Apple's 80% iPhone Charging Limit: How Much It Has Helped After a Year

Is it worth reducing the charge level on the iPhone 15 Pro Max/Apple

In the iPhone 15 models that came out last year, Apple added the option to adjust the battery. It limits the maximum charge level to 80 percent.

The idea is that never charging your iPhone above 80% will increase battery life. Therefore, the editor of MacRumors kept his iPhone at 80% from September 2023 until now, without any manipulation.

HisiPhone 15 Pro Max battery is currently at 94 percent after 299 cycles. For most of 2024, the battery level remained above 97 percent, but in the last couple of months it has started to decline faster.

He left his iPhone at 80 percent and never turned off or changed any settings. There were days when the battery would die because he was without a charger for most of the day, and there were days when he had to carry a power bank with him to keep it from running out. It wasn't always convenient to keep the charge at 80 percent, but there were days when it didn't affect performance too much.

It was always nice when the iPhone randomly decided to charge to 100 percent, which is something Apple built into the 80 percent limit to ensure the battery level stays calibrated.

Mostly it charged through USB-C, not via MagSafe, but sometimes charged via MagSafe. It was probably a 70/30 ratio between wired and MagSafe charging. It often let its battery run down before charging, and it didn't sit on the charger very often for long periods of time.

I don't have a lot of data to compare, but it looks like the charge limit up to 80% allowed me to keep the maximum battery capacity higher than my colleagues, but there is no significant difference. I got four percent more battery life in 28 cycles, and I'm not sure the suffering of being limited to 80 percent charge for 12 months was worth it,
he noted.

It's possible that the real benefits of the 80 percent limit will appear in two to three years, not in one year. And he'll keep it at 80 percent to see the long-term impact.