The battery continues to be one of the critical points of every device, whether it is a mobile phone, smart watch or tablet. If you have a battery, you are subject to its inevitable degradation and thus the gradual reduction of ultimate autonomy. We can use a measurement called charge cycle to estimate the health of the battery or know if something is going wrong, and now with the arrival of iOS 17.4 we know that data on iPhones is easier than ever.

Load cycles? Let’s start from the beginning. A charging cycle occurs every time we use 100% of the battery, no matter how we do it. If we use the battery from 100% to 0% one day, it is a cycle. If you spend 25% one day and 75% the next day, it’s a cycle. If you spend 10% every day for ten days, it’s a cycle.

Battery degradation. As we increase the charging cycles, that is, charging and discharging the mobile phone, we increase the degradation of the battery. Charging and discharging the battery is a chemical process that consists of moving electrons from one point to another, and in this process, the materials that make up the battery are eroded. This is inevitable, and although work is being done to reduce degradation and even on alternative materials to the classic lithium-ion, the truth is that we cannot prevent battery degradation.

Batteries have a useful life. So how is this useful life measured? It’s really in the charging cycles. Considering that we are dealing with iOS 17.4 and iPhones today, we can give a simple example: According to Apple, the iPhone 15’s battery can maintain 80% of its capacity after 1,000 charging cycles. In other words, if the battery of an iPhone 15 fresh out of the box gives us 10 hours of autonomy, we can expect it to give us eight hours when we complete a thousand charging cycles (equivalent to charging the mobile phone from 0 to 100% every day for 2.7 years) .

How to learn battery cycles? Until now, this was not an easy task because iPhones only displayed the health of the battery in percentages (100%, 87%…). Knowing when it’s actually time to replace the battery is an interesting fact, but it tells us little about our charging habits or whether there’s something wrong with the battery. Doing 500 cycles and having 90% is not the same as doing 20 cycles and suffering a lot of degradation.

Know your iPhone’s charging cycles | Captured: Xataka

Things are changing with iOS 17.4. The new version of iOS brings with it many new features (largely related to the introduction of DMA) but also the battery. And now we can know the exact cycles and date of first use. To do this, simply go to Settings > Battery > Battery health. The exact data will appear there and we will be able to find out whether our battery is good or, on the contrary, we have too high a degradation for the cycles we use.

Pictures | Xataka

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