iPhone 12 battery draining fast

Yes installing beta is easy, you need to download and install the profile for public beta. Then just the same as normal iOS update and you will be running beta.

If you delete the beta profile later, your phone will update to public releases.

Hi there,

As many others, I am on the same situation...

I have read some people returned the device and got a new one. Then, the new device worked fine. I am really happy for them. I am on my third one and I am still getting the same problem. Don't think John Lewis will be changing my phone a 4th time but give me a refund.

I have an iphone 12 with giffgaff (O2 UK). Same as others, overnight my phone discharges like 15,20 or 30%. My brother bought same model but 128gb for himself in Spain. He is with vodafone and his phone overnight in idle discharges between 2/3% in about 8/9 hours.

Last night, I decided to take off my SIM card. Results were excellent. 100% From 9pm until 7am. Tonight I will be performing another test where SIM will be on the phone under 3g instead of 4g.

It is definitely a problem with the signal. My questions here are:

• do you think is a hardware or software problem?
• Why does not affect everybody?
• Will I really get a terminal that works like a charm if I keep returning the devices or buying it somewhere else?

As suggested on this forum, I contacted Apple support to discuss the matter with a senior advisor. They dont want to listen there is a problem out there or they already know and they dont want to confirm it.

Surprisingly, when lower power mode was ON, my battery used to discharge around 15/20%. However without the lower power mode, my battery discharged only 9%. The senior advisor said this was finally normal and acceptable behavior when we know it is not.

Hopefully the will eventually come around and replace faulty terminals or fixing it with a new firmware.

Every night is a test for me...

Last night I disabled Optimised Battery Charging and changed Voice & Data to 3G.

At 8:37pm yesterday evening my iphone 12 was 96% and this morning at 7:15am was 92%.

I know this result was using 3G which confirms something is definitely wrong with 4/5G.

4% in 10 hours and 40 minutes looks acceptable to you guys? iPhone in idle.

That is very acceptable! I have the same problem in Sweden with Telia. I have been in contact with Apple and they did a test and my phone, according to them, works like a charm. I have been in contact with my operator, Telia, and they have no idea what I’m talking about. But yesterday I deactivated my esim (Telia) and at the moment my phone works as it should, no draining. With this said, I don’t think there is anything we can do about the problem, just sit tight and wait for an update.

Hi, I’m having the same battery drain when idle with no active apps issue most of the time since I got my iPhone 12 Pro. I believe, I went through all possible troubleshooting steps.

Initially, I restored my phone from encrypted backup because I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up everything from scratch. I ended up with battery drain. After chatting with Apple Support, they found no issue with my battery after running diagnostics. So we went through my settings, like location services, background refresh etc. and they all looked good because I manage those very tightly. As a result, they recommended to erase the phone and setup as new, which I did. That didn’t help. After that Apple Support had no idea what else to suggest except using low power mode, which still didn’t help much...

I should note that I’m using both sims, eSim being the main one for calls and data. 5G is turned off completely.

The issue however sometimes resolves on its own and the battery is excellent throughout the whole day, without me making any changes whatsoever. So this very inconsistent for me and it makes any attempts to A/B test pointless...

Many times I thought my change resolved the issue until it came back the next day out of nowhere.

But I did notice that using only one line seems to help a bit. I’ll keep my settings unchanged for few days in order to observe this.

And as many of you mentioned, airplane mode completely resolves battery drain for me too.

Have been in touch with Apple support and have had my issue escalated to a specialist. Had all sorts of diagnostic run and on advice of specialist have reset all settings and see how it goes tomorrow. Will see if it makes any difference. Otherwise only remaining options are to restore from a backup and get new handset.

Yes, the modem power drain seems to be in the range of 2-4% an hour - it'll depend on what phone you have as to what percentage of battery drains each hour, so the percentage drain will probably be slightly smaller on a Pro than on a Mini. (But the actual drain current pulled by the modem will probably be identical.) My mini was losing somewhere between 3 and 4% an hour on average.

I feel sad about this whole situation. It's been a week since I got my 4th replacement and so far so good. Yesterday, I had it on idle for 24 hours and used it only for 47 minutes listening on Spotify. Only 10% battery was lost though I do remember my 11 Pro Max would only lose 5% after 24 hours on idle.

Resetting my network settings seems to have fixed this issue for me. We will see how long it lasts. It has been 2 nights now without issues. I did not have this issue for the first week I had my mini. I only have one SIM.

Since you ask - and I am indeed a software engineer who has spent a decade working for a chip manufacturer...

If you have two completely identical phones in terms of software load - same iOS, same firmware, same apps, same settings, same SIM, same network, same location - then if they are indeed behaving differently, then the most likely cause is variation in silicon. The chips that come out of the foundry are not identical - some silicon runs faster, some runs slower. Part of the production process is to catch the chips that run particularly slowly and discard them before they get near phones. Effectively, you draw an arbitrary line, and say that chips which are slower than that line don't get used.

In exactly the same way, chips which have analogue electronics in as well as digital - like modems - can also perform differently between different samples; you'll see small variations in signal strength and in power consumption, for example. You'll see chips which can still run perfectly at slightly lower voltages, and ones which lock up if the power supply isn't perfect.

In reality, software is a lot more consistent than silicon!

All that said, there is so much software on an iPhone that it is very hard to say that two phones are running completely identical software - if they get a clean DFU reset and reinstall, and then no other software or apps are loaded, they'll be pretty close to identical but even then there will be things which aren't the same, because drivers for chipsets will do things like power and performance optimisation and may set different defaults for voltages etc depending on how the individual chips are performing.

So it's a lot more complicated than most people realise....

I can confirm your findings in my case. A mentioned earlier my Telekom DE eSIM did not cause any problems. Only when activating the second line (SIM) from Vodafone DE triggered the excessive battery drain.

Today, I've received a new SIM card from WindTre IT, I'm in roaming therefore it selects O2 DE by default. Guess what...no battery drain.

It's either been a problem with the Vodafone SIM or Network. I don't think it depends on location because Vodafone kept draining in various locations (cell towers). It's clearly between the modem and the carrier not able to talk to each other correctly.

I hope it's finally fixed, at least for me. I was lucky my company switched carriers, unfortunately not everybody has this possibility.

Pretty much everyone with this problem turned off 5G as the first attempt to fix it, given 5G is a known battery hog - made no difference.

Some people have found that turning off both 5G and 4G (if your carrier allows it) does fix the problem, suggesting it is specific to the 4G and 5G parts of the modem. O2 in the UK do not allow you to turn off 4G, so I can't try that - and anyway, I really wouldn't want to be restricted to using 3G data speeds on a smartphone in 2020...

Something I have caught onto might help with these issues. I purchased a IPhone 12 Pro Max a few weeks back and decided to charge the device with the MagSafe charging lead with the 20 watt plug. I realised the phone battery was draining quicker when using the phone. I decided to stick with the MagSafe charging lead as the battery was less in size compared to my previous handset IPhone 11 Pro Max so I assumed performance would not be as good anyways. However yesterday I decided to charge the 12 pro Max with the USB-C to lightning cable to 100% charge and the phone battery lasted a lot longer, I would say on par with the previous version 11 Pro Max.

Looks like my iPhone 12 drains a lot more battery when connected to Wifi. I was loosing almost 15% battery overnight connected to Wifi. When I turn off the wifi I lost 7% overnight. I see the same trend happening during the day as well. Wifi drains a lot more battery than expected

Don’t know if this has already been posted but if your having this issue what carrier do you use? I saw a post where one individual said they took their SIM out and it solved the problem. I’m using a 12 pro max on Verizon and haven’t had a single issue with idle draining. Just curious if it could be the SIM/carrier itself or the units are actually defective.