Premium smartphone manufacturers have been steady improving battery life for years , and Apple is no exception . In fact , if you only look at the improvement of the current iPhones compared to last year ’s model , you may not realize just how far they ’ve come .
The battery in today ’s new iPhones lastsseveral prison term longerthan that of the iPhone X introduced just seven years ago ! Fortunately , we have been testing iPhone battery life in the same means since then , so we wanted to instance just how much better iPhone battery life sentence has become .
Wecompare battery life , capacitance , mah and watt hours for every iPhoneseparately .
iPhone battery life over the years
We have tested electric battery life-time using the Geekbench 4 battery life test depart all the way back to the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. We perform the test the same way each sentence , put screen brightness to 200 nit and disabling all notifications and car - brightness setting . We then race the mental testing with the “ dim screen door ” feature turned off to exert consistent brightness .
The Geekbench 4 bombardment test runs the Geekbench 4 benchmark repeatedly on a loop until the battery die , with a small fracture between runs . It ’s a way to keep the sieve dynamic and the processor occupied in a coherent manner over an extended full point . It is , however , a little see — the more mod Geekbench 5 and Geekbench 6 unfortunately did not admit a battery benchmark .
Here ’s how long each of the regular iPhones lasted during this test . There are two tabs on this chart , one show shelling life ( in minutes ) and one read the electrical capacity of the battery ( in milliamp hours ) .
you’re able to see a absolved and impressive gain in battery biography over fourth dimension . Battery electrical capacity has grown a lot , almost doubling from the iPhone 8 to the late iPhone 16 . But battery life has extend much more than that , with the iPhone 16 running this same mental testing , at the same brightness , endure overfive timesas long as the iPhone 8 ! Bear in mind that covert size of it has increased quite a bit over this clip , too .
Also read : iPhone assault and battery compared – Capacity , mah and watt hours for every iPhone
Taking a look at the “ large ” model telephone set , we see a similar story : an increase in battery capacity , but a much freehanded increment in battery life . There are fewer phones to look at here , as the iPhone XR and iPhone 11 had no great variant , and the iPhone 12 and 13 had a “ mini ” framework or else of a larger one .
Pro iPhones shine even brighter
The iPhone Pro model are known for often give slightly longer battery life , in part because they may use unexampled or more advanced constituent that are more effective . Here ’s how long the iPhone Pro models last , along with the battery capacitance in mAh . While the iPhone X and XS do n’t carry the “ Pro ” name , they ’re included here as they were distinctly the pro models of their release twelvemonth .
Starting with the iPhone XS , Apple bring out a larger Max model that always had a great showing and a bombastic battery . Here ’s how they compare . you’re able to see only a modest increase in battery mental ability over the last five years , but a more than double over of battery life history .
Whether Pro or not , large or standard , Apple ’s assault and battery aliveness gains have dramatically outpaced the bigger battery capacities . In other words , efficiencyis going way up .
iPhones are now more than twice as efficient
We can well come a sort of basic “ efficiency score ” when we divide battery capacity ( in milliamp - hours ) by electric battery life ( in minutes ) .
The result is amAh per minutescore that lets you have sex how much battery is being used to start the headphone for one minute during these tests : meaning , brightness stick at 200 nit on a mostly - snowy sieve ( with a bit of colored and fatal text ) , running Geekbench 4 tryout on a loop-the-loop .
For this value , lowerscores are respectable , as it mean less electric battery capacity is being used per minute .
The iPhone Pro mannequin are almost always just a speck more efficient than their non - pro sibling , with a notable exception of the iPhone XS being a short less effective than the iPhone XR . But no matter how you slice it , iPhone power efficiency has become steadily better over time , even as performance has gone right smart up and video display have become larger and brighter .
Now get ’s take a facial expression at the enceinte - size phones .
Again , the Pro phones are slimly more efficient than their non - Pro combining weight , but the big tale is the dead huge improvement in overall might efficiency in the last seven year .
What is the cause of this efficiency improvement ? It ’s undoubtedly hard to immobilise down . There have been improvements in iOS over the years , but also in the low - level microcode that controls everything in your iPhone from USB and Lightning ports to haptics and NFC . Wireless radios have meliorate , from Wi - Fi to Bluetooth to 5 G to NFC . Display engineering keeps improve , offering not only better quality and in high spirits brightness but also the ability to ferment power into photons with greater efficiency . And of course , the main app central processor and supporting chips extend to evolve not just to offer expert performance but to use less power . That means A - serial publication Apple Silicon , RAM , power regulation circuitry , and so on .
The telling and unbendable efficiency gains of the iPhone origin over the least near - decennary come in little drips and drop — a few percent here , a fraction of a percentage there — until they all tot up to a downpour . It ’s the compound interest of peregrine major power efficiency , and we are all the beneficiaries of it .
Still , we ca n’t help but find the double-dyed improvement in this yr ’s iPhones , even relative to just the year before . Not since the iPhone 11 to iPhone 12 generation has overall powerfulness efficiency improved this much in one year . But unlike that generational leap , where iPhone battery mental ability wentdown , this year the efficiency saltation was paired with larger assault and battery . No wonder the iPhone 16 argument is delivering the longest battery life ever in an iPhone by such a all-encompassing margin .
There ’s no battery case for the iPhone 16 yet , but we have rounded up thebest iPhone 16 caseswhile we look for one . For portable superpower looking at our reviews of thebest MagSafe power banks , and back at base at thebest MagSafe chargers .
