Q: iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

I charged my iPhone 5 last night a good 8 hours total charge time.  Came to work this morning (about 3 hours after taking it off the charger) and my battery is down to 88% with minimal usage (check email, no calls) something doesn't seem right I hope Apple fixes this soon.  I will try turning off my WiFi as suggested in a previous post and see if that helps.

UPDATE: After rebooting my phone (turning off and on) the battery percentage jumped up to 91% still low but not as bad as the 88% it was showing prior to the reboot.  Sounds like a serious software fix is needed.

Message was edited by: MikeSil

I just changed the setting of the email app from push to manually download. Battery seems much better. at 6pm it's at 60%. Yesterday would be about 20% left.

I think I have confirmed what yurijw has found out, completely by accident.  I reset my settings and used wifi at home where I had a constant severe drain down on the battery.  I DFU restored and it did absolutely no good (after resigning into home wifi).  I then came to work I  forgot to sign back into work wifi, so it has been just on the cell signal.  Now today I am experiencing the same usual and acceptable standby and usage drain I did with my iphone 4.  End of problem.  Obviously there is a serious bug causing power drain WHILE ON WIFI in IOS6! Apple please fix this!! 

My issue is definitely different. i've kept wifi off and still have significant issues. Seems there are multiple potential causes.

Must be different reasons. By the way, I have also completely disabled icloud syncing based on the experience of others.  But that and DFU restore did not seem to make any difference to me, unlike disabling wifi.  Not a great solution but at least I can wait until they fix with a ios6 upgrade, which is obviously necessary to make normal use of the phone.  

I've disabled everything and dfu restored. nothing works. calling applecare. if apple would just acknowledge the issue, that'd help

I've done everything. Restored with and without backup from DFU. Even got the phone replaced. Still dropping a percent a minute. Very frustrating. The weird thing is that when I do a restore I get great battery life (1% drop every 15 minutes of use). But as soon as I power cycle the phone it goes back to its draining incredibly fast. It's got to be an iOS bug but I'm still gonna get another replacement. Knowing Apple, they won't say a word about this problem an probably won't release a patch for a while...

Just spoke to apple care and they were useless. told me i could wait on the line half an hour to speak to the supervisor, but that all the supervisor could do is take down more details. bizzare - 1st line tech support couldn't write down the details of the issue! rather strange. they offered a replacement, but what's the point.

what a waste of time. apple make too many avoidable mistakes. can't believe i'm thinking it, but the galaxy s3 is looking very tempting at this time

I must admit. I'm upset about this battery thing just as much as everyone else but I know that apple will fix this sooner than later so I will stick this out because I love the iPhone. There is no way in **** that I will move over to the Samsung galaxy!!!!

In the same boat!  Why isn't anyone from Apple posting. Ugh! Apple hello.

Do apple post here?

I set up my iphone 5 as a new phone, notification and location services off, brightness at 10%, emails set to fetch, most functionality off, and have a strong 4G LTE signal and airport express wifi router.

I get 4-5 hours usage before it dies from 100% and i have conditioned the battery from 100% to 0 since the day it was launched.

Is my best option to go to a genius bar and have them exchange? Does anyone know if the NYC locations have replacement phones? Has anyone had AppleCare over the phone mail them a replacement and if so how does that process differ from in store?

I have had 2 replacements, both from a local Apple Store. The process there is simple. I was offered one by AppleCare but said no - if you're close to a store, it's easy to pop in.

That said, replacements don't help. The issue is either a software one, or a common hardware one.

Andy did you achieve more than ~5 hours battery life usage from 100% on any of your models?

My worst usage is ~4 hours 20 minutes and best is ~5 hours 30 minutes.

One thing I did note was that my battery came with a 100% charge supposedly. It was direct shipped from AT&T perhaps mine is faulty I am just afraid to pull the trigger on getting a new phone and setting it up as new (again) and having the same subpar battery life due to a unclear hardware or software issue.

Did all of your 3 iphones 5 have the same battery life?

Hi Jonathan

I'm just starting to trial the 3rd one now. It's be DFU'd and not restored from any backup. So, it's as clean as it could possibly be, although i do have all my apps installed. It's now charged to 100%, so I'll let you know how it gets on. The other 2 were identical - pretty much consistently lost 1% every 2 mins with extremely light use. I'll screenshot the usage screen just before the new phone hits 0%.

As a note, Apple (if you're listening) - It's a huge shame not to restore from backup, as I've lost my message history, which was handy. Pain really (at least message history can be viewed on the mac using http://mobilesyncbrowser.com).

I'll let you know how number 3 goes.

Andy