iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

I have a question. We all do have the problem with our iPhone 5 battery. And we hope it's an iOS 6 bug, not a battery hardware issue.

Is it possible to downgrade the iPhone 5 to iOS 5.1.1? If the batter would last longer than, it would be a proof for a software bug of iOS 6.

First day with mine at work. Been using my iPhone4 for a few years.(Upgraded to iPhone5 - 16MB Wifi)

I charged it to 100% this morning. The settings are the same as my iPhone4 and I did a restore when I picked up the new one yesterday.

As I sit in my office, I observed the following.

iPhone5

from 9am -12 down to 31%

iPhone4

from 9am -12, down to 70% +/-

This is really bad. Everything is faster but the only thing I have been doing is a bit of browsing and around 15-20 emails. No apps run.

😮

Well after following this thread for the past week, I think my 32GB iphone 5 is doing alot better. I did the RESET within the phone and charged it to 100% 2 days ago. Took off the charger around 6am and finally after 1 day and 10 hours, it died. This was also with about 7 hours of usage. Not bad..... I don't think.

So after it died I charged it again to 100%, took it off the charger around 5:10am this morning and it is now @ 92% with

Usage- 1 hour, 8 minutes

Standby- 7 hours, 5 minutes

8% drop seems not too bad.

I think the reset helped mine out becuase when I first got it, it seemed to drain about 1% every 2 minutes....

Have been tempted to do the restore but will wait another few days since it seems to be getting much better.

Thank you for the tip, 😎 , I just read your response and did a hard reset and will give it a go and monitor, I hope it works.

Regards !

There is a 100% battery problem with iphone 5 and ios6!!

Three days in a row, the phone went dead after almost 5 Hours in STANDBY MODE!!!!

(no usage, no apps on)

That´s unacceptable and even more with unaviabillty of iphone Accessories!!!

I´ll hope a soon update will solve that problem!

DonHombre wrote:

I have a question. We all do have the problem with our iPhone 5 battery. And we hope it's an iOS 6 bug, not a battery hardware issue.

Is it possible to downgrade the iPhone 5 to iOS 5.1.1? If the batter would last longer than, it would be a proof for a software bug of iOS 6.

That's not possible as IOS5 does not support iphone 5 hardware.

Mmh, that's not good. Well, it was just an idea. So we'll wait for an update. Hopefully.

OK, I just lost another 5% battery in 35 minutes. Did a hard reset, sent to 2 emails, nothing else. Notice phone flips from 3G to LTE quite often. Doesnt look like it will make to the end of day. BTW I just texted my wife (at the expense of 1% battery life) who now has my old iPhone4, shes been using it all morning to surf, text etc etc and shes sitting at 75%...

Is Apple even reading this forum ?

hmmmm...

- at 3:10 pm i left the house with twitter, instagram, and camera apps active

- about 15 minutes later i noticed my leg starting to get hot (phone was in my pocket)

- at 3:35 i returned home having lost 14% battery life since leaving at 3:10 pm

- the phone was not used at any time during those 25 minutes

it appears that there definitely is some sort of issue with battery usage, whether related to hardware, software, or both.

there is no fine print in the tech specs for iPhone5 that say the indicated useage and standby times are contingent upon limiting the functionality of the phone and various apps by turning off settings or disabling features.

having to do so is not an acceptable solution to this problem.

in the time it has taken to compose this post my iPhone has lost an additional 2% of its battery life while on sitting on my desk and on my home wifi network.

BOYS AND GIRLS:

I HAD this problem until today... and working with AppleCare and the genius(es) at the Apple Store NYC/Upper West Side, we may have a solution.

Here's my story:

New iPhone 5 ATT 32gb opened the box on Tuesday @ 10am. Came with 60% charge. I RESTORED from my backup in iTunes (mac) - previously had an iphone 4, iOS 5.x

After RESTORING my backup to the new iPhone5, I let it charge to 100% via USB/lightning.

Like you, I noticed that battery life sucked. Hmm... must be (siri, maps, location services, retina display, insert any mythological user of battery power). By the following day (thursday), I recognized that something wasn't right. Burning way to much juice. Fortunately, genius appointments were avail later thursday afternoon.

Thursday's genius did a hardware diagnostic and then played with some settings... asked me if I had RESTORED from an iOS 5.x backup ... "yes" - genius asked me to WIPE the phone. Restore to factory, and DO NOT use the backup. Fortunately, my icloud and email accounts were all in iTunes and this only cost me 2 hrs. We can debate the inconvenience all night long, but I'd rather have a phone that works and I'm not a complainer.

By Thursday bedtime, the "rebuild" was back to my liking, and all media transferred. Still had to download iTunes match music. Next time, I'll have a playlist for all of my matched music. I charged the phone overnight and when I woke up at 6:45 am, the phone was 100%. Great. I went to work.

Friday, I used the phone for some texts, listened to some music on the way to work, made about 10 minutes fo calls, used siri a few times, read a bunch of email, etc... normal morning use of a mobile device. But by 11am, I didn't like that the usage was starting to come down. And I noticed that the "General > Usage > Time since last full charge:"

is identical -- genius told me that we want to see some delta here... these numbers should not be the same. By the time I saw Friday's genius, the numbers were both at 8hrs+ -- exact match.

Friday genius again did a hardware diagnostic, then took a look at the crash log... he said that something must have crashed during the config... and yes, the appstore crashed when I was updating 135 apps. I failed to restart the iPhone. Friday genius restarted the iphone then put the phone to sleep. He told me to sit tight for 10 minutes. 10 minutes later - there was a delta between standby time and usage! He pointed out the crash logs... and it looks like an app crash took out the battery manager. THIS ALSO EXPLAINS why the battery was charging at rapidly fast (unusually fast) speeds. Friday genius said the official time to charge an iPhone5 should be about 80 minutes from 5%. If it charges from 50% to 100% in 10 minutes, something is not right. And what's not right is the battery/power management software is crashing.

THIS IS ENTIRELY a SOFTWARE ISSUE

Many of us have apps crash and we simply keep using the phone -- but Friday genius instructed me to do a hard reboot to be safe.

I am now charging and I will report back if all this is still working later.

SUMMARY - to make this work:

1. DO NOT use restore from previous backup. WIPE your new phone and configure from scratch. YOU CAN use mail and iCloud settings sent from iTunes;

2. AFTER you sync in iTunes, RESTART/REBOOT your phone

3. Verify that "Settings > General > Usage > Time since last full charge:" has delta from standby to usage (after sitting there for a few minute in sleep).

I think this will solve our issue(s) - which seem to all be related.

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE state and confirm in future posts that you have:

1. WIPED your phone

2. You DID NOT restore from a backup

3. You rebooted your phone after the sync/config

4. There is a difference between standby to usage times in Usage settings

If you have not done ALL FOUR of these things, your contribution to this thread is not useful to Apple. And yes, they are monitoring it, so please keep it professional. Thanks to all.

I'm not sure what is new here compared to elsewhere in the thread

I want to agree with Jeremy over here. I went to the Appl store on 5th Avenue on Thursday 9/27/12. Had the same exact issue everyone here is having, Phone was at 100% at 8am, by 12 Noon I had 35% battery life left, with minimal phone use. Phone was hot, even the night before I went to bed at 11PM with 95%, woke up @ 7am, the battery was at 15% and phone was warm.

The guy inside the Apple store went into Usage & Diagnostics and noticed I had a crapload of LowMemoryErrors and crashes, he told me to go home ( had to go back into my office), literally uninstall / clear / reset everything in the phone, even told me to delete all my apps in iTunes, and re-download them clean again. Took a while but I did it.

Battery much better at the moment, I am @ 73% , Usage: 3 hours, Standby 4.5 hours. Definitaly noticed an improvement we'll see how the day goes...even tho its better I still think we need ios 6.1 to fix this issue, the phone battery is not working as advertised..

Resets havent worked for me...what has is turning off my wifi when I leave home and turning mail push off and keeping it at manual. I assume theres a problem with the phone constantly fetching information when mail fetch is on and constantly tryign to connect to networks when wifi is on. The reset did not work, but with only the two above changes I am getting close to advertised battery life ~6 hours of usage, ~180 hours of standby.

Overall, I just think its ridiculous that in order to use my product I have to lose all my text messages and progress in apps (games, in app purchases, etc.).

I doubt apple is tracking this thread (you have to call in) but on the slight chance that they are, PLEASE have the new ios 6.0.1 have this fix. I dont want to have to limit myself in various ways. If I wanted to set up a phone as new w/ everything erased I would have just bought a samsung.

That being said, I have been faithful to the iphone since 3gs, and trust that apple fixes this with an update.

I turned off the Weather and Facebook widgets in Notification Center and my battery life has been better. Not great, but better than it was.

Hi All,

I don't believe in turning off functionality on a beautiful phone as iPhone 5. Here is what I did, and it did make a difference to me (I was a victim of the battery issue).

1. Go to Settings --> Notifications

2. 'Not In Notification Center' - Ensure all the new applications installed by each one of you, have not only the notification Center turned off, but also ensure you turn off unwanted apps - (Good to have Alert Style as None)

a) Badge App Icon

b) Sounds

c) View in Lock Screen

I did all this and from earlier, my power was draining out anywhere between 2%-4% every hour. Now it has reduced drastically to 1% maybe in 2-3 hours 🙂.

And I can't take my hands off the phone, which is why even the 1% every 2-3 hours, else that also should increase with time. Plus, feel free to use 'Do Not Disturb' from Settings frequently when you really won't be using the phone (sleeping, driving, meetings).

Over the air (wifi backup to iclouds also consume a lot of power, turn it off and do it once when you are charging the phone)

I believe, the new OS is taking time for people to learn about, as it contains 100's of new functions, which we have to get used to in time, and causing all these confusions. It is a great phone people, trust me 🙂.

Cheers,

Vishnu