How to Keep Macbook, iPhone, and iPad Battery as Healthy as Possible
Tags: News, Apple, Battery, Health, Mac

Photo by radovan on Unsplash

Your device’s battery is not immortal aka it does have a limited life span. Every time you use your device and then charge, it will lose some of its life. In order to make your battery lifespan last as long as possible before you need to replace it, here are some explanations, software, and behavior that I already did and collect from other sources that will help you achieve that healthy battery.

Just think about this for a second. Humans love alot of things. The way food tastes, the way music sounds, focusing on highly intense movie scenes, driving their cars, playing with their kids, and so on. What allows ANY of it to be possible? The brain.

Explanations

Battery Type

From their official website, they tell us that their devices are using Lithium-Ion battery type. Not just Apple, most of all rechargeable electronic devices are using this type of battery.

The lithium-Ion battery emerges in the early of 1990s after the dominance of the Nickel-Cadmium battery. This Li-on battery has some advantages over the old battery type, some of them are:

The energy density is twice from the Nickel-Cadmium battery.

High cell voltage (3.6 volts) allows the battery pack design with only 1 cell, which is the number of cells that most of the smartphone uses.

Low maintenance battery. There is no memory and scheduled cycling is required to prolonged the battery life.

many more, you can see all the explanation of Li-ion battery from here https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/archive/is_lithium_ion_the_ideal_battery

Apple Li-on Battery

Apple already tweaks and improve the performance of the batteries with their own software and hardware. This is what makes Apple’s device battery lifespan is good, or maybe better than other brand’s devices. There are 2 features that you need to know regarding the Apple Li-on battery:

They charge fast until 80% and then charge slowly to reach 100%. That slow charge will prolong your device’s battery life. Software optimized. Your device will stop charging based on your behavior, or your device’s temperature. This will prevent our battery to be overcharged.

Charge Cycle

Li-on battery lifespan can be determined by its cycle. The more you have, the less full charge capacity you might have. The charge cycle is counted every time you charge the device. 1 charge cycle is counted when the battery is charged from 0% to 100%.

This can also be cumulated when you do partial charge. Let say that you charge your battery from 75% to 100%, that time you got a 1/4 cycle charge. The next time you use your device again until it reaches 50% and then your charge again to 100%, now you have completed 3/4 of 1 cycle charge because of accumulation with the previous charge.

Heat or Room Temperature

Every electronic device including a battery is having a common enemy which is heat. The battery of your device lifespan will decrease faster whenever you operate the device in a hot or cold environment.

Software and Feature

There are many software and features that can help to determine the health status of our battery. With this software (or feature if it natively exists in Apple device) we can know whether our battery is still healthy, or not.

System Report on Macbook

To see your battery status on your Macbook without any 3rd party software, you can see it on the System Report feature inside macOS. To access that you just need to click: About this mac > System Report > Power. You can see the cycle and condition of your battery.

System Report Macbook

Battery Health on iPhone

Even though we don’t have System Report on our iPhone, we can see the battery health status via Battery settings in the iOS setting’s menu. Just tap Setting >Battery > Battery Health. You can see information about Maximum capacity, battery status, and an option to help your battery’s lifespan last longer.

Battery Health iPhone

CoconutBattery

This is a very useful Mac App that every Mac user should have. CoconutBattery can tell us detailed information about our device’s battery. Just download the app from here https://coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/, and you can see all information about your Apple device’s battery status.

CoconutBattery information.

Behavior

Now is the main topic of this article. These are all my experiences that made my battery is already not good enough and some information that I got from multiple sources to help me prevent my battery to become worse, and it’s actually working.

For Macbook, Always Use Power Outlet Whenever it’s Possible

If you are working and you can connect your Macbook to a power outlet, just use it. When you use your Macbook and it’s connected to a power source, it won’t use your battery (it still uses but very small usage). It’s done by the macOS system, so don’t be afraid it will make your Macbook overcharge. Doing this behavior, your charge cycle will raise with a very small amount. You can see on my coconutBattery screenshot from September until November, my battery cycle improved very fast, it was because I always use my Macbook without a power source and charge it when the laptop battery is very low (usually at 5%).

macOS automatically hold the charge.

For New Macbook, Check the Optimize Battery Health Options

MacBook that has thunderbolt 3 port and using macOS Catalina version and later, can have these feature. You can access the options by clicking: Battery icon > Battery preferences. Check the Optimized battery charging option and Manage battery longevity inside the Battery Health.. menu.

battery options

For iPhone and iPad, Don’t Use Heavy Resources Apps While Charging

Using a heavy resource App on iPhone and iPad can make the devices warm, especially on the iPhone. The warm device can also happen when we charge our device. You can tell that if we combine these 2 together, our device will become much warmer and maybe hotter. This is not a good condition for your battery. So, it will be better if you charge the device after you are done using the heavy resource app on the device.

For iPhone, Turn on Optimized Battery Charging

In the latest version of iOS, it has a new option that can be enabled from Battery Setting. You just need to enable Optimized Battery Charging and the OS will help you manage the charging mechanism of your device. One of the mechanism is the OS help us by disconnect the charge and reconnect based on our behavior when using the device. This is so helpful when we charge our device at night when we are sleeping.

Same with Macbook, Charge as Soon as You can

Photo by Brian Patrick Tagalog on Unsplash

iPhone, iPad, and Macbook have the same type of battery, therefore they use the same cycle mechanism. We need to minimize the escalation of this cycle on our device. The only way to do this is to charge your device as soon as possible. The worst choice of charging behavior is always to use the device battery until it got a very low battery percentage, and charge it until 100%.

It’s Okay to Charge Overnight, But..

You can charge your device at night when you’re sleeping, but make sure you turn on the option for Optimized Battery Charging and if you have, use a slow charge adapter. Using a fast charger is not so good for charging overnight, because we don’t actually need it and a fast charger makes our device a little warmer than the standard power brick.

For All Apple Devices

Photo by Igor Son on Unsplash

Again, the common enemy of electronic devices and its battery is heat. So use your device in an environment that isn’t too hot and too cold (room temperature is fine). If you feel your device is getting hotter, you should stop using it for a few minutes. For Macbook that has fan(s) you can use an application such as Mac Fan Control to customize the fan speed and the time it starts kicking.

A Little Note

Keeping the health of our device’s battery is great, but make sure that behavior isn’t making our main job and activity distracted. Your smart devices are there to help you do the job, not for making it more complex. At the end of the day, if your battery’s condition is not good anymore you can replace it with a new one.