made and when it is used, the initial capacity of the battery would be slightly less than 100%
Regardless, if your pre-2014 or running iOS 11.2 or earlier you won’t see the Battery Health in the settings and check your battery health condition unless you pay for the third-party apps.
What is Optimised Battery Charging?
The Lithium-ion batteries tend to have a longer life span when they’re not charged to 100%. With the release of iOS 13, Apple introduced the Optimised Battery Charging feature which exploits this feature keeping battery below 80 percentage until a full-charge is needed. Hence, it slows the chemical aging process of the battery down.
When the Optimised Battery Charging is active, your iPhone tries to learn your daily routine and predict how long your phone will be on the charger when you go to bed overnight. After a few weeks, your iPhone will be able to guess when you usually plug your phone to the charger and when you take it off charge.
This prediction helps your phone optimise the recharging process based on your daily behaviour and prevent your phone from fully charging as soon as you plugged it in. Rather, it will keep the battery charge below 80% most of the night, even though it remains on the charger the whole time. Just before the time, iPhone predicts that you will take your phone off the charge, usually in the morning, it will finish charging the battery to 100%. In this way, your battery will spend less time in the fully charged state and though, the b is extended.
Optimised Battery Charging is enabled by default in iOS 13. But because it is an AI (artificial intelligence) based feature, you cannot get the benefits of it as soon as you buy a new iPhone. In practice, it takes several weeks for the algorithm to collect that data about your daily routine and reliably predicts when you need your phone in the morning.
Finally, if you’re used to getting up unexpectedly in the middle of the night and begin to use your phone, seeing that your phone only charged to 80% may be annoying. So, you may want to disable Optimised Battery Charging. For that go to Setting menu and Battery Health and toggle the Optimised Battery Charging off. Anyway, don’t forget that disabling Optimise charging will accelerate the death of the battery.
How Long Do iPhone Batteries Last?
No battery lasts forever, that applied to the iPhone batteries too. Eventually, you need to take your phone to the nearby Apple Store and ask them to replace the battery for you. The life span of the battery mainly depends on the model of your device and how you have and how you treat it. If you follow the suggestions about extending the battery life, you can expect a longer length of time between your phone needs a new battery.
Although Apple doesn’t say how long iPhone batteries last, the experience with the past iPhone models revealed that for a frequently used device if used properly, the battery capacity begins to reduce after a year-and-a-half to two years which is around 400 to 500 full charge cycles.
How to Extend the battery life of your iPhone?
Here are some tips that help you get most of your battery and extend its life span:
- If you notice that your phone gets hot when charging, you should remove the hard casing from the device before plugging it to the charger. Excess heat can adversely affect the capacity of the battery and shorten the expected life cycle of it.
- Update to the latest iOS compatible with your phone. The newer version of the software uses the system resources better and therefore, drain the battery of your phone less frequently.
- No matter how you use your phone, the best way to preserve battery life is tweaking iOS setting for the optimised battery usage. Two simple adjustments affect the time you can your iPhone before you need to look for a power source. The first trick is reducing the brightness of your screen or use Auto-Brightness. You can also save some battery power using a Wi-Fi network instead of cellular networks.
- Don’t leave your phone under the sun or where the temperature is high.
- Don’t leave apps open on your phone. Save your work and close the app so you can go on your work later.
- Don’t use dynamic backgrounds.
- Remove unneeded apps from your device.
- Don’t read this post! In place, go to Battery under Settings and keep eye on your iPhone battery activity, functionality and find apps draining your juice.
Without a healthy battery, your iPhone is nothing more than an expensive silky toy. To make life easier for you (and your luxury phone) we supplied everything you should know about batteries in the iPhone and how to get the most out of these rechargeable components.
References
- https://www.apple.com/batteries/why-lithium-ion/
- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
- https://9to5mac.com/2019/10/01/ios-13-iphone-optimized-battery-charging/#:~:text=All%20iPhone%20models%20use%20lithium,degrades%2C%20their%20maximum%20capacity%20reduces.
- https://swappie.com/en/everything-you-need-to-know-about-iphone-batteries/
- https://www.apple.com/batteries/maximizing-performance/
- https://www.totalleecase.com/blogs/blog/iphone-battery-health