Apple may be trying to make it easier to check the battery health of the iPad based on new features found in the iPadOS 17.5 beta.

Steve Moser and Aaron Perris of MacRumors found numerous references to a battery health menu.

Judging from the references, it appears that the new menu will display the iPad's maximum battery capacity and current cycle count. The cycle count is the number of times the battery has been fully charged and discharged. The iPhone 15, which has a similar battery health monitoring tool, is rated to retain 80% capacity after 1,000 charge cycles.

So by looking at both statistics at once, one can quickly see if the battery is performing as promised by Apple. Knowing the capacity also means that you can diagnose battery life issues and whether you should replace the existing battery with a new one.

Currently the iPadOS 17.5 beta is only available to developers, so we ourselves have not had a chance to look for the battery health menu. However, MacRumors claims that this menu does not appear on existing iPads, suggesting that it may be exclusive to the iPad Pro 2024 and iPad Air 2024.

This is not to say that battery health will definitely not be added when older models are able to upgrade to iPad OS 17.5, but there is no guarantee; as demonstrated with the iPhone 15, Apple has been known to confine certain battery health statistics to the latest models for Apple does not like to lock in specific battery health stats to the latest models.

Personally, I'm still not sure why it took Apple so long to add this feature to the iPad. Battery health has been a feature of the iPhone since iOS 11.3 was released in 2018 and was further enhanced in iPhone 11 the following year; the iPad has zero battery health features available to users, which seriously delays this upgrade.

iPadOS 17.5 will be available to public beta testers, probably in the next few days, ahead of a stable release in the near future. iPad Air 2024 and iPad Pro 2024 hubs can follow all the latest news and updates .