Batteries
don’t last forever. As you charge and discharge your battery, it degrades and
over time, you get less battery life from a full charge. Eventually, the
battery—or the device—needs to be replaced.
Battery Capacity
Decreases Over Time
A
battery doesn’t just go from good one day to bad the next. Instead, batteries
slowly degrade over time. This capacity decrease is a gradual process—happening
over many charge cycles—and you won’t necessarily notice until you realize you
used to get a few more hours of battery power from a charge.
You
can help prolong your battery’s life and keep its capacity up by properly
caring for your battery. But you can’t avoid battery degradation forever. If
you replace devices often—say a new phone every couple of years—you may never
notice. Or, you may notice but the problem won’t get bad enough to do anything
about before it’s time to replace your device again. But for devices like
laptops, which you’re likely to keep for longer, you may have to replace your
battery at some point.
Some
devices will even warn you when it’s getting time to replace your battery. For
other devices, you can often find third-party apps that let you check up on
your battery’s health.
How to View a
Device’s Battery Health
Unfortunately,
many devices don’t display battery health warnings ahead of time. You’ll either
notice a problem yourself or the battery will simply fail. Even devices that do
include some kind of warning often don’t give you much advance notice. It pays
to check up on battery health yourself once in a while.
Here’s
how to find battery health information on some common operating systems and
devices:
Ÿ Windows Laptops: We
recommend NirSoft’s BatteryInfoView to find a Windows laptop’s battery health,
but there are other utilities you can use instead.
Ÿ MacBooks: Hold down the
Option key and click the battery icon on the menu bar. You’ll see a
“Condition:” line displayed here.
Ÿ iPhones and iPads: You
can actually ask Apple support to tell you your iPhone or iPad’s battery health
Ÿ Android Phones: Unfortunately,
most Android users are out of luck. Some older phones would show battery health
information if you opened the dialer and typed *#*#4636#*#*, but this doesn’t
seem to work on modern phones.
For
other devices, search for the type of device and “battery health” to get
instructions.
When It’s Time
to Replace a Battery
Whatever
your device says about the health of its battery, the rest is up to you. If
your battery reports it’s at 40 percent of its original capacity, but you’re
still happy with how much battery life you get, there’s not much need to pay
for a replacement until it declines to a point where it becomes bothersome.
How to Replace a
Battery
If
you have a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or another device with a removable
battery, replacement is easy. You just need to purchase a replacement battery
designed specifically for your device, power down your device, and then replace
the current battery with the new one. This gives your device a fresh battery
with maximum capacity.
However,
devices these days are often made so that you can’t access the battery
yourself—at least not easily or without voiding your warranty. Instead, you’ll
need to have the manufacturer replace the battery for you. For example, you can
take an old iPhone, iPad, or MacBook to an Apple Store and pay a fee to have
Apple employees open your device and replace the battery for you. Check if your
manufacturer offers this service.
Of
course, even on devices without an easily accessible battery, if you’re so
inclined and don’t mind the associated risks, you always have the option of
doing it yourself. You could open up
your device, get a replacement battery, and try to seal it back up again. We
don’t necessarily recommend this, though. Too many modern devices have batteries
and other components that are glued together and not designed to be opened.
The
battery health status your device reports can help you decide whether it’s time
to replace your battery, but the decision is ultimately up to you. If your
battery feels okay to you, then you don’t need to do a thing right now. Better
to put that money toward a future device replacement. If the battery is no
longer performing adequately and you’re not interested in replacing your
device, then it’s time for a replacement.
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