They won’t do the replacement even if you insist on doing it?

No what the guy told me is that they can't replace batteries because of lack of repairability. So their "battery replacement" is really a full device replacement (even though my device is otherwise in mint condition), and therefore they won't do it until their own diagnostics tell them the battery is dead. And of course I found lots of people sharing the same experience on forums, their diagnostic tool is set to never tell them the battery is dead.

Apple does replacement but if the iPad is on the obsolete list then they won’t.

I'd suggest two things.

One, do a wipe and re-install from backups. If the device doesn't really have much of importance on it, just wipe it and start fresh.

Two, discharge the iPad until it shuts off, then fully charge it and leave it plugged in for several hours after that. That will update the battery capacity gauge.

You can see the internal battery stats by plugging the iPad into a Mac and running any of a couple of different utilities - one free one is coconutbattery.

what does the battery health on the settings app say?

I don't think I have a battery health in settings. The apple store guy ran some sort of remote diagnostic (and there is no way it is at 100% after 4 years of daily usage).

My point being that you can't really change those batteries on demand.

Try another store. The guy might be trying to sell you a new device.

If your iPad is still covered under some sort of warranty it's absolutely new enough that it has a battery health section in the settings.

Something tells me you're not really being honest with us, for the sake of a "apple suxx" story.

It's an ipad pro 11 first generation. As I said, 4y old. But if you think I am dishonest be my guest.

iPadOS doesn't show battery health. It's always been like this. If you can show me where you are seeing battery health on a iPad then let me know.

If you have a Mac probably the easiest way to see it is to connect the iPad to the Mac via USB and then use a third party app. I use this one, Coconut Battery [1].

The battery health is also included occasionally in the analytics the iPad sends to Apple if you have sending analytics. In Settings go to Privacy & Security/Analytics and Improvements/Analytics Data.

That takes you to a list of various recent analytics files that have been sent to Apple. If battery health was included it will be in one of the files "log-aggregated" files (iPadOS < 16) or "Analytics" files (iPadOS 16).

Battery health isn't always included in the analytics uploads so you might not have it in any of the files. Then you just have to keep checking as new files appear.

Here's a video I found talking about this [2]. The author of the video has written a shortcut [3] that shows up in the shar sheet. When viewing an analytics file you can share it with that shortcut and the shortcut will try to find battery information in that file and display it.

I just gave it a try but my logs don't currently have health information so I don't know how well it actually works for that. It did get cycle count from my logs and that matches what Coconut Battery shows.

[1] https://www.coconut-flavour.com/coconutbattery/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQ_0l5pi7ro

[3] https://www.itecheverything.com/powerutil