With the iPhone 15 lineup released last year, Apple introduced an optional battery setting to limit the maximum charge to 80%, in an effort to improve battery life. We set our iPhone to this 80% limit from September 2023 to today. The results are surprising!
A useful feature according to our tests
After nine months, the battery capacity of our test iPhone 15 Pro was still at 100%, with 161 charge cycles. And two months later, on September 25, we are still at 100% and 197 cycles. Looking around at colleagues, friends, and readers, this is an unusual case, but not uncommon either. Most of you have lost a few percent. The average seems to be above 95%, which is 5 to 10% higher than that of an equivalent model that did not use optimized charging.
It’s true that it’s not always easy to last the whole day, but with a USB-C port that makes it easy to charge anywhere, it’s not impossible. In the worst case scenario, a MagSafe external battery can greatly help.
Coming back to the limited charge, you should know that the iPhone is not completely limited to 80 or 90% (or other value in the settings). Sometimes, depending on your habits, the iPhone charges itself up to 100%. This is also a function designed to keep the battery calibrated. In our case, we recharged about half in USB-C, half wirelessly via MagSafe.
After a year, the exercise has proven conclusive, limiting the number of cycles and the deterioration of the battery. It will be necessary to reassess after two years, to see the decline or not of the health of the battery. Generally, it is between the second and third year that an iPhone goes below 80% capacity, which leads to a drop in autonomy and / or performance, depending on your settings.
For this iPhone 15 Pro and the editorial team’s new iPhone 16 Pro, we set the limit to 90% to study a possible impact.
