The latest iPhones show the devices’ battery cycle count, helping users track the long-term “health” of the battery. Displaying this data is simple, though it’s somewhat hidden.
In addition, you can check when the iPhone 15 or 16 was manufactured and first activated. (Note: This does not work with previous iPhones.)
Batteries have a limited lifespan
Diamonds are forever but batteries are not. Lithium-ion batteries in phones, laptops, etc., inevitably wear out. Each one comes with a limited number of times it can be charged and discharged. A general range to expect is 300 to 500 charge cycles, but Apple uses such high-quality batteries in the iPhone 15 and 16 series that you can expect two or three times that many cycles. Checking your iPhone battery cycle count can give you insight into your usage habits as well as the battery’s health.
However, checking the iPhone battery cycle count is not as easy as it sounds. Simply plugging in the device to charge does not mark the start of a new cycle. That happens only after all of the battery’s power has been expended.
“You could use half of your laptop’s charge in one day, and then recharge it fully,” Apple says in a support document about battery life in MacBooks. “If you did the same thing the next day, it would count as one charge cycle, not two. In this example, it might take several days to complete a cycle.”
Knowing how many cycles a battery has been through gives a rough approximation of how heavily the device has been used — and therefore how much life it has left.
How to check the iPhone 15 and 16 battery cycle count
Image: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac
To check your iPhone battery cycle count, open the Settings app and scroll down to the Battery section. Now tap on Battery Health. You’ll see Cycle Count clearly listed. Also displayed in that section is the month the iPhone was manufactured, as well as the month it was first used.
At one point, Apple buried the cycle count information in the About section of the Settings app. However, that made no sense and is no longer true.
Tracking iPhone battery health
The iPhone battery cycle count serves as an approximate way of determining the health of a battery. Subtracting the number of cycles already used from the estimated lifetime expectation gives a general sense of how much longer a battery will function. And the expectation is high: “Batteries of iPhone 15 models are designed to retain 80% of their original capacity at 1000 complete charge cycles under ideal conditions,” Apple says.
However, iPhone users don’t need to depend on this one method. You can look in Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health to see how much using the iPhone has reduced the total amount of power it can store. That’s the Maximum Capacity entry. The guideline is that a battery that provides less than 80% of maximum capacity should be replaced.
In the example in the screenshots above, the iPhone 15 has undergone 232 charging cycles since September 2023, and its Maximum Capacity is at 98%. That gives the handset a Normal battery level.
We originally published this article on how to check your iPhone battery cycle count on October 6, 2023. We updated the information.
