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.
I have noticed the battery drain as well! I got the 16 Pro Max last Friday (20/09) and the first day was okay, but since then it all went downhill. It drains like crazy even w/o usage. Sometimes while writing e-mails or having a phone call it drains ~ 10%! I do not think this is either normal or okay. I upgraded from 13 PM for the battery and what I got is something even worse. Who wants that after paying €1900?
Could factory reset help? I tried hard reset but saw no difference. I also had “Finishing upgrades in the background” for sometime, a week maybe, it went away yesterday, but no improvement whatsoever.
I’ve noticed that it’s not only on the 16 pro max but the 16 pro as well. I reached out to apple and ran diagnostics, checked battery status, etc. No straight answer from apple other than to send it in to have it checked out.
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
Why is my iPhone 16 Pro Max battery draining so fast?
