Obviously “it’s not you, it is me.“ 
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I was on 80% but my phone gave me a notification that with my usage patterns I should set it to 95%, so I’ve used that since. After a year, I’ve 97% capacity, which seems good to me.
It probably suggested this because I do a lot of international travel and use often cannot charge it regularly.
I just assumed the words above or below a link are the posters words. No big deal though.
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Even with the 80% limit. I still think how you charge greatly impacts battery health. Regardless of whether it is ‘limited’ or not.
I have a 16 Pro manufactured in September 2024.
342 Cycles. 94% Battery Health.
I had the 80% limit set from first use in October 2024.
This is by far the lowest my battery health has ever been, however this is also the most lapse I have ever been with how it’s been charged. Quick top ups here and there, quick charges to get it to turn on and up to 15-20% when it has died mid flow. Regular times of stick it on charge and taking it off when it gets up to 60% and I need to rush out.
So I think the charge limit has its place definitely.
With one caveat of its important to understand exactly how batteries work, charging etc
Equally, as others have alluded to in here. I think it’s also luck of the draw with the battery you get in your phone!
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The beauty of LION is that it doesn’t matter if you charge from 20% to 80% or 6 times by 10% it’s the same wear on the battery.
What harms the battery the most is when you leave it charged above 80% or below 20% for long periods of time.
That’s why guidance is that if you’re not going to use it for a long time, charge it to about 50% and turn it off.
Sounds fair, I’ll go away and do some more reading on it!
I have an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and I’ll share my stats here.
The device was manufactured 25 months ago, the battery has 317 cycles, and maximum capacity is at 86%. My charge limit is at 95%, and the “Recommended charge limit” by iOS 26 is 90%. These numbers are not that different from the writer (in fact, I have way too many recharge cycles with a worse maximum capacity) but I don’t consider the performance to be terrible. Yes, I’ve noticed it does not last as it did but it still lasts me a whole day: if I am putting my Apple Watch to charge during dinner time, I might as well charge the phone. And get the watch before going to bed and leaving the phone charing all the night.
Not sure if charging up to 95% is worse or better than 80%, but it’s like giving up 15% of the daily battery capacity that I have paid for, given that the life of the battery seems to be the same… well, I just leave it at 95%.
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I have a similar use case, and my 4 year old iPhone 13 is at 88% capacity. Don’t know what I would get if I did the 80% thing, but not using the 80% limit is one less fiddly.
I do limit my Windows laptop to 80% since it cost about twice a much as the iPhone, and I have it plugged in all of the time. I discharge it to about 20% once a week, so it takes some attention.
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I’m not the OP but there IS the idea floating around that charging above 80% is harder on the watch than keeping it in the 20–80 range. OTOH, that means you only have 60% of the capacity available and so you risk running out of juice when you’re away from a charger.
I use the Charging option to only go up to 95%, which gives me almost full power availability and the hope that it’ll extend the battery life on my 2yo phone. As Bmosbacker sez, YMMV.
My assumption is that Apple engineers know what they are doing, and if they built the 80% limit into the system, they probably have a good reason for doing so. For now, I’m going to take a twofold approach: 1) keep the maximum charge at 80%, and 2) as I did this week, change it to 100% when traveling.
I try not to be on my phone constantly, so I should normally not run out of juice before I can charge it at night.
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As a counterpoint, maybe Apple figures it doesn’t help very often (or ever), but Android users see it as a barrier to switching?
I use 95% currently. Was 80% until this month, but I’m getting sick of playing a brief game and being in the low 70s. My phone is often wirelessly charging, and often on my desk, and surely heat is bad right? But also, if the heat is under a threshold maybe it just doesn’t make a noticeable difference long term…? Anyway, my guess is that they got sick of people complaining they didn’t have a software feature so they added it to keep people from complaining.
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That sounds like a good strategy.
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I suspect Apple‘s decision-making is a bit more strategic than that, at least I certainly hope so.
I got seven years of battery life out of my 2018 iPhone XS. Only recently (in 2025) when the battery began to consistently show a max charge capacity below 80%, did I trade it in for an iPhone 16e (and got $80 for the XS at the Apple Store.)
My iPhone XS spent its life in an OtterBox Defender case and looked as good when I removed the case as the day I bought it.
I never used a fast charger with it. I plugged it into a charger when the battery dropped below 40% and unplugged it when the battery passed the 80% mark. I used several Apple shortcuts (automations) to verbally notify me at those charge levels. At 40% the automation was also able to turn on Low Power mode.
My battery practices were in line with what is recommended at the excellent Battery University.
I waited a long time for Apple to add a Charge Limit feature to their iPhones. Now that it is here, it does make my life a little simpler as I don’t have to so carefully watch and unplug as the battery nears 80% charge.
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I have been using my iPhone 16 Pro Max for a year. I enabled the 80% limit a few weeks after I bought the phone.
About two weeks ago, my battery health showed 100%. It has dropped to 98% now with 216 charge cycles.
Was it worth it for me to use the 80% option? It is complicated. This is the first time I have bothered about this setting. I did not care about that with my last iPhone (one year ago):
So, the iPhone 15 Pro Max battery was able to achieve 100% max capacity after one year because of my charging habits described in the quoted topic above without having the 80% setting enabled:
The iPhone gets its charge daily during the night between 3:30 and 6:30 a.m. via the Belkin Boost Charge Pro 3-in-1 Wireless Charger (the charger is sitting behind a smart plug that turns the power on and off at the times mentioned above).
With just the normal settings (optimized charging, no fixed level of 80%, daily charging for three hours, at always the exact same times - Apple is able to do its job preserving my battery’s health under those circumstances, without the 80% limit). And I get to use the full battery’s capacity if needed.
My iPhone 16 Pro Max battery still is in good shape after one year, but it is not at 100%, even with the 80% limit activated.
So, how did I get through my days with 80% enabled throughout the year? Well, mostly everything was just fine. But there have been days where I needed to look for an opportunity to charge my iPhone some days. And there have been days (probably a few dozen days over the year) when I ended up with 20% or a little less in the evening, which is not good for the battery either.
So, was it worth the hassle to limit myself to 80% battery given my personal experience? I think probably not in my case.
I am considering going back to optimized charging without caring about anything else.
Given my daily charging pattern of three hours from 3:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., the OS is able to charge to 80% and to only push the battery to 100% at about 6:30 a.m. Then the iPhone is being disconnected from the charger, and I am using it so that the battery level is going down under normal use, so that the battery will not stay at 100% for a long time.
The 80% limit is just great if you are reliably able to get through the day using less than 60% of the battery’s capacity. I am not able to do that, at least not every day.
EDIT:
I just switched to 100% and only then did I receive the prompt that a limit of 100% could degrade my battery health sooner and that - given my usage patterns - I should set the charge limit to 85%. Well, 85% it is then. Let’s see how this will play out. 
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I hope I didn’t miss this, but my search on this page for “laptop” only found one instance, where someone said they limited their Windows laptop to 80%. Does MacOS have controls for this on laptops? I didn’t see anything in the Battery System Setting, but I’d be interested in protecting my MacBook Air’s battery in a similar fashion to everything discussed in this iOS topic.
It kinda has a setting for this:
Battery→Battery Health (i) → Optimized Battery Charging is the closest you can get.
No, Apple doesn’t offer a charge limiter option for Mac laptops or Apple watches. They reserve that feature for devices running iOS. However, there are third-party apps available that can limit the charge for Mac laptops to 80% or other specified values. I personally use the AlDente app and am quite satisfied with its functionality.
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Interesting discussion, everyone seems to have different tips to make the most out of their batteries.
While I’m convinced some lithium-ion packs are in “better shape” than others (a matter of luck), battery degradation is also very much linked to the user environment and behaviour.
- Extreme hot/cold climate, high level of humidity
- Heat produced by the device based on materials (Titanium > Aluminium), case and usage of course
- Type of charging : wired with high/low power or wireless
- Frequency of charging even though this is less the case with li-ion since e.g., 1 cycle 0-100% = 5 cycles 20-40%
- Finally : software optimisation to reduce degradation (such as optimised charging or limit to 80%)
I have owned an iPhone 15 Pro Max for about 2 years: 431 cycle - 87% health. My battery health dropped significantly in <1 year when I started using wireless charging (Belkin 3-in-1 stand) with a MagSafe case. Heat was higher than wired, despite a limit set at 80% charging.
My battery health then stabilised since ~6 months at 87% despite close to 150 cycles done on that period with intensive use. On that period, I have been mainly using a 5W “vintage” Apple charger which produces less heat. This must help.
As for the initial question: I’d say hardware optimisation (slow wired charger) matters much more than a software limitation. I plan to use wireless charging much more rarely on my future iPhone (plugging it to a smart plug for certain hours like described above is a great idea). I also plan to deactivate the 80% limit while keeping optimised charging on: going below 20% with a slow phone is never fun.
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Adding my stats to the mix. I just upgraded from a 15 Pro Max that I had assumed I’d be keeping for a long time* to a 17 Pro. For the first while, I just charged it to 100% once every couple days, but I eventually switched to 80% nightly. Both were on a 2.4A USB outlet built into a power strip, which I assume qualifies as slow charging. As of today, cycle count is 341 and battery health is 94%.
Still deciding what charging practice to use with my 17 Pro. My intention is to use this phone for years, so maximizing battery life is fairly important, though I’m not opposed to paying Apple for a battery replacement down the road if the phone itself is still performant.
*Turns out the large form factor isn’t for me, and while the massive battery life was nice, the key reason for getting it was for the higher-magnification camera—a distinction that Apple graciously removed from the 17 Pro/Max decision. Fortunately, my wife prefers large phones, so it’ll be replacing her XS (which is on its last legs battery-wise: she has to have it plugged in most of the time, and it overheats often).