- The iPhone 18 Pro Max uses software to artificially reduce its battery capacity to avoid shipping restrictions
- The same software trick must be used when sending the phone in for repair or sale
- Other phones may begin to take this same approach
The iPhone 18 Pro Max has the highest capacity battery that Apple has ever put in a handset. Going by rejections, you get a 5,567mAh battery in eSIM-only models and a 5,391mAh in versions with a physical SIM card slot. But both are over 20 watt-hours (Wh), and that could have been a problem for Apple.
You see, most countries have additional shipping requirements for devices with a single cell battery of over 20 Wh. For example, both the US and the UK consider these “dangerous goods”, and they are prohibited from being sent through standard consumer mail services such as USPS Standard Post and Royal Mail.
That’s obviously a problem for a device that many people order online — and it can also complicate shipping the device to stores. But Apple has come up with a clever solution called ‘Prepare to Ship’.
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This is a mode that uses the battery firmware to limit the capacity to below 20Wh, and it is active from when the phone is manufactured until a customer first activates it.
Once you have the phone up and running, the limit is automatically removed – so in other words, this gets around the shipping restrictions, without limiting the capacity of the product you receive.
However, this also adds an extra step that you have to take before you ship the phone yourself somewhere – whether you’re sending it for repair, selling or whatever, as you’ll have to manually enable the ‘Prepare to Ship’ mode again.
How to prepare your phone for shipping
To do this, go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Prepare to ship. Then just follow the on-screen instructions, including selecting whether or not you want to erase your phone as well.
However, there are a few things to be aware of: to activate the “Prepare to Ship” mode, your phone needs to discharge a bit, so you should disconnect it from the charger, and you should also be aware that it may get hotter than usual while this process is carried out.
The whole process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours depending on how much the battery needs to run down, but you can use the phone as usual in the meantime (assuming you haven’t also chosen to wipe it), and the Settings app will show a red ‘Ready to Ship’ badge once it’s done.
If you’ve deleted it, you’ll see if it’s ready to send on the ‘Hello’ screen instead – just tap the info button there.
When ‘Prepare to Ship’ is enabled, it limits the battery to below 80% capacity for 14 days, but if you need to undo this setting before, just go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Ready to Ship, and tap ‘Undo Shipping Preparation.’
This could become the new normal
So it’s a simple enough process, but it’s one that’s essential to know when it’s time to sell or repair your phone – so hopefully there’s enough messaging around.
But while this only affects the iPhone 18 Pro Max, it may one day become the norm. Certainly, we expect future major iPhones to have this same feature, but Android phones are likely to get in on the act as well, as it’s a very elegant solution to the problem.
Currently, some Android phones get around 20Wh restrictions by using multiple smaller battery cells, but depending on the design of the phone it may be preferable to have just a single cell – in which case a solution like Apple’s firmware trickery makes total sense.
This is one of those situations where we think there’s no shame in borrowing ideas from other manufacturers.
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