Mine says it's at 93% capacity, and I acquired my iPhone 14 Pro in September 2022. So it's less than 1 year old. I have noticed that at the end of the day I have to charge it where it used to make it through the day without a second thought. I'm not sure what changed, but something is really dragging on the battery, so if a bunch of other people are experiencing the same thing then yeah, sounds like there's a problem.
Like the article says, Apple expects about 10% per year. You're doing slightly better than the average of what Apple expects and plans for.
There are loads of variables as it pertains to battery charging and life, and most of them are outside of the user's control. Some of them are even outside of Apple's control.
10% per year seems quite a lot to me as my four-and-a-half year old XS Max is at 79%.
Right, that's why the bell curve concept as discussed in the text exists. Some will be over that 10% per year, some will be under. Some will take five years to hit 80%, some will take less than a year.
I’m confused by the article’s reference to product failure rates following a bell curve. In all of my years working with electrical and electronics based product development, including working closely with reliability engineers and component engineers, the failure rates of such products and systems have followed a bathtub curve model, not a bell curve.
What is your source of this bell curve failure rate model? It seems intuitively incorrect simply from a standpoint that nothing that I can think of would cause a reduction in failure rate as a product gets older and accumulates more runtime and cycles.
The bathtub failure rate curve reflects the fact that electronic components and systems built using these components tend to have an early higher failure rate due to “infant mortality” failures, including manufacturing defects, then dip to a much lower failure rate for a very long period of time, but then increase again as components wear out over extended run times power cycles, component degradation, environmental stress, heating and cooling effects, etc.
If the batteries in smartphones degrade with an increasing number of charge-discharge cycles, exposure to thermals, etc., I would expect the failure rate for batteries to be monotonically increasing with time. What would cause a battery’s failure rate to decrease at some point in the future?
The only thing I can think of is that the author is trying to describe the total number of reported failures over a product’s lifetime. As the product is removed from service later in its lifetime of course the number of failures that get reported would decrease because there are far fewer of the products still in use. But that’s not the definition of failure rate within the scope of reliability engineering.
14 Pro already down to 89%. Bought right at launch a year ago. Never saw this drastic decline with any of my previous phones (I get a new one every year).
I am also at 89%. I have to say Apple must have changed their battery supplier. My MBP 14 M1 is also 89% battery health with 261 cycles.
I am very disappointed by obvious decline in battery quality for the last couple of years.
Er, hang on. 89% for 261 of 500 cycles sounds spot on schedule. Just done the maths: 89.65% is on target to hit 80% after 500 cycles.
Yes, but... Macbook battery life can take a hit if the user regularly leaves it plugged in and the battery sitting at 100% for extended periods of time. I'm not saying that's the case here, I obviously couldn't know that, but it can be a real issue that doesn't show up in the cycle count.
I find the Battery Health function to be dubious. I appreciate that it's there, but my personal experience with my iPhone 13 has been to watch the health indicator steadily decrease over two years until literally freezing at 80% for the better part of 9 months. This same thing happened to my Series 5 Watch. Just last week, the Watch finally dipped to 79% with the requisite warning of degradation, while the phone is still holding at 80%.
It's been over two years, so I'm satisfied with the battery performance as a whole, but the pegging of the health indicator at exactly 80% for such a long time makes me chuckle a bit.
You should be skeptical. At best, it's an educated guess, but people treat it like some biblical gospel.
The algorithm, data and assumptions that Apple uses to arrive at the figure are opaque, and unknown.
In real life, batteries are tested by putting them under load, and seeing how they perform. As with fuel economy figures, YMMV in real life.
Now, in August 2023, my Watch S3 purchased in March 2019 still indicates its battery health is still 100%, which is highly improbable, by virtue of the natural degradation of the cell's chemical components alone. The other possibility is that it is an anomalous super cell that had a true capacity that far exceeded the rated capacity when it was manufactured. Also doubtful.
The Battery Health figure gives Apple a purportedly objective metric it can use to cite in dealings with users. But the real metric is how long your device actually lasts in usage.
I’m confused by the article’s reference to product failure rates following a bell curve. In all of my years working with electrical and electronics based product development, including working closely with reliability engineers and component engineers, the failure rates of such products and systems have followed a bathtub curve model, not a bell curve.
What is your source of this bell curve failure rate model? It seems intuitively incorrect simply from a standpoint that nothing that I can think of would cause a reduction in failure rate as a product gets older and accumulates more runtime and cycles.
The bathtub failure rate curve reflects the fact that electronic components and systems built using these components tend to have an early higher failure rate due to “infant mortality” failures, including manufacturing defects, then dip to a much lower failure rate for a very long period of time, but then increase again as components wear out over extended run times power cycles, component degradation, environmental stress, heating and cooling effects, etc.
If the batteries in smartphones degrade with an increasing number of charge-discharge cycles, exposure to thermals, etc., I would expect the failure rate for batteries to be monotonically increasing with time. What would cause a battery’s failure rate to decrease at some point in the future?
The only thing I can think of is that the author is trying to describe the total number of reported failures over a product’s lifetime. As the product is removed from service later in its lifetime of course the number of failures that get reported would decrease because there are far fewer of the products still in use. But that’s not the definition of failure rate within the scope of reliability engineering.
I feel the distinction is that bath-tub curve is for component failures (high early failures, then a great mid-life, followed by old-age problems). The Normal distribution is useful for variations if the performance across a population — battery aging isn't really a failure issue, it's that different samples/batches work better than others.
14 Pro already down to 89%. Bought right at launch a year ago. Never saw this drastic decline with any of my previous phones (I get a new one every year).
I am also at 89%. I have to say Apple must have changed their battery supplier. My MBP 14 M1 is also 89% battery health with 261 cycles.
I am very disappointed by obvious decline in battery quality for the last couple of years.
Er, hang on. 89% for 261 of 500 cycles sounds spot on schedule. Just done the maths: 89.65% is on target to hit 80% after 500 cycles.
I got mine at launch and I have to say, I am very careful with charging. I only tried charging most of the time to around 80% but even then, at some moments I forgot to take it off the charger and it hit 100%. From one moment a couple of months ago on I hit 100% charge while staying on the charger for a couple of hours, battery capacity started dropping and now I'm at 96%. Even while being careful it still managed to drop, let alone seeing other people dipping even to 90% or lower. Just like I've been voting for Macs having desktop mode you can software in which they don't charge beyond 80% I also want a software toggle to charge to 80% on iPhone and not let an algorithm to decide when to stop charging to 80% since it can be very inaccurate for most of the time to protect your battery health and the environment.
One reason I buy the "Max" versions of iPhone is because the battery is considerably larger than the standard models. You don't have to charge it as often so the battery will accumulate fewer cycles over its life, plus there's more reserve capacity allowing more tolerance for degradation.
Battery health is at best a rough estimate, as the only way to measure actual capacity would be to fully charge; rest for 5 hours at full; fully discharge and rest for 5 hours after discharge; then charge again. Performing that procedure allows the battery gas gauge to re-learn the capacity. It's worth trying if you find your health has degraded more than expected.
I’m confused by the article’s reference to product failure rates following a bell curve. In all of my years working with electrical and electronics based product development, including working closely with reliability engineers and component engineers, the failure rates of such products and systems have followed a bathtub curve model, not a bell curve.
What is your source of this bell curve failure rate model? It seems intuitively incorrect simply from a standpoint that nothing that I can think of would cause a reduction in failure rate as a product gets older and accumulates more runtime and cycles.
The bathtub failure rate curve reflects the fact that electronic components and systems built using these components tend to have an early higher failure rate due to “infant mortality” failures, including manufacturing defects, then dip to a much lower failure rate for a very long period of time, but then increase again as components wear out over extended run times power cycles, component degradation, environmental stress, heating and cooling effects, etc.
If the batteries in smartphones degrade with an increasing number of charge-discharge cycles, exposure to thermals, etc., I would expect the failure rate for batteries to be monotonically increasing with time. What would cause a battery’s failure rate to decrease at some point in the future?
The only thing I can think of is that the author is trying to describe the total number of reported failures over a product’s lifetime. As the product is removed from service later in its lifetime of course the number of failures that get reported would decrease because there are far fewer of the products still in use. But that’s not the definition of failure rate within the scope of reliability engineering.
I feel the distinction is that bath-tub curve is for component failures (high early failures, then a great mid-life, followed by old-age problems). The Normal distribution is useful for variations if the performance across a population — battery aging isn't really a failure issue, it's that different samples/batches work better than others.
Okay. You’re reiterating what I said in your first sentence. Battery aging, I.e., wear-out, is already considered in the bathtub shaped failure rate curve. That’s all part of what you call old-age problems and it is a failure mode. Failures are failures. Keep in mind that even during the flatter part of the bathtub failure curve failures are still occurring, but at a lower rate than the higher parts of the curve. Product failures that occur during the flatter part of the curve are potentially due to what you call bad-batch and not-quite as good as others issues.
Keep in mind that every unit has its own failure curve. The failure rate curves that are produced by reliability analysis are done with large sample sizes and by applying statistical methodology. If you wanted to talk about bell curves and normal distributions you could probably say that the population of products that conform to a product’s predicted “bathtub curve” failure rate model is based on a bell curve model, where the majority tend to follow the predicted failure rate curves and there is a distribution and outliers on both sides that don’t follow the predictions at all, both better and worse.
Getting back to iPhone 14 battery drain, my iPhone 14 Pro Max is still at 100% after about 9 months of use. I don’t do anything special to affect battery life and leave it all up to the iPhone’s charging circuitry. I’ve never tried to babysit my products and rely on them to do their jobs as designed. I very rarely unplug or turn off any of my computers, PCS and Macs, but just let them sleep. Some of them have essentially been running for more than a decade with occasional cleaning and making sure airflow to cooling fans and ports is okay.
If I was investigating why an iPhone or Mac was losing battery capacity in an accelerated manner I’d take a look at what’s running and the CPU load, number of active threads, etc., kind of things. Apple is always adding more background processes for all of the new features, e.g., crash detection, so you’d have to at least consider that the device is being asked to do more when you think it’s idle. Same thing with notifications and constant updates for social media apps like TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’d want to know what the heck is going on to consume more CPU cycles and battery capacity, if indeed that’s the case.
I purposely still use the 5 watt charger to minimize heat during charging. Battery Health at 98%. 14Pro purchased 9/16/22 so close to a year old. I only use the 20 watt charger when in a hurry and that's very rare.
I purchased a 4-pack of Air Tags and they were a battery suck as indicated by Find My, and worse on my wife's 2020 SE, would drain the battery just sitting overnight, so stopped using them. Haven't tried again with newer IOS versions.
I got mine at launch and I have to say, I am very careful with charging. I only tried charging most of the time to around 80% but even then, at some moments I forgot to take it off the charger and it hit 100%. From one moment a couple of months ago on I hit 100% charge while staying on the charger for a couple of hours, battery capacity started dropping and now I'm at 96%. Even while being careful it still managed to drop, let alone seeing other people dipping even to 90% or lower. Just like I've been voting for Macs having desktop mode you can software in which they don't charge beyond 80% I also want a software toggle to charge to 80% on iPhone and not let an algorithm to decide when to stop charging to 80% since it can be very inaccurate for most of the time to protect your battery health and the environment.
Interestingly iOS already has a charging on hold feature. This aims to keep charge around 80%. However, there is no exposed UI for this. As far as I know, it only triggers when actively using the (continuity) camera. You can see this status in the MacOS control centre as well as in iOS Settings, Battery — see between 12:00 and 15:00 in the image:
I'd love there to be an iOS Shortcut action to trigger this. Then I could script when I don't need a full charge...
Mine says it's at 93% capacity, and I acquired my iPhone 14 Pro in September 2022. So it's less than 1 year old. I have noticed that at the end of the day I have to charge it where it used to make it through the day without a second thought. I'm not sure what changed, but something is really dragging on the battery, so if a bunch of other people are experiencing the same thing then yeah, sounds like there's a problem.
Like the article says, Apple expects about 10% per year. You're doing slightly better than the average of what Apple expects and plans for.
There are loads of variables as it pertains to battery charging and life, and most of them are outside of the user's control. Some of them are even outside of Apple's control.
Sure, I'm just relaying my experience. This phone stands out compared to my experience with the iPhone X, 11, and 12 that preceded it. At no point in the lives of those previous phones did I feel a need to charge the phone before the end of the day like I do now. Yes, there are loads of variables, but it's a noticeable change and the experience is a loss greater than the 7% the phone reports would suggest. I cannot recall reaching sub-20% battery in a normal day with any of those previous models.
Interesting...I'm an iPhone 12 Pro and mine has a max capacity of 87%. I've never had the battery changed either. I'm thinking this is a software issue.
Seems like 87% is the magic number for Apple. I’ve replaced 2 iPhone batteries and never ever got below 87% battery health. One battery was at 87% for 6 months with me using my iPhone every day.
For what it’s worth, my 14 Pro purchased last September, is still at 100% battery health. That’s probably not surprising, since I honestly don’t use the phone as much as most people do. I have, though, noticed that where I leave the phone when I’m not carrying it *appears* to have a strong effect on how fast the battery drains — even between two locations only a couple of meters apart. I speculate that it’s a 5G RF thing (reception is poor to nonexistent in most places in my home other than right by windows), but I really don’t know.
Mine says it's at 93% capacity, and I acquired my iPhone 14 Pro in September 2022. So it's less than 1 year old. I have noticed that at the end of the day I have to charge it where it used to make it through the day without a second thought. I'm not sure what changed, but something is really dragging on the battery, so if a bunch of other people are experiencing the same thing then yeah, sounds like there's a problem.
Like the article says, Apple expects about 10% per year. You're doing slightly better than the average of what Apple expects and plans for.
There are loads of variables as it pertains to battery charging and life, and most of them are outside of the user's control. Some of them are even outside of Apple's control.
Sure, I'm just relaying my experience. This phone stands out compared to my experience with the iPhone X, 11, and 12 that preceded it. At no point in the lives of those previous phones did I feel a need to charge the phone before the end of the day like I do now. Yes, there are loads of variables, but it's a noticeable change and the experience is a loss greater than the 7% the phone reports would suggest. I cannot recall reaching sub-20% battery in a normal day with any of those previous models.
And my experience of the 14 Pro is that its battery lasts much better than for my X or 12 Pro. Which maybe takes us back to @Mike Wuerthele's (very wide) bell curve.
I have noticed an infrequent issue with the latest iOS release version on my iPhone 14 Pro Max. What I’ve noticed a few times is my phone will go into a state where it jacks up the screen brightness beyond my selected level and run the CPU at a rate that causes the phone to heat up considerably. If it’s in my pocket will notice it immediately, but if it’s just sitting on a desk or counter I may not notice it for a while. It seems like it is in a thermal runaway state because the normally cool iPhone is unusually hot. If I restart the phone everything is fine.
I think there is a bug in the latest iOS version that is causing the CPU to get into a hot spin cycle. If you don’t notice it because you don’t have your phone on you where you can feel it, this would very likely drain the battery much faster than normal and heat up the phone unnecessarily, which is also bad for batter life.
Unfortunately I can’t get the phone into this state in a repeatable manner or else I’d submit a bug report. It has happened when running Maps at least two times, but it’s also happened outside of Maps. It’s only appeared in the last few point iOS updates.
I find the same thing happening with my 14 Pro Max since I got it in June. I think 3x I've noted the phone being hot to the touch in the top left area of the screen and murdering my battery. Each occasion I was away from home and wifi, but not actively using the phone for anything that intensive. Must be a background process or something maybe? Battery life is still at 100%, but it's only 2ish months old I suppose so that should be expected.
Comments
If the batteries in smartphones degrade with an increasing number of charge-discharge cycles, exposure to thermals, etc., I would expect the failure rate for batteries to be monotonically increasing with time. What would cause a battery’s failure rate to decrease at some point in the future?
The only thing I can think of is that the author is trying to describe the total number of reported failures over a product’s lifetime. As the product is removed from service later in its lifetime of course the number of failures that get reported would decrease because there are far fewer of the products still in use. But that’s not the definition of failure rate within the scope of reliability engineering.
...the 6 was bought Black Friday 2022...
One reason I buy the "Max" versions of iPhone is because the battery is considerably larger than the standard models. You don't have to charge it as often so the battery will accumulate fewer cycles over its life, plus there's more reserve capacity allowing more tolerance for degradation.
Battery health is at best a rough estimate, as the only way to measure actual capacity would be to fully charge; rest for 5 hours at full; fully discharge and rest for 5 hours after discharge; then charge again. Performing that procedure allows the battery gas gauge to re-learn the capacity. It's worth trying if you find your health has degraded more than expected.
Keep in mind that every unit has its own failure curve. The failure rate curves that are produced by reliability analysis are done with large sample sizes and by applying statistical methodology. If you wanted to talk about bell curves and normal distributions you could probably say that the population of products that conform to a product’s predicted “bathtub curve” failure rate model is based on a bell curve model, where the majority tend to follow the predicted failure rate curves and there is a distribution and outliers on both sides that don’t follow the predictions at all, both better and worse.
Getting back to iPhone 14 battery drain, my iPhone 14 Pro Max is still at 100% after about 9 months of use. I don’t do anything special to affect battery life and leave it all up to the iPhone’s charging circuitry. I’ve never tried to babysit my products and rely on them to do their jobs as designed. I very rarely unplug or turn off any of my computers, PCS and Macs, but just let them sleep. Some of them have essentially been running for more than a decade with occasional cleaning and making sure airflow to cooling fans and ports is okay.
If I was investigating why an iPhone or Mac was losing battery capacity in an accelerated manner I’d take a look at what’s running and the CPU load, number of active threads, etc., kind of things. Apple is always adding more background processes for all of the new features, e.g., crash detection, so you’d have to at least consider that the device is being asked to do more when you think it’s idle. Same thing with notifications and constant updates for social media apps like TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I’d want to know what the heck is going on to consume more CPU cycles and battery capacity, if indeed that’s the case.
I'd love there to be an iOS Shortcut action to trigger this. Then I could script when I don't need a full charge...
Sure, I'm just relaying my experience. This phone stands out compared to my experience with the iPhone X, 11, and 12 that preceded it. At no point in the lives of those previous phones did I feel a need to charge the phone before the end of the day like I do now. Yes, there are loads of variables, but it's a noticeable change and the experience is a loss greater than the 7% the phone reports would suggest. I cannot recall reaching sub-20% battery in a normal day with any of those previous models.
Which maybe takes us back to @Mike Wuerthele's (very wide) bell curve.