With the iPhone 16, Apple is offering a more efficient battery, which is supposed to considerably improve autonomy. However, the reality would be very different if we are to believe the feedback from some iPhone 16 users. As noted by MacRumors, a ton of people are complaining on Reddit and the Apple forum to see their autonomy melt away like snow in the sun!
iOS 18 would tire the new iPhone 16s
Normally, when you buy a new iPhone, the battery life is supposed to be impeccable for at least the first three months, because the battery is brand new and its capacity is 100%. Unfortunately, this would not be the case for many iPhone 16 owners. When you look at sites like Reddit or Apple’s support forum, many people are complaining about having poor battery life since they got an iPhone 16.
The cause would not be the components of the iPhone which would consume too much energy nor the battery which is brand new, but rather iOS 18 which would consume too much energy. In any case, this is what many users affected by the problem have concluded. Some hoped that iOS 18.0.1 would solve the problem, but that’s not the case, the situation has even gotten worse!
Several testimonies express concern about the turn this is taking. Here for example is that of huanbrother :
The 16 Pro has terrible standby time when in sleep mode (it’s not connected to my Apple Watch), and as you can see from the graph, it runs background activities excessively . But, guess what, I disabled AOD (but that shouldn’t be the case since in sleep mode it was already disabled) and enabled frame rate limiting in accessibility settings (not power saving mode) to turn off ProMotion, and there the background frenzy is gone! However, this did not solve the battery drain: in 4 hours and 20 minutes it lost 11%, going from 70% to 59%.
The testimony of JulianL also highlights the problem:
I’m experiencing terrible battery life with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max. I upgraded from a 15 Pro Max, which was running iOS 18 and had 99% battery health when I sold it. With Apple promising better battery life for the 16, I was eager to see how much extra time I’d get. The answer? I’m now only getting 50-60% of the battery life I had with my year old 15 Pro Max. Really disappointing. All settings are the same, including background refresh disabled globally, screen refresh rate set to 60Hz, and connection locked to 4G (because, for my usage, I see absolutely no difference in the operation of my phone with these parameters, so I might as well adjust them for optimal autonomy). I received my 16 Pro Max on launch day, so it’s 19 days old now; any indexing or other background configuration should be completely finished at this point.
There is little chance that the problem comes from a problem with the batteries selected by Apple, because before the new iPhones are marketed, Apple tests its batteries in order to anticipate their performance and check if they do not generate high temperatures. Everything suggests that the problem is iOS 18!
For our part, we have the iPhone 16 Pro Max in the editorial office and we do not encounter any problems of this type, on the contrary the autonomy is very good.
