The 80% rule when it comes to charging up your electric vehicle has been widely accepted as the best practice for maintaining the lifespan of your vehicle’s battery. Perhaps it’s with that in mind that led Apple to introduce its own 80% rule, this time with its iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro smartphones.
As highlighted by The Verge’s Allison Johnson, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro will come with a new Charging Optimisation options under the battery health and charging menu. It seems that on top of the regular Optimised Battery Charging setting that is already on current iPhone models which slows down charging speeds once your iPhone hits 80%, Cupertino’s new smartphones will allow you to set a hard limit on battery life to 80% altogether. This means that your iPhone will never be able to charge past that point at all. Incidentally, it seems that you can also turn off all of the iPhone battery health features too.
The battery life of the iPhone has always been a talking point, and especially so with last year’s iPhones. It was reported that iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro users were seeing battery capacity falling off by as much as 10% a year after getting their hands on it. This hard cap on battery charging to 80% could be one way to satisfy the critics, though I’m still not entirely convinced on the prospect of limiting yourself to just 80% of your brand new iPhone’s battery capacity, in fear of it possibly dropping down to 80% a couple years later.
It’s also worth noting that Apple had not upgraded the battery on their fresh batch of smartphones. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is still rated for up to 29 hours of video playback, the same as its predecessor, while the iPhone 15 Pro is also rated for up to 23 hours of playback like the iPhone 14 Pro. Similarly, the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus have the same rated battery life of 20 hours and 26 hours respectively, just like before. That being said, if you’re limiting yourself to just 80% of the iPhone 15’s battery, you’ll be getting fewer hours of battery life.
