5.0.1 update--even worse battery life

After upgrading to 5.0.1 my iPhone is draining the battery even faster! Anyone else seeing this problem?

Posted on Nov 10, 2011 11:39 PM

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1,434 replies

Nov 18, 2011 12:48 PM in response to art_in_motion

After a few calls and emails back and forth wih Apple Support. The engineers investigating the battery drain asked me to restore as a new iphone 4s and not sync any of my apps. So I've got a pure vanilla phone with nothing but the base iOS 5.0.1 After nearly 2 hours of sitting and doing nothing the battery is down to 92%. Which is better than it would be, I guess. If I didn't want to actually have the "useful" smartphone I paid for. So very angry at this point.

Nov 18, 2011 12:57 PM in response to TEfromboron

TEfromboron wrote:


After a few calls and emails back and forth wih Apple Support. The engineers investigating the battery drain asked me to restore as a new iphone 4s and not sync any of my apps. So I've got a pure vanilla phone with nothing but the base iOS 5.0.1 After nearly 2 hours of sitting and doing nothing the battery is down to 92%. Which is better than it would be, I guess. If I didn't want to actually have the "useful" smartphone I paid for. So very angry at this point.

I mean this in the best way, but how does it feel to be a guinea pig? Wow. And even 92% after 2 hours is crap. At the very least I'm glad to hear that it's not our apps that are screwing with the battery.

Nov 18, 2011 1:21 PM in response to CDFreet

Ha! You know, it doesn't bug me to be a test case. I grew up in hospitals having experimental orthopedic surgeries. So I'm used to it. Now, if the Apple engineers could turn out to be as good as my surgeons, then 5.0.2 should be freaking awesome for everybody! 🙂


On another note, I give my Applecare rep high marks in being friendly, responsive, and communicative to my emails and calls. I really would not want to be on her end dealing with God knows how many upset customers

Nov 18, 2011 4:31 PM in response to harpatwal

I really dont know what to do... I went with 19 % of battery to sleep. 8 hours later, locating-services were all off, all apps closed, absolutely stand-by, nothing on in the background, the battery showed me only 4 % in the morning. This is 2% each hour. That would mean the standyby for this iPhone 4S is only at 50 hours. And if i use it, the phone couldnt bring me through a day... i honestly dont know what to do with the phone, it makes me nervous as the battery drowns like sand trough my hands.


This is really bad. Please fix this up as fast as you can!

Nov 18, 2011 5:38 PM in response to D.R.C.

Anyone know what apple will do if it is a hardware problem and not software? I had the 3gs and iphone 4 (after the antenna problem was fixed) and never had any problems.. My iphone 4 would last 2 days (which i need in my line of work) so i am not happy AT ALL with my iphone 4S( I always have wifi/blue tooth OFF and only the minimal location services and notifications) My dad who has my old iPhone 4 always has bluetooth/wifi on, stocks and weather always going.. and his phone lasts almost 2 1/2 days!..

Nov 18, 2011 5:52 PM in response to julieda

I read that too. But it's never been from an official Apple source. It poor customer relations to not issue an official statement.


I'm running a vanilla Iphone 4s with no apps loaded, just iOS 5.0.1 I'm at 7 hours 13 minutes stand by so far as it has sat doing nothing all day. It's showing 3 hours of usage and I haven't touched it. The battery is currently at 48%.

Nov 18, 2011 10:33 PM in response to art_in_motion

My experience has been worse than most. I have observed more than 10% per hour with iOS 5.0, and it is the same or worse with 5.0.1.


I am a software developer and I can appreciate the problems that Apple has rolling out a whole new product to a large market with many platforms. By the same token I am not willing to accept that as an excuse. Apple should have done extensive testing which included impact of 5.0 and 5.0.1 on battery life and signal strength. Mobile phones today can be as critical to a person's survival as a reliable car in winter.


I also find it unacceptable that downgrading software is not possible. I can attest that none of my customers would accept such a statement from me. The difference is that Apple is a giant with a captive market.


The impact on me has been painful. I rely on my iPhone 4 for e-mail and text while I travel, not to mention directions, mass transit, calendar, and of course phone calls. Most of my travel is international, usually in parts of Asia where I do not speak the language. I find the language translation apps indispensable. Having a dead phone is literally crippling.


While it is great that you can do all this with an iPhone, in less than 2 years it has all become indispensable for my professional life. Partly because all my colleagues and customers expext this capability from me.


At this point I am literally reaching the point where I have decided that I must buy some sort of Anderoid phone before my next trip. This is so that I can have similar capability with reasonable battery life. While I have not found the Anderoid platforn as pleasant as iPhone, I feel very insecure without the tools I have become accustomed to.


Apple, I hope that you are working on a real fix and the delay is because you are testing it so thoroughly. I can accept that you make a mistake, it is how you recover and avoid future mistakes that will determine if your market dominance will continue.

Nov 19, 2011 12:41 AM in response to art_in_motion

Strange. After 5.01 I didn't change anything in my iPhone. It is all the same as it was with iOS 5 (all apps and notifications) and I also had no battery issues at all with my iPhone 4 before. Now when I applied iOS 5.01 I see a bigger battery drain over the night too. In 6 hours when I sleep, my battery drains from 72% to 33%, before iOS 5.01 it went from 100% to 92%. So iOS 5.01 drains battery in standby 39% per 6 hours and iOS 5 used to use only 8% per 6 hours in standby.

Nov 19, 2011 5:18 AM in response to art_in_motion

É uma pena esse upgrade não ter dado a resolução do problema de bateria como a Apple tinha informado assim que liberou a atualização.

O ponto forte dessa atualização para a 5.0.1, foi o Over The Air (OTA), pois em questão de bateria só piorou a situação de vida.

O pior desse upgrade é não poder voltar para o iOS5, que minha bateria durava mais.
😟

A melhor solução para esse problema de bateria é uma NOVA atualização, e que essa sim ocupe a proposta de MELHORAR a performance, ao invés de piorar mais.

Quero a 5.0.2 agora!

Nov 19, 2011 6:39 AM in response to RiverWhiskey

I agree


When I first posted on this some developers tried to explain to me how the Billions of instructions and complexity of what Apple does is just so vast these things happen. No they don't.


This is not a technical problem. What I mean by that is the symptom is technical but the root cause is one of process, rigor and mostly - leadership. This problem is not intermittent and only happening to a very small set of users who have a weird combination of apps. As such this should have been caught in testing. This is the point where i would say Apple was a victim of it's own growth and size but Ithink the root cause is much simpler. it all starts with Steve Jobs telling those with antenna problems to hold their phone differently. That is an extremely disappointing, pathetic and debilitating thing to think and say. That is your root cause. If Apple were at a true CMMi 5 Level (forget the cert - I mean acting at that level) and the leadership walked the quality talk this would never have happened. Apple's testing program needs to be as advanced and more throrough than your product engineering. Instead Apple allowed it to slip by the wayside. That is evident by how easy and obvious this situation was to test. Apple got big, grew a complex organization, greedy and fostered the wrong attitude toward quality from the top down. These root causes are what hit GM, Nokia, RIM etc. I offered to help fix this and am offering again. My final advice is that if it's not me you find someone from the outside and give them complete authority to fix this. Odds are your culture is too arrogant, filled with alliances and fear for you to fix this on your own. Those things contributed to where you are.

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5.0.1 update--even worse battery life

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