There is a thing known as calibrating a battery that sources say you should do once a month. This is done by running your device all the way down (such as a phone, tablet or notebook computer) and then giving it a full charge to reset the battery life estimates. For some devices, just running it down until it shuts off and recharging is enough. Others, such as notebooks with backup suspend modes and such, the instructions might say to run it down, then leave it for another 5 hours before recharging.
Apple may actually be doing this internally on their devices now, or perhaps I do not understand the jargon here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/119954
But general repair sites, such as iFixIt, offer instructions:
https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Battery_Calibration
This week I decided to do this for my iPhone, MacBook Air, and iPad.
But my iPad never came back. After running it all the way down, I plugged it into a charge and got the expected “please recharge me” screen:
It did not seem to recognize my charging cable that I always use. I ended up trying three things:
- Old style USB-to-C cable on a dock USB port.
- USB-C cable from MacBook Air to the iPad.
- Original iPad charger and original cable.
Even after leaving it plugged up overnight to the (confirmed working) original Apple iPad charger and cable, the iPad still had no charge the next morning. Attempts to reset it did not work. Perhaps it just died.
I am posting this here in case anyone else runs into this.
This iPad is over 5 years old, but still under AppleCare+ warranty, so I am taking it in to see what they can find. Gotta love extended warranties ;-)
To be continued…