Hi everyone,
Has anyone noticed their 16 pro max battery draining quicker than it should? Got the phone on launch day, under Settings>Battery it mentioned some updates running in the background may affect battery and thermal performance so I waited. Now that the message is gone, I still notice the battery draining quicker than usual.
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 18
I’m also very disappointed with my battery life after a week of use.
down to 30% after 14 hours, I use 80% charge cap but this is also when spending about 1.5 hours at least charging in the car during the day and me sleeping for 5 hours where the phone wasn’t used at all. Screen is idling all the time (home and lock screen) even when I don’t use it or touch it for long periods of time, that’s barely any real drain though.
The real battery guzzler is safari. Since day one, it has been responsible for 45-70% of my total battery drain even though I just use it for searching a bit on google, looking up some info or buying some stuff (which is coupled with price checking, checking for best options available and so on) and maybe watching a short info video or two.
I just use it casually yet it drains an insane amount of battery for the light browsing I do. The other apps are less than 10%, almost all of them below 5%. But safari ends up at 50-60% usually, it’s like it’s cutting my battery almost in half.
considering trying another browser.
I turned off some features in the safari options like fetching pages pre-emptively when searching for things. I also installed adguard though that doesn’t seem to have helped much except make my experience better.
I’ve now made sure to stop a lot of apps from background refreshing when I don’t need them to, turned off location services for apps that don’t need it for my uses, also turned off the majority of the system services location tracking (used to have them off but apple turned them all on again, maybe with the ios update or perhaps due to changing my phone). I also turned off mobile data background refreshing and stuff like that so it only does it on wi-fi. For always on display, I turned off the wallpaper since I just want the information.
A lot of small battery drainers add up to a lot in the end.
I honestly expect that the battery draining is also due to ios 18 being new and there are probably some bugs and unoptimized parts, especially with the AI stuff, that needs to be fixed gradually.
Ordered a wireless charging powerbank to avoid ever having battery anxiety, easy to bring along since it doesn’t need cables. I will rarely need to use it though.
I’m still happy with my battery time overall, because I came from a iphone xs max, 6 years old. Still has good battery health at over 80% but thanks to new software, it would be drained of battery after a few hours of use. This one, even if used heavily, will last me all day even with the 80% battery limit. Unless I use it nonstop with safari of course. Without safari, I could use it nonstop and still have some battery left at the end of the day.
i just feel a bit tricked since they claimed 33 hours of video watching while I can just barely squeeze out a full day with 80% battery and at most moderate use. I realize they did their tests in super optimal conditions, probably with every kind of other process stalled that will be active in normal use and probably having pretty low brightness (if I wanted to use more brightness than around 40-50%, my battery would drain A LOT faster, that’s true for both my macbook pro and phone), but it’s misleading since no one will be getting 33 hours in a real life scenario. Probably at most around 20 hours continuous use if optimizing settings and not using battery guzzler apps without too much brightness.
I hope apple fixes the issues soon, this is clearly not a hardware problem, it’s a software issue.
My phone used to drain battery rapidly even when it was idle, and I couldn’t figure out why. A friend recommended this guide 11 Proven Steps to fix iPhone 16 Pro Max Battery Drain Issue. I followed their tips, turning off few features that I didn’t need to be running in background, especially background apps like the weather and map widgets. Now, I’m seeing a noticeable improvement in my battery life! You should try them aswell.
The iPhone 16, Pro and Max is the latest device available (2024) and it was just recently released on the market.
The draining battery issue will probably go away shortly as newer Apple devices tend to have this issue to calibrate the battery capacity of your device.
The very same thing occurred during the release of 6S.
I charged it up to a full 100% yesterday in an attempt to calibrate the battery and it seemed to have done the trick…
50% discharge in the last 24 hours which seems reasonable regarding what I did with the phone.
Iphone 16 pro max :: Battery drains like 1% every 5 mins when on a regular phone call. No apps running in the back ground and got my phone like 5 days back. Phone updated when first received and assumed the indexing would take a couple of day but apparently no luck even after day 5. Apple support ran some diagnostics and see no issue and the battery health is at 100%. Most running app in last 5 days was phone at 31% and Lifetime call time from cellular option is 4 hrs 31 minutes with total cycle count at 5. No way close the claim of 33 hrs of video and at best may last 3 hrs of video. Definitely think it's a lemon and booked an appointment to return it before the 14 day ends.
Same experience with iPhone 16 pro. Got it on launch day. Apple health app is using ~20% of the battery, with only 3 minutes on screen. Didn't have this issue before...
Same here… I have iPhone 16 Pro (256 GB) for one week now. Yesterday I told someone how good the battery life is. It was. It held up for more than a day. Maybe 1,25 days. Today I charged overnight (I have set the 80% limit from the beginning) and noticed during my lunch break that I was already below 20%… mostly used by insta and safari, but no uncommon or extremely heavy usage.
I disabled some settings now (e.g. journaling, since I don't have that app anyways and some Siri stuff and background updates), but that should not be the solution for a brand new and "best battery ever" phone.
my 16pro battery is draining very fast. I took photos and checked messages for 30 mins, and my phone went from 100% to 59% with version 18. then I updated to version 18.1 is the same issues here. I turned AI off , I’m seeing up a little bit in battery life. but a little bit better now. is running 18.1, however, betas aren’t the best for batteries anyways.
After a week, here’s how my phone battery has been acting on average:
8:30am Full charge
5-6pm: ~50%
10pm: ~20-30%
6:30am the next day when I wake up: 5-15%
I then charge it back to full power for the day.
This is on an average screentime of 5hrs 30mins.
I used lightroom a bit but whats weird is I still get the same battery life whether I used a bit of lightroom or not. And my battery still drowns to below 20% while I sleep. On my previous iPhone 14 Pro, the battery drain while I sleep was very minimal and not more than 10% down.
My photos are still indexing though after a week. Not sure how to speed up this process. I have almost 50k photos and vids so maybe thats why?
I thought so too. I reset and set up as new. Usually on iPhone 15 pro max I am left with 60% by end of the day. With 16 pro max at 50%.
Give it a week at least and there will be a marked improvement. I'm fine now.
Unfortunately I have the same issue (16 Pro no info about indexing) and I don't think that anything will improve. Why? Because same happened with my 15 Pro last time. I erase my 15 Pro few times. It was better but just for 3-4 days everything backs.
I think it is iOS 17/18 issue. It needs much more power and Apple doesn't care about it.
I’m having the same issue. Three days after I transferred all data to my new phone, I noticed pretty significant battery drain. To be clear, the transfer finished the first day I got my phone so it has nothing to do with that. All apps are updated, background refresh turned off, data refresh turned off. After a full charge, I browsed safari for 20 minutes and the phone went from 100% to 81% with very minimal usage.
my iPhone 13 Pro Max had way better battery performance. I wish I hadn’t sent it back to Verizon. Had I been aware of this issue, I would have never kept this phone. I’ll definitely be opening a ticket with Apple and I suggest everyone does the same
Same problem, with my 14 Pro I would do a whole day and in the morning before a charge would have about 30% life left. This morning my 16 Pro was down to 9% and looking at the usage, it drained down whilst I was asleep with the Home and Lock the greatest user at 32%. Hopefully it will get better with time.
I got my 16 pro max on launch day (arrived sept 20th) and was just sure that the battery would be better than my 13 pro max which had 85% battery health left. I completely understand that the initial set up would drain down some battery and it did. But since then, I have turned off nearly everything that everyone says to turn off which sucks because some of those things are cool, but it still drains SUPER fast. I got all day out of my 13 pro max with 30 or 40% to spare most of the time and I have 2 phone lines on it. 1 for personal, and the 2nd for work.
That being said... I did a controlled test last night. I have my phone set to only charge to 90%. So I charged it to 90% and then laid it on my nightstand and turned on "do not disturb" and woke up the next morning and it had drained down to 78%. It makes no sense. I still haven't sent back my 13 pro max because I'm not too sure about whether I'm going to keep this phone or not after these battery issues. I want to think it's just some sort of software bug, but I honestly can't tell at this point. I wish someone from Apple would address this and say that there is a battery drain issue and they are aware and it will be addressed with 18.0.1 or something. To say the least, I'm frustrated.
Now, on the other hand, I also bought the apple watch ultra 2 in black (from the apple watch 8 45mm) at the same time and that battery life is UNREAL. It's amazing. 10/10. would recommend.
So I posted in this thread sharing my experience with the iPhone 16 Pro. I still have the Pro but I also bought a Pro Max now. The Pro Max is behaving exactly the same as the Pro. The two phones have roughly 30% difference in battery capacity - that is, the Pro Max lasts about 30% more, but and get this, under my pattern of usage, it is basically identical to the Pro.
The Pro goes off the charger around 7am, and by 8:30pm the battery is in the gutter, near 0%. The Pro Max survives the day, but only because out of the box it has 30% more battery. At 8:30pm it’s basically at 30%. So yeah, the Pro Max will last me a full day without issues, but let’s not kid ourselves, the suppose battery tests touting the most incredible, impressive battery life ever since any phone ever, not really true.
It’s basically the same thing as all times before. The small phone is much more pocketable and practical to use, but the battery won’t last a day. The large phone is too unwieldy, but it will grind out the day, just barely. (I say barely because even the Pro Max won’t actually pull off 7am to midnight for me.)
Why is my iPhone 16 Pro Max battery draining so fast?
