Why does my battery drain so fast?

Whether it’s your laptop, iPhone or iPad, over time your battery life will start to go downhill and your device will die sooner than it used to. Unfortunately, this is normal for lithium-ion batteries and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You can slow down the degrading of your battery by following specific charging habits and Apple has recently made a lot of improvements in this area. You can enable optimized battery charging which will basically learn your charging schedule and only charge your device past 80% before you’re about to unplug and start using your device again. It’s the full cycle from 100% to 0% that puts the most wear on your battery so optimizing the charging and not pumping it all the way to 100% immediately will improve your battery’s lifetime. However, it will still lose its capacity over time as it goes through more and more charging cycles.

How to check your battery health

A lot of Apple devices now have built-in options to check your battery health. On the iPhone you can see your battery health report under Settings – Battery – Battery Health & Charging. On a Mac you get the same overview under System Settings – Battery.

These are good tools for doing a quick check on your battery’s condition, but if you want to dig a little deeper there’s a great free tool for that. Coconut battery has been around long before Apple offered any way to check your battery health, and even now it shows you a lot more than Apple does. With Coconut battery you’ll see your device’s battery health, charging cycle count and the age and manufacturer of your battery.

Apple considers 80% and above to be a healthy battery. Anything under that and you’ll start noticing your battery life getting shorter and shorter. My iPhone is currently at 73% and according to the notification in settings my battery’s health is “significantly degraded” and a replacement is recommended. I definitely notice the difference but I think my phone is still fine. I’ll probably use this battery for another year or two and then it might be time to upgrade to a new phone anyway.

Do you check your battery health? Do you actively do something to try to improve battery health? Let us know in the comments.