Here’s How to Monitor Your iPhone Battery Health from your phone or Mac [UPDATE]

Now that we know Apple controls device performance on older iPhones to avoid battery-related issues, maybe it’s time to pay closer attention to your battery’s health. You can do that easily from your iPhone or your Mac. Read on to learn how.

iPhones with older batteries were shutting off without warning, so Apple addressed the problem by essentially slowing down the processor. The issue was that the occasional peak power spike the processor needed over taxed batteries that couldn’t hold a full charge any longer. By spreading the processor requests over more cycles the battery strain was reduced and the phones stopped randomly shutting off.

If you want to track your battery’s overall health so you know what to expect from your iPhone’s performance you can do that from your phone or your Mac, and it doesn’t have to cost any money.

Checking Your iPhone Battery Health on Your Phone

If you want to monitor your iPhone’s overall battery health from your phone check out Battery Life. The app shows your current charge, wear level, and run time. You can see your charge history, too. If you don’t want to see adds and think additional data in the Today widget and Apple Watch app would be handy, that’s a US$1.99 in-app purchase.

Checking Your iPhone Battery Health on Your Mac

You can monitor your iPhone’s battery health from your Mac with coconutBattery. The app is popular staying on top of your Mac’s battery and it’s also great for seeing how your iPhone and iPad battery is holding up. You’ll need to connect your iPhone to your Mac’s USB port to see your phone’s charge and overall capacity, plus you can see details like model number, serial number, and manufacture date. coconutBattery is free and you can upgrade to coconutBattery Plus with additional device data for $9.95.

Apple isn’t saying what it’s threshold is for reducing performance for weak batteries, but anecdotally it looks like when your battery won’t charge beyond 80% of original capacity you’ll see the change. That number comes from several Reddit users saying that’s when they noticed their iPhone got slower, so if nothing else it’s a nice marker point for watching to see if your performance degrades.

[Updated with information about the battery threshold for lower performance]