iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

I had the same battery issues and did the restore as mentioned earlier.

I noticed after the restore (the phone was recharged to about 10% after the restore from completely dead) that the battery took a solid 2.5 hrs to charge, compared to maybe 1hr the previous morning.

It seems now the battery is doing a bit better than it did the first 2 days.

I'm mostly using LTE with a brightness at 40% or so.

I'm not sure if it was the restore or the battery just taking some "breaking in", but it does seem to be getting better.

I've gotten 9 hrs of battery on lte while cruising the phone and doing lots on it. Make sure your wifi is off.

Sometime I get random usage. My usage went from 5:19 mins to 5:32 minutes and I didn't touch my phone for 15 mins! Is anyone else getting this random head and do you think it's related to the battery drain.

*usage*

After discharging/charging, here's my usage over the last 5 hours. The next step is to do a complete reset/restore.

Drain/Charge 9/23/2012 Completed @ 2:25 PM Sunday

86% after playing a flying game until 2:55 PM

30% Played temple run until 5:06 PM.

Left to sit for a while.

6PM 27% only receiving mail.

6:36 25% only receiving mail.

7:00 PM 22% only receiving mail.

7:40 PM 18% only receiving mail.

I have everything that drains battery life turned off including LTE. I do not have wifi on, I don't have any location services on, no notifications except text messages, mail is sent to manually fetch, I have it so that it does not send information to apple when there is a problem, there are no apps running in the background, literally everything I could think of that would hurt my battery life is turned off. I unplugged my phone this morning at 10:00 am. I sent about 10 text messages, took 4 pictures and got on Facebook once. Made sure I closed all of the apps after using them. My phone was at 8% by 5 pm this evening and then died by 6. I don't know what to do but it is very disappointing, even thought I did expect to have some problems with this being a brand new phone, I figured it would have some problems. I expected battery problems but not this bad, my iPhone 4 has lasted 2 full days on 1 charge many times, I also used my 4 as a golf GPS and leave it unlocked the entire round and it is still above 20% when I am finished. iPhone 5 may be returned within the 14 days if the battery life doesn't change.

Hello everyone... This is long and intricately detailed... and all relevant. I am a network operations analyst, I work in IT for one of the largest newpaper and media corporations in america. It's not rocket surgury, but... let's just say I know about computers. 🙂

So, in a nutshell, I am posting to say that a clean DFU restore DID have a huge positive effect on the battery life, so far. Curious? Read on

I'm a proud iPhone 5 64gb owner (verizon upstate New York) and I was experiencing battery drain. Under my same usage habits as my iphone 4 32gb... which are light gaming like words/scramble with friends for maybe an hour or two a day (9am-9pm time frame = a day for me) and... light email checking, facebook reading, a few web pages browsed... maybe 20 text mesages on average... and maybe an hour of solid time talking on the phone... in a mixture of wifi and LTE coverage areas... and maybe 30-45 min of iPod music listening in the car hooked up to a stereo through heaphone out... I used Siri some.... but not excessively. Just light app useage mostly.

(iTunes reports I have 38 apps total, to give you an idea of how much I have. Mixture of various tools, games, entertainment stuff)

Under the iphone5 useage trends I mention above, I was going through almost a full battery charge in the 12 hours between 9am and 9pm... and be getting 20% and 10% notifications by the time i was going to bed... 11pm-12pm... and since I use my phone as an alarm clock for work, I figured that in eight hours it would be totally dead... and I'd need to charge it, or risk being late for work because the phone would die in the middle of the night.

This was something I thought I would have to just "accept" at first... and i figured going from single core iphone 4 to the more powerful dual core 5, larger screen and LTE would all equal less battery life... so... at first I was ok with it.

(the one saving grace is that I thought the iphone 5 charged rather quickly... i didn't time it but it seemed fast)

Well, After a few days... I thought there must be something I can do... so I decided I would try some things... BUT TO NO AVAIL... NONE OF THESE HELPED THE PROBLEM... Here is the list though... try for yourselves and see... it may help you, even though I had to do the restore...

1. First was brightness... turned to about halfway, and auto dimmer turned OFF (auto dim didn't seem to do anything, which is another story...)

2. then i tried turning off location services for EVERYTHING except "find my iphone"... (just in case lost/stolen)

I even turned it off for all of the location services for system services... every single one of them. cell network search, diagnostics and usage, setting time zone, traffic, compass calibration, location based ads, all of them (they all showed that they had been in use in the last 24 hours...)

3. I Left Wifi and LTE on... but I turned off "ask to join new wifi networks"

4. Autolock was set to 1 minute

5. My Gmail account was set to FETCH and only set to check every hour, instead of 15 minutes like i used to have it on my iphone 4.

6. iCloud was set to push, but only for contacts, safari, photo stream, and find my iphone. All others were turned off

7. I turned off all notifications for passbook, stocks, and weather.

8. I don't use bluetooth very often so I turned that off as well.

9. I made it a huge point to always double click the home button and close out of all the "running" background apps after i was done using them.

10. for the record, I left sounds alone... volume was high for ringing, headphones, and alerts. Keyboard sounds on.

11. i let the battery completely die once until it shut down, and then fully charged the battery up again...

Even with all of the steps listed above... I could LITERALLY watch my battery percentage meter in the top right go down every hour... especially when using it for any activity I mentioned above. (I never felt excessive heat from the iphone5, however i have an otterbox defender case on it... thick material. Still, never felt hot to me.)

I had never experienced such noticable drops in battery percentage when using my iphone 4, even after switching my 4 to iOS6... I knew there was NO WAY my new iphone5 would last through 24 hours of my normal usage before needing a charge.

So, I got more frustrated.. and started searching online forums more for others with iphone 5 / iOS6 battery life problems... And i came accross this one. As of 9/24 1am EST... this is the most active thread with almost 7000 views and over 100 replies, so I figured I would post here.

I read through everyone's suggestions... experiences... comments... and I thought about a few things

1. I think iOS6, and specifically the new maps and other services which use cellular data and location services... needs to be updated and is definitely a cause of battery drain... we'll just have to wait for apple to identify the problem... but they may wait a while just to make it seem like it's not the iphone5 hardware which is calling for the update. I think they need to save face here... so they're going to let this go on for a while... just a gut feeling i have. With all the media attention about the 5 and iOS6... they probably want to avoid any bad publicity about needing a major version release less than a week after people got the iphone 5 in their hands... i mean... think about it. So how long will they make us wait? Who knows... but I think some part of iOS6 has to be part of the battery life of the iphone5 problem.

2. Iphone 5's MAY have come preloaded with iOS6, however their method of install is unclear... what I DO know is, when I downloaded the iOS6 upgrade for my iphone 4, it was about 500MB of data... according to the software update screen on the iphone4 itself. When I just downloaded iOS6 for my iphone5 via ITUNES... it was almost 1000MB download... over 900MB.... so... whether that's because they were only updating from iOS5 to 6 so it didn't need a full OS... or because there are already some changes made at apple, 400MB of changes to be exact? there is a size difference between the upgrade and the "full" downloads... SO... i figured... I would make sure my iphone 5 had the latest iOS version 6.0 direct from apple....

3. While skeptical about doing a DFU restore and reinstalling all of my apps again... i was totally unenthusiastic about this... however... I live an hour from the nearest apple store & genius bar... and I know they would just do a restore on it anyways... so... i bit the bullet and just did it.

4. I had set my phone up as a new phone to begin with, not a backup, however i still wanted to try from scratch again... to be extra sure...

RESULTS... I have been messing with settings putting them back to what they were 1-11 listed above...... downloading my icloud contacts and... setting up facebook again... and... it's only dropped 2% in an hour and a half... which may seem like a lot but it is less than before. It sat at 80% after the restore for well over 15 minutes... just being idle and doing nothing. Which, leads me to believe... that whatever may have been running at idle isn't running anymore.

i had downloaded a system monitor tool called SYS activity monitor before the restore and ran it, and it seemed like there was a lot of processes before the restore (60-70 approxiately) and the memory usage was like 500-700mb, most of it being free..... and running this tool afte the restore... the results actually don't look that drastically different... Some less running processes... closer to 60... so no smoking gun there.

I will report back to you all with the results of my battery life tomorrow through my normal working day. Up at 9am, work from 10-6:30pm... then home. I will charge it tonight and then only run from battery throughout the day tomorrow to see if this restore did anything major for me.

I can say with certainty right now, that under my normal usage... if i come home and it's above 20-30%... then the restore had a effect, even with the system/software settings the same as steps 1-11.

SORRY FOR THE LONG POST... but we need to be thorough here to narrow this problem down... if it's iOS6, that's a good thing IMHO... rather than the iphone5 batteries / hardware being bad... i actually hope this is just iOS6 or even just iphone5 firmware code drama...

In writing this entire post after the restore... and let's admit, it's a lot... battery life only dropped 3 percent. from 80 to 77... while poking around on the phone to double check info before i wrote about it on here. Before the restore... it would have dropped much more than this in the same amount of time... just how much of an improvement I can't say... I'll know more tomorrow but I really do notice a difference.

thanks for reading. Hope this info helps someone.

@digglerdan

Mine did the same thing! It died super quick all day, and so by the time it got down to 10%, I figured "we'll, might as well kill the battery entirely now" and it continued draining until it hit 1%. I continued using it, and it sat at 1% for an hour and a half!!!!

I truly don't understand.

*well

Thought I'd update - I decided to not charge my iPhone 5 last night, I thought it would die over night and I could give it a full cycle charge then, however I woke this morning and still in the low 40's. I've been using it for around 4hrs, just lite use. A little face book, web and text message. It's now at 25%.. But in reading the recent posts and posting myself its dropped 5%.. It's very random.. There doesn't seem to be any pattern.

Yes Apple do advise to run your phone as light as poss to conserve battery power but they wouldn't make all these features pointlessly..

This new iPhone has had serious development to be the best Apple have made. I'm sure hundreds have tested it prior to release to tune to acceptable standard.

That's why I find this all so odd!

I hope Apple don't try and save face with an update or statement, personally think that could be the worst thing they could do.. A simple hands up to noticing a battery issue and a revised iOS would be the best thing here, and quick!

These phones are not just toys, there are people's lively hood.

I also have done a clean DFU restore after yesterday loosing 41% in 5 Hours with out using my Phone. At the moment i have alook now and then to see if it has helped. So far after 3 Hours with out use the phone is at 100%.

But i have changed my Sim Card,

before i could get LTE and turn it off if i needed to. With the new Sim Card i have no LTE but i can turn 3G off if i need to. Now i did not expect that!!

As i don´t need LTE i´ll leave it as it is.

I’m not sure this is the culprit or not. But here’s what I’ve observed.

I’ve updated my iPhone 4S to iOS 6. After I got the iPhone 5, I too experience the battery drain.

I noticed the Reading List in mobile Safari is trying to sync/download the webpages for offline reading. But the status just say “Waiting...” and doesn’t seem be to downloading.

This may be one reason it’s always running in background trying to download. But it’s just “waiting”.

Also I am not able to delete the Reading List items. It keeps saying “bookmarks are being synced.”

Over at the Safari on my Mac (10.7.4) and iPad (iOS 6). Whenever I deleted any reading list items, they just kept coming back!

So I disable the iCloud > Safari setting on iPhone 5. The reading list on the Mac and iPad now works properly.

Though I’m still unable to delete the reading list items on the iPhone; and the status still says “Waiting...”, the battery now doesn’t drain as fast!

Hope this helps.

So I think my overnight drain issue is due to WiFi sync. This morning I woke up to "ath has quit unexpectedly", which I believe has to do with WiFi sync. My usage also went up from 2 hours to just under 5 hours and dropped over 15%.

I see that others have complained about battery drain and WiFi sync in the past, but I've never had issues with it. I'm going to try turning off WiFi sync tonight and see if the battery still drains over night.

(I know that a wifi sync would obviously drain the battery, but I never initiate it manually. I go on the assumption that it only runs when you plug the phone in to a power source, or initiate it manually)

Results after restoring to factory settings. My phone only lost 2% overnight. Seems Apple has a problem with Final Flash of the phone. I'll use it today. I'll be on the road and I have calls and email to deal with.

After some light use this morning, email, internet etc, I'm sitting at 90% and it's been 3 hrs.