How to check your iPad’s battery health in a few easy steps

Apple has made it very easy to check battery health on your iPhone or MacBook, but for some reason has deterred iPad users from doing the same. On an iPhone or MacBook, checking battery health is as simple as heading to Setting > Battery, and looking at the battery health percentage. On iPad, you need to use a more convoluted workaround.

Why is battery health important?

A simplified explanation is that batteries are cells that use chemical reactions to generate electricity. The chemicals in the battery degrade over time, resulting in a drop in the battery’s ability to store and generate electricity. Every time you charge or discharge a battery, the chemicals degrade. The rate of degradation varies depending on several factors, but generally, batteries such as the ones used by Apple retain up to 80 per cent of their original capacity after 1,000 charge cycles. Charging once a day gives an approximate useful life of 2.7 years.

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In Apple’s case, once the battery degrades to the point where it can’t hold more than 80 per cent of its capacity, the device will slow down to compensate for the loss. It’s at this point that Apple recommends getting the battery replaced at an authorised service centre. In fact, if your Apple device seems slower than usual, especially if it’s an old device, a simple battery replacement might lend it a new lease of life!

Again, we’re not sure why Apple doesn’t allow iPad users to easily check the health of their device’s batteries, given that iPads tend to last a really long time, which can be further extended by a relatively inexpensive battery replacement. We say relative only because it’s cheaper to replace the battery than to buy a new iPad.

How to check battery health on an iPad

If you don’t want to install third-party apps, the only way to check battery health on an iPad is as follows:

1. Head to ‘Settings’ > ‘Privacy & Security’ > ‘Analytics & Improvements.’

2. Tap on the ‘Share iPad Analytics’ toggle switch to enable the feature.

Assuming you’re sharing analytics data with Apple, you will be presented with log files with a whole bunch of seemingly unintelligible text.

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3. Tap on ‘Analytics Data’. Open the first file in the list titled in a format similar to ‘Analystics-2024-05-24-102749.ips.ca.synced’. The date and time value will change depending on when you’re trying to access the file.

4. Copy and paste the text into a document and search for ‘MaximumCapacityPercent’.

The number after that figure indicates the current maximum capacity of the battery. If the number is significantly less than 80 per cent and you’re facing stuttering and other performance issues, it would be best to get your battery replaced immediately. 

The MaximumCapacityPercent number isn’t always accurate, which is why we’d recommend looking at whether it’s significantly lower than 80 per cent. For a more accurate estimate, divide the values for ‘NominalChargeCapacity’ by ‘MaximumFCC’ and multiply by 100. The variation will only be about 5 per cent, so it’s usually not worth going through this much effort, however.

Keeping tabs on battery health is important to ensure that you’re getting the maximum performance from your device. It’s also a useful indicator of any underlying issues such as a battery that is discharging at an unsafe rate. We’re not sure why Apple doesn’t make this data easily available to iPad users, but we’re hoping that it was a simple oversight and that the feature will arrive in the next version of iPadOS.