Charles Martin
It's not surprising that the largest smartphones by the likes of Apple and Samsung have the longest battery lives, because they have the biggest batteries — but new testing shows that the iPhone 16 Pro Max beats them all.
Technology enthusiast site Tom's Guide has updated its rankings of battery life in popular smartphones for manufacturers' latest models. Its testing showed that the iPhone 16 Pro Max's battery, rated at 4685mAh, lasted for 18 hours and six minutes.
By comparison, Chinese smartphone OnePlus 12 managed 17 hours and 37 minutes. That's the closest to the iPhone 16 Pro Max — but the OnePlus 12 has a larger 5,400mAh battery.
Samsung's Galaxy S24 Plus and Ultra models scored significantly lower at 16 hours 46 minutes, and 16 hours 45 minutes respectively.
Both of these were better than Apple's iPhone 16 Plus with its 16 hours and 29 minutes. However, the iPhone 16 Plus has a smaller 4674mAh battery, compared to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus's 4,900mAh.
Big jump in battery life
The regular iPhone 16, at 12 hours 43 minutes, has a significantly shorter battery life than its larger siblings in the range — but still it showed well over an hour's improvement in battery life over the iPhone 15, which came in at 11 hours 5 minutes. Similarly, the iPhone 16 Plus added over two hours more battery time than the iPhone 15 Plus, which was rated at 14 hours 14 minutes.
That's a significant increase in just a year, and perhaps especially so for what are the regular iPhones. There is an even more marked increase for the iPhone 16 Pro models.
Specifically the battery life in the iPhone 16 Pro Max beat the iPhone 15 Pro Max by just over four hours. The smaller iPhone 16 Pro topped the iPhone 15 Pro's battery life by three and a half hours.
By comparison, Google's Pixel phone lineup lagged behind the industry leaders. The regular Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro both came in at around 13 and a half hours, while the Pixel 9 Pro XL managed 14 hours 37 minutes.
Note that while the figures were all measured using real-world tests, such as web surfing over 5G, in practice users will not necessarily see such significant improvements. That's because for consistency, the testing had the brightness of all smartphones set to 150 nits, where the iPhone 16 range can all go up to 2,000 nits.
As ever, battery life is directly dependent on usage. But the iPhone 16 Pro Max has the longest potential battery life, and all users will see a benefit from that.
Christine McKee
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William Gallagher
2 Comments
Anecdotally - my wife and I upgraded from iPhone 15 Pro Maxes 8 days ago - the 16 Pro Max is actually doing worse. Regularly now, by bed time our phones are 30% full whereas our 15 Pro Maxes were around 50% under same usage. At first I thought it’s the usual initial battery drain as the data/apps/etc get downloaded again - and, maybe this time, some AI stuff gets initialized with data on our phones, but it’s now day 8 - and battery use still hasn’t recovered on either of our phones. Ergo, battery is worse - at least for us - on the new phones.
This is all well and good. But, I’m really disappointed by iOS 18 so far. Initially,
my iPhone 15 seemed okay but after a few days things seem slow on WiFi. In general, there are a ton of reports about sluggish phones and non responsive screens. How could this have been approved for release??? Have been using iPhones since iPhone 1, iOS 18 is likely the worst yet and the AI features are not even enabled for phones that support that. Really looking forward to Apple to redeem itself and fix iOS 18. iOS 17.7 was great and now I regret updating
I’m assuming the hectic pace of keeping up with Wall Street schedule expectations is putting real strain on the development teams. Is that right @Tim Cook? So, your company releases a half baked OS version instead of waiting for it to be ready and better tested? And, you are okay with that Tim ?? Would be curious to know how
many people are in the QA team and how much hardware and variations have been tested OR not.