[Schnitz]

What is the logic or science behind that claim? I’ve fast charged my iPhone 16 pro (heavy user) daily if not more often for a year using Apple chargers with the charge limit set to 80%. Remaining battery capacity is still 100%, which is something I’ve never had after a whole year. Fast charge doesn’t seem to hurt.

[ryukoposting]

My guess is that, from the factory, Apple's firmware doesn't actually charge the battery all the way up to its 4.2V "full" threshold. It's probably stopping at 4.12 Volts, or something like that. Then, that threshold will slowly rise over the years in order to keep perceived battery life consistent. Eventually, after several hundred (or maybe a couple thousand) cycles, the threshold stops rising at around 4.2 Volts, and that's when you'll start to see the "battery health" number start to decline.

While I'm not an Apple engineer, I am an embedded systems engineer. I promise you, this kind of trickery is commonplace in consumer electronics. It's also far more common in expensive stuff (phones, laptops) than in cheap stuff (power banks, vapes). Cheap stuff could do this, it's not hard, but the people making those devices don't get paid enough to care.

Point being: A lithium ion battery's capacity is reduced every time you charge it - sometimes by only a couple mAh, but still. This is intrinsic to the chemistry. Your phone is doing things behind the scenes to mitigate that wear, but wear still happens. If you intend to keep your phone beyond its designed 2-3 year lifespan, it behooves you to keep charging current down.

[rr808]

> Fast charge doesn’t seem to hurt.

For me a year is nothing though, my phone is on its 4th year, my daughter has my old iphone X.

[Schnitz]

Yes but if after 1 year I’m at 100% battery health then isn’t it reasonable to assume that what I’m doing isn’t significantly harming my battery and I can continue like this for several more years? On previous iPhones where I didn’t use the 80% charge limit battery health dropped mostly linearly over the 3-5 years that I had the phone.

[Eisenstein]

The logic is that is causes the battery to get hotter.