Is it normal for the battery health to be at 99% with a 44 cycle count? My mom got me this iPad Air M3 (2025) last April, and I’ve been using it for note taking and watching some movies. I don’t regularly check its battery health, but I was surprised to see it already at 99%.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: iPad Air M3 (2025) Battery Health
Yes, this is perfectly normal.
Your iPad battery is rated to retain 80% of its original capacity (when new) after 1000 full charge cycles. Assuming that the battery health will fall in a linear fashion, simple math shows that you might reasonably expect your indicated battery health to fall by 1% for every 50 full charge cycles - the displayed figure being displayed to the nearest integer value.
As such, with 44 charge cycles "on the clock", you are seeing exactly as might be anticipated.
Additional to the comments from LotusPilot, remember that you can expect +/- 1-2% tolerance just in the conversion from an analog measurement to numbers on a digital display. Battery capacity is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, so I wouldn’t worry about a single measurement. Observe from month to month and monitor the trend.
To add another wrinkle to your observation: the value "Health" is derived by dividing the battery's current capacity by its "design capacity" when new. The vagaries of mass production mean the ACTUAL original capacity of your battery may be greater or smaller than the design capacity. Thus, the value you see is based not on your battery's capacity when new, but on an AVERAGE expected capacity of all batteries of the model.
And we all know how averages work:
My M4 Pro Macbook Pro 14 that arrvied in late March 20215 showed a health value of 102%. I also have an Macbook Pro bought in June 2013 that still has its original battery. It shows just over 80%,and still gives very useable runtimes in use. Not bad for a 12-year old battery. The old Macbook Pro has not been "babied;" It has a lot of road warrior miles logged, and the only reason I replaced this year was software compatibility with older versions of macOS. I call that good service.
Please do not obsess over an inexact AND non-linear value.
Additional additional comment: The battery gauge does not round, it truncates the fraction. So it will show 99% when the battery falls to 99.9%
Is 99% battery health normal with 44 cycle count for an iPad Air M3?
