Need some iPhone 14 charging tips? These are the facts and habits you need to maximize your phone battery’s longevity.
iPhone users — casual and enthusiasts alike — are forever searching for longer battery life. While fast charging keeps us topped up every day, the absence of replaceable batteries means eventually, the lithium-ion cells enclosed in our phones are going to age and deteriorate, making it harder to maximize battery life.
If you’ve used iPhones a couple of years, you’ve probably noticed the battery doesn’t seem to last as long as it did when your handset was brand new. Three years down the line, many phones struggle to make it through the day on a single charge. Holding onto a phone even longer can even spell trouble for system stability.
Unfortunately, battery capacity inevitably declines with age. However, there are cool iPhone 14 charging tips you can use to prolong the life of your battery. If you’ve ever wondered what the best way to charge your iPhone’s battery is, here are some scientifically proven tips to maximize battery life.
iPhone 14 charging tips
Partial charging is a healthy habit
One particularly persistent battery myth is that you need to occasionally fully discharge and recharge to erase “battery memory.” This couldn’t be more wrong for lithium-ion batteries. It’s a leftover myth from lead-acid cells, and it’s pretty undesirable to charge your iPhone 14 in this way.
Partial charging is just fine for lithium-ion batteries and can have some great benefits for cell longevity. To understand why it’s important to appreciate how a battery charges. Li-ion batteries draw constant current and operate at a lower voltage when closer to empty. This voltage gradually increases as the cell charges up, leveling off at around a 70% charge before the current begins to fall until the capacity is full.
Notably, operating at a low voltage is good for a battery’s lifespan, increasing the number of available charging cycles before you’ll start to see a significant reduction in capacity. Roughly speaking, every 0.1V decrease in cell voltage doubles the cycle life, according to Battery University. Therefore, charging up your phone in that 30% to 80% range keeps the voltage lower and might slightly prolong the battery’s lifespan.
Smaller but regular top-ups are much better for Li-ion batteries than long full charge cycles.
Using up just 20% of your battery between charges isn’t practical, but topping up when you’ve used about half will see an improvement in your battery life over the long term. Especially if you avoid charging up to full each time too. The bottom line is that smaller, regular top-ups are better for Li-ion batteries than long full charge cycles.
Avoid idle charging
Charging overnight is a very common habit, but it’s best to avoid, despite the convenience of waking up with a full battery in the morning. Each full charge counts as a ‘cycle’, and the iPhone 14 is only built to last for a set number.
If you charge overnight, you are guaranteed to miss when the phone exceeds the magic 80% mark that is best for extended long-term life.
While the iPhone 14 has built-in sensors to shut off charging when it hit 100%, if still turned on it’ll lose a small amount of battery while idle.
What you may get is a “trickle charge” as the charger attempts to keep the iPhone at 100% as your phone naturally loses on its own charge during the night. This means that your iPhone is constantly bouncing between a full charge and a little bit below that full charge – 99% to 100% and back again during a longer-than-required charge. It can also heat the iPhone up, which is also bad for the battery.
So, a great iPhone 14 charging trick is to charge during the day than to charge overnight.
Your best policy is to have Do Not Disturb and Airplane Mode switched on. Better still, you could completely switch off your iPhone, but that may not be possible if you rely on it as an alarm or wish to be ready to take calls at all hours.
If you are leaving your iPhone plugged in for a long period of time, removing the case can prevent it over-heating.
A final iPhone 14 charging tip that’s worth mentioning is parasitic load. This occurs when the battery is being drained significantly at the same time as being charged, such as watching a video or gaming while charging.
Parasitic loads are bad for batteries because they distort the charging cycle and induce mini-cycles — where part of the battery continually cycles and deteriorates faster than the rest of the cell. Worse still, parasitic loads occurring when a device is fully charged also induce higher voltage stress and heat on the battery.
Gaming or watching videos while charging is bad because it distort charging cycles.
The best way to avoid parasitic loads is to turn your iPhone off while charging. But that’s not really realistic. Instead, it’s best to keep the workload light while the device is plugged in, leaving it idle most of the time. Browsing the web is probably fine. Also, remember to unplug it once the battery is topped up enough.
Heat is the enemy of long battery life
Along with all of the above iPhone 14 charging tips, temperature is an equally key contributor to longevity and maximizing battery life. In fact, it’s arguably the biggest killer of long-term battery health. Like high voltages, high temperatures stress the battery and make it lose capacity far more quickly than when kept at lower temperatures.
A cell kept between 25 – 40 degrees Celsius (77 – 86 degrees Fahrenheit) should retain around 85% to 96% of its capacity after the first year with sensible charging cycles. Raising the temperature regularly above 40°C (104°F) and charging to 100% sees this fall to just 65% capacity after the first year, and a 60°C (140°F) battery temperature will hit this marker in as little as three months.
The ideal temperature to maximise battery cycle life is below 40°C
A battery dwelling in a full state-of-charge exposed to a high temperature is the worst of all worlds and the number one thing to avoid when charging your iPhone. So a cool iPhone 14 charging trick is to never leave your phone under your pillow to charge at night or plugged in on the dashboard of your car on a hot day.
Use MFi Certified charging accessories
Another iPhone 14 charging tip is to use the charging accessory that came with your phone, as it is sure to have the correct rating. Or make sure that a third-party charging accessory is approved by Apple. Cheap alternatives from Amazon or eBay may damage your iPhone, and there have been several reported cases of cheap charging accessories actually bursting into flames.
That said, your iPhone should draw only the power that it needs from a charger.
How to maximize battery life long-term
Lithium-ion battery technology is well understood these days, and iPhones are built around our use cases, but bad habits and myths still permeate the public consciousness. While most of these habits won’t severely negatively impact your iPhone’s battery life in the medium term, the decline in removable phone batteries means we should take extra precautions to maximize battery life and thus our iPhone’s longevity.
Broadly speaking, smaller regular charge cycles and keeping your phone cool are the main iPhone 14 charging tips to keep in mind.
Here’s a TL;DR summary of the iPhone 14 charging tips above:
What’s the best way to charge your iPhone 14?
- Avoid full cycle (0-100%) and overnight charging. Instead, top up your iPhone more regularly with partial charges.
- Ending a charge at 80-90% is better for the battery than topping up to completely full.
- Heat is the battery killer. Don’t cover your iPhone when charging, and keep it out of hot places.
- Don’t play intensive games, stream videos, or run other intensive workloads while charging to avoid heat and mini-cycles.
- Use MFi certified chargers
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