Q: iOS 6 iPhone 4s battery drain

Does System Activity (I hope I recall that right?) let you check CPU while you're doing something or do you have to check it in a separate window? I only have iCloud for contacts, docs and data, and find my iPhone turned on

Wow. Sorry but I have no other ideas. This is a proven process but the device should reboot then come up to the initial setup screen asking if you want to setup as new or whatever. Have heard folks having to do it twice to get it to come up but not seen behavior such as yours. Only other recommendation would be the erase and restore as new. But that will of course dump all your stuff. However if you have iTunes and sync contacts and such with gmail or outlook etc then you can pretty easily get your stuff back. Also  you can redownload apps from app store "not on this phone" but any saved data wont be there. So its a case of which is more important. Certainly if you do that and it doesnt help you can always restore your backup so you didnt loose all your saves stuff for nothing. Really depends on what you have and use. For me I have contacts and email and several apps but no games and such that I care if the data is wiped. I can always get contacts back from gmail or outlook or iCloud and of course apps will download again.  Keep us posted if anything changes.

The one I've settled on is called "System Activity Monitor." Cost $.99 if I remember right.  It shows--in a separate window-- the processes which are running and runs a bar graph at the bottom of that screen as to CPU usage.

It should show processes which may give you a clue as to what is eating up your CPU cycles.  For example, I may have Safari closed but the phone is still trying to sync bookmarks and the CPU is running up to 100%.  I then have to turn the phone off by holding down the sleep button at the top of the phone and using the slider to turn it off and later turn it back on in order to kill these processes.  If I launch Safari again, the usage goes right up to 100% and stays there until I quit the program, turn off the phone and start it again.

Has any one using System Activity Monitor seen many processes of notification_pro? I was having battery issues with my iPhone4 and saw that there was a whole screen (12-15 instances) of just this process taking over! I have a now discontinued app call PKiller which willl kill any background processes. This is the only way I've found to kill this thing. I have no idea if there's an app that causes it or whether it's something else.

i have just loaded up system monitor

now with everything turned on

including i cloud

sys mon tells me my cpu is at a steady 3%

it sometimes jumps to 9%

mostly steady at 3

Cliff, my phone is behaving now and with no apps running other than System Activity Monitor, CPU usage is 5-7% and notification_pro is the 7-9th process.  That assumes the process listed first is taking the most CPU cycles.

terry,  I have an iphone 4, not 4s, and my CPU runs at least 5%. 

My phone seems to be fine at moment. My phones been on 63% batt. The last 45 mins that will all services on

And sys mon steady 3%

Something that some are using is pulling data, some app. Seems to be using a process even when not loaded

Like I said in earlier post. Make sure face book app isn't installed,

Also remember even if Facebook has been removed. Something is left behind, I suspect activ...... A process

I have kept my apps to a bare min

Until ios6.01 is released

So I installed System Activity Monitor and it shows a steady >3% CPU usage even with safari, mail, and chrome in the background. Have the screenshot and will post later. Nothing really stood out as a constant problem or running, and the only things that spiked the CPU were when I scrolled up and down on the phone or took a screenshot.

Also, even with cellular data turned off I still had a drain of 2% in less than 30 min. It might be spotty service (?), as I have AT&T and their coverag ***** at my school, barely one bar in most classes, while Verizon's is full bars pretty much anywhere. However, I still find it crazy that my service is draining my phone that fast.

Wow--that all looks good to me. I'm running a higher "resting" CPU usage and my battery seems to be lasting longer.  Only thing I can suggest is to pull up System Activity Monitor from time to time when your battery seems to be declining rapidly and see if usage has jumped to 100% and see if you can figure out why. 

Good luck Caleb.  This is a puzzle.  Hope iOS 6.0.1 solves it for all of us.  I'd like to go back and use Safari again.  I have a number of frequently used pages on my home screen. 

My final conclusion is that it is 90% due to cellular data, turn it off and that corrects most of it, however I think there are also some background process issues.  The first run through with no cellular data I got OK battery life but not super and I think some of what was classified as "usage" should have been "standby".  Today I'm great, as advertised battery life but it's been mostly standby.  When I started web browsing and things like that I feel it still drops a little on the fast side but not nearly as bad.

So there most certainly is a huge gaping bug with cellular data and then possibly some loose canon processes that get stuck running in the background.  Again though, the weird thing is I can't find excessive data or CPU usage when running programs to monitor it.

Now i'm @ 77% 2 hours 24 minutes usage, 17 hours, 5 minutes standby.

Yesterday I got around 20 hours standby and 9 hours usage but I didn't actually use it 9 hours.

I will write a little article and post it on my blog about the battery drain issue and the fact that millions of people are having the same problem and apple doesn't seem to realize it as a problem.

I'm sure they realize but do not care.  It has become clear to me the suckers (i.e. us) that go out and by a new apple product on relase date are upaid beta testers.  The last Apple product I had that worked as advertised out of the box was the iPhone 4.  My girlfriend got a 4S and she had terrible problems with a "no sim" error message.  I had to comb through the forums for hours and hours to find out about some hidden update Apple had quietly released to fix the unacknowledged issue.  A special procedure was required to get this update - it wasn't pushed through like a normal update.  That update did in fact fix the phone.  Now this battery nonsense with iPhone 5.  Apple is quite simply an unscrupulous, dishonest company that only stands behind their products when it's convenient.  I suspect they employ something like hte fight club car manufacturer formula to determine whether they should acknowledge and/or fix a problem they **** well knows exists.

We should all be voting with our feet and not buying iPhone 6.  I also see that they screwed over iPad 3 purchases to some degree.  Shameful.

Here is the 4S saga if anyone cares: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3600035  Now that I went back and looked I recall how you had to do the update.  If you used the phone to check for updates it would say none were available.  However if you plugged into itunes, backup and restore your phone it would quietly install 5.01 without telling you.  Only checking the version after restore would confirm anything even happened - that and that the phone would be fixed.

It is not hard for me to imagine why they do it this way.  Then the standard Apple "it's your problem waste your time and try a fix that may or may not work" answer of "restore your phone" and this appears to fix it without ever acknowleding that it was a known bug and that a software udpate was required to fix it.  Shameful.

At least for me, the battery drain culprit has been with Safari. Took several days after upgrading to iOS 6 to figure it out and playing with every setting the device has. The solution for me was to disable Safari in settings and use Google Chrome. Since doing this, my battery drain has been close to what it was under 5.1.1, but still not absolutely perfect. With Chrome, I can usually go the whole day--maybe a day and a half--with moderate usage, wheras under 5.1.1 I could easily get two days, sometimes even with heavy useage. Even with Chrome, there are still bizzare ups and downs in battery drain where the battery might stay at 100% for an hour or so of use, and at other times it will drop rapidly. The average over a month, however, is at least sorta close to 5.1.1. The only drawback to using Chrome is that some apps use Safari (or Safari code), and with it disabled these apps don't work fully. The National Weather Service app is an example of this--the app itself works, but if you click on a subpage (like the Hurricane section which is kinda important at the moment here on the east coast), it goes nowhere because it relies on underlying Safari code. Apple in late September installed the battery tracker program on my phone and exfilled the data a couple of days later, so I was hoping that they would at least publicly acknowledge there is a battery drain issue, but even the most recent news rumors of 6.0.1 being in test fail to mention ANYTHING about the battery issue. That has me very worried. As of this post, there have been 208,000 views of this page and more than 1300 posts---that should be a warning to Apple that THERE IS a problem and that the company should at least publicly acknowledge it.

Headhunter06, Apple almost NEVER acks an issue. I wouldn't trip on this. It's simply how they do things. However in the past they have almost ALWAYS fixed all they issues in time. I know Apple says they don't read the forums but that also is not always true. I had gotten a phone call from Apple about my battery issue posts in the macbook pro forums.

As I said, Apple does fix almost all issues. Eventually.

I have bought iPhones on release day since the first iPhone. I can't remember any issues, save 1, that was not corrected in some fashion. (The one was antena-gate, it was a bandaid more than a fix, and yes people will disagree on that but thats not the point of my post.)

My point is Apple will fix this. It maye be a more complex issue than it seems to us so it may take time.

Spending big bucks on phones and finding an issue *****! BUT Apple will fix it.