Why is my iPhone 16 Pro Max battery draining so fast?

I have the same issue since the iOS 18 update for the 16’s a few days ago. I was pretty impressed the first day or two before the “update”. I got this to replace a 14 pro that got to 80% in less than two years. I work with someone that refuses to do the updates and has better battery life from a pretty old iPhone. Might consider that looking ahead but I was looking forward to AI.

I’ve had similar issues with my 16 pro max battery dropping constantly. Another strange thing I noticed is that the MagSafe charging slows down after 59% and stays at 62% for about 45 minutes. This happens only with MagSafe and not usb-c. Anyway went to Apple Store they ran some diagnostics and replaced my phone.

The new one is no different. The battery charging is slow when using MagSafe charger (30 watt adapter) and now the charging stays at 68% for about 45 minutes. I’m not sure what’s happening here!!

After one of the recent updates, the battery life improved a lot, but still seems like they can do better. A full charge will now last be the full day as opposed to when I first received the phone, I'd run out in less than 6 hours.

You should try contacting apple of get a new 16 i dont really know how to help this is my best idea

You're constantly using Internet in that situation, often with poor signal.

For a use case like that you should be connected to a car charger.

I have charged my phone twice, i activated my 16 pro max yesterday afternoon, i dont use it for calls either. Is apple gonna do something? Same is happning to my 15 pro max. Its not lasting for 3 hrs i have to charge again....

I have the same - got my 16 Pro on launch day (Sept 20), the message did appear and stay on for a day or so that "certain tasks related to the update continue in the background including indexing" as some people are saying, but it was gone by Sunday. It's Monday now, I woke up with 90% (that's the charging limit I manually set for myself), 2 hours later (after some light video watching of maybe 20 minutes during breakfast plus a 5 or so more minutes of texting at one point), and it's at 80%. Very odd.

IF the indexing is continuing without the message being displayed, ok, but how long does it approx. last for?

EDIT: the only thing that happened for me that was out of the ordinary - I initially wanted to transfer my old phone data via WiFi from the old iPhone 13 to the new 16 Pro, but both phones somehow lost WiFi-connection during the transfer, so I stopped that and tried launching the new phone again, this time downloading a back-up off of iCloud (which worked without a hitch). But somehow I can't see that having anything to do with battery drain, can it?

I've noticed my iPhone 16 pro max’s battery seems to drain faster than my previous phone, which was a iPhone 13 Pro Max. Not by a huge difference but noticeable. I thought I would notice a decent increase in battery life for the 16 pro max

iPhone 16 Pro here. 7:15am until 5:20pm now and I’m already down from 100% to 32%. Had the phone for 2.5 days now. Not a ton of active use today. Noticed the battery keeps draining pretty steadily around 2-3% per hour even if I’m not touching the phone. Definitely something is up. I came from years of Max phones. Got sick of the size and wanted to switch back to the smaller variant. Now I am going to have to see if this holds up since I don’t want to deal with battery anxiety. Normally I would drain my 14 Pro Max to about 10%-20% by the end of the day. 🤷‍♂️

I’m having the same issue, and I thought it was just because it’s downloading from iCloud and setting up. But it has been a few days now and I can barely get 9 hours out of the phone before I need to charge but I usually start charging at just below 20 percent. I will try tomorrow to run it to 0 and see how many hours it gives but definitely not as advertised?!

But if it is an iOS issue, didn’t Apple release an iOS update last year, soon after the iPhone 15 came out, solving the issue and improving battery life? I didn’t get the 15, it’s just what I read online 🤔

I bet it has something to do with all the background tracking of Apple intelligence. It may be collecting data for the “contexts”, and the extra program load may be draining the battery quicker than previous models without the hardware/software. It is the first generation with AI, and AI requires much more hardware to calculate.

16 Pro Max - Exact same issue with the battery drain, I don't have the message anymore saying its finishing updates but my battery is still draining fast. Tried leaving the phone on low power mode for a day to see if it made any difference, which it barely did

I am also facing issue with iphone 16 pro, battery is draining very fast. my iphone 14 was better than this. if i get the option to return iphone 16 i will surly return it. very bad experience.

i also changed some setting to save battery Eg: Stopped all app running in background. chosen dark theme, always on display is off and more.

i done understand why battery is draining so fast and what is the use of these features if we are disabling them.

Phone fully charged early morning and almost drained at the afternoon. 8 hours of taking pictures, Facebook, Instagram, one call and 13 percent left. This is a disaster. My old iPhone 12 with old battery performed this way