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.
Unfortunately crazy battery drain happening for me as well on iPhone 16 pro. Still not solution.
I tried everything. I’m NOT new on iOS and I didn’t find any solution yet. Please avoid common comments please. There is no app working in the background acting wired. It’s just some sort of process working in the background and draining battery even when not using iPhone. Specially when not using it.
Background activity off. Most of the commons draining tasks off.
I’m comparing my activity to my previous iPhone 14 I have to my girlfriend. She is at 78% while I’m at 45%. Something not going right here.
Restored one time and solved nothing. I would like to avoid restoring everything and not using iCloud backup to be honest.
Anyone going crazy and disappointed like me? Seems no one is talking about that. And without a case there will be no a solution or a feedback from those engineers supposed to fix it.
I just received it 3 days ago, I have now iPhone 16 pro, and I noticed that the battery must have some issues! It’s absurd how can go down in half an hour even if you don’t use it a lot like constantly. Especially I was quite surprised to see it on the morning it dropped down to 5% after last night charge? I have no idea but my iPhone 14 pro in the begjnng lasted much longer. When I got it, I could say that battery lasted definitely log, especially not used no matter if WiFi is on or Bluetooth orbiter stuff in background, I feel like we l had better batteries in the previous models😅 I wonder what they did that made it give up on the first day? It feels like even iPhone 16 pro came exhausted in the box lmao.
But let’s say that even my keyboard has problems I reset it, and I speak in English and I use predictive text so I can write faster, sometimes it doesn’t even seem knowing the worlds, I’m doing to change English with other English, same thing with other languages on my phones that’s one of the weirdest things that happened to me with iOS lol
I hope that after one month our battery percent doesn’t drop under 50%’😭😟
now is 100% but dropping so fast, never encountered that fast tho lol Like j read the comments and someone said they used safari and form 100% went to 80% for half and hour, yeah j put Spotify maybe and just close it, for half and hour or less depends if j want to explore more songs. Still don’t bave that many background apps that may affect it.. battery down with 20% less😒
i hope there might find a solution, this phone is great but something went wrong with thej life of the battery. At first I thought oh I must be maybe the only one, but as I saw it on the community I’m like wow we’re literally a a lot ! I’m glad tho, I think that until now Apple might be already aware of the batteries that are not lasting even half the hours they mentioned 🥲😅
I noticed this too! Also idk if it’s normal even when I use if for short time, it gets warm and even hot at touch. Does it happen to anyone too? I checked all apps that may be possible reason and other things but none, as j have deleted already the unused. Thjs. Happened since the first day it arrived, so I found it quite weird. Feels like pure unluck when it becomes like burning warm and no battery lasting life, I might have joked this phone was put already exhausted in the. Box, so it shuts down lol but for real it was released almost month ago, I find it too early for us all to be having these problems but yet we do🥹
Not at all, my phone even gets hot like it’s been overloaded with stuff and I’m just on safari. I guess I’ll report that in any case to check out why it gets heated🥹
I haven’t felt any improvement on the battery I hope it they do another one maybe
it drops down just like as before, but maybe others might have sen improvement? I hope it gets improved 🤞
I have the same issue. Really regretting switching from my iPhone 15 Pro Max to the iPhone 16 Pro Max. The iPhone 15 Pro Max is probably the best battery experience I have ever had in a phone. I feel more than disappointed.
Yeah, I am super disappointed with his battery performance. Advertised as 27 hours of video streaming, but my 16pro can't even last a day (as in 12 hours) of normal use as in texting email, news, and book reading. This is pretty ridiculous if you ask me. And all the setting are the same as they were on my iPhone 14 which I traded in.
Incorrect! That 18.0.1 release “fixed” the issue either the touchscreen being unresponsive on some occasions and other issues with the camera.
same issue as everyone here, battery draining faster than my 14 pro which has 85% on the battery health. Going to the genius bar in Fri, they’ll pbbly change my phone but I think I’ll just return it and keep my 14pro… I don’t want to wait for a software update to fix this issue. Disappointed that once again they released a phone which is clearly not ready and with false advertisement (apple intelligence).
18.0.1 supposedly fixed the touch screen issue but I still have the issue…
Contacted apple support and they agree the battery was decreasing too fast but can’t see the issue… it’s pbbly all hush hush now…
You shouldn’t have to set it up as a new one… I’m sick of apple and there excuses my iPhone 13 Pro Max and 14 pro max lasted waaaaay longer… I’m about to call AT&T to figure something out I don’t want this anymore and I want my old phone back
I'll give an example. I tested how long it would last watching a video. I charged to 100% and it dropped to 51% after over 13h. When it got to 51% I stopped because it was obvious it could last that much more or at least another 10 hours. This is my second similar video attempt, the first one showed the same results, but it was before the last update. Here is a visual:
I don’t do any of that and have the same issue. I don’t use for social media and mainly use for texting and limited calling. I’m at 64% and haven’t done anything today and took my phone off the charger at 7:20 Am
That's certainly your prerogative, but I took a flight last week with my 16 PM and over a movie played over a two hour flight streaming via the plane's Wi-Fi, the battery used was three percent, from 100% down to 97%.
Battery drain on a phone call will vary depending upon the reception in your area.
same as me. I am used to use 13 pro max before. Battery health is only 86% still use all day no issue.
3 days ago i bought Iphone 16 pro, it is smaller as I want that size but the battery is 10 times gone faster… dont know if it is problem with this phone battery or ios18?
I was testing if an app is doing this but to no avail, the iPhone 16 pro is still drawing pretty fast, in the specs they show some battery performance similar to the 13 pro max but, of course, my 13 pro max still has this amazing battery life… I don’t know if should I wait for the 18.1 update or send it to warranty, because AT&T does not accept returns.
I have the same issue with my 16 pro, while reading this thread, battery just drained 3% and literally that about 5 minutes top of screen time. I’ve checked if any app is doing something with it like the meta apps or something but it’s the same. I am wondering if I should wait for 18.1, send it to warranty, sell it or return it, but a think AT&T is not accepting returns.
While this is true, I already took that into consideration. First, I installed the same iOS 18 upgrade on my iPhone 15 Pro Max - but its battery drain was back to pretty much normal after a few days (the update tasks you refer to typically only last a few days). But my iPhone 16 Pro Max - now almost 3 weeks later, still regularly dips into the 30% range by end of day (vs. 50+% on the iPhone 15 Pro Max - under same usage conditions).
Why is my iPhone 16 Pro Max battery draining so fast?
