Battery life on iPhone 5

$900? Whew!! And I thought my $400 64GB was steep! Sorry!! And yes, I arranged today to return my SECOND iPhone 5 and go back to either the 4/4s. Unfortunately, I do not have time to get to the Apple Store before my trip on Wednesday. I will have to return the iPhone 5 after I get back in two weeks. What really upsets me is that I am about to leave for trip to Turkey, and on all my trips I do extensive video and photos. This phone is going to last about one hour… Maybe two??? I am livid that I'm not going to have anything to record my trip with. Apple is on my S$&t list now. So much for all the $ spent on extra accessories ...and the fact I sold my old Lifeproof case and other items....

Yes, the 32GB iPhone 5 costs $899 from Apple in Australia.

http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone5

The tipping point for me is I went to an all day music festival on the weekend. I charged the phone to 100% overnight and turned off LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Spotlight Search and dimmed the screen brightness to near minimum.

During the day I rarely used the phone. I send about 15 SMS text messages. I did not make any phone calls. I was within a 3G Cellular area. I used the web for about 90 seconds and took 3 x 2 minute videos and about 5 photos without flash.

The phone was at 50% after a few hours and by later afternoon less than 20%.

It did stay at 1% for about 30 minutes before it finally depleted. I left the festival with no battery left.

No point carrying a phone with all these features if you can't use them without a power socket at your side!

I'm on third iPhone 5. I would loose probably 1% every three minutes. Nothing worked except turning off data. I concluded it was related to lack of LTE in area. The phone appeared to continue to search for LTE when there was no LTE in the area.

Just last Friday we finally got LTE in my area. That has fixed the problem. I think I get about eight hours of usage or very close to it. Good luck guys. Trust me, I feel your pain.

FYI there is _NO_ fix for this. This is either a hardware problem with select phones or some very serious bug deeply ingrained in the iOS 6.0 & 6.0.1 operating system. I have used my phone on various 3G networks in six different countries now. I exchanged the phone once and I have done a DFU restore and tried the phone wiht no apps and iCloud disabled. The horendous battery drain is the same every time always no matter what if cellular data is turned on. Turrn cellular data off and battery life is fine. Apple has really screwed their customers on this one.

I have my second iPhone 5 (32gb) and am continuing to have 4-5 hour battery life. Is this problem common with the 16gb also? I ask because I know 2people in the area that I live in and they love their phones and have no issues. They both have the 16gb.

I also had about 5 hour battery life on my new iPhone5 (received at AT&T store on 11/5) - until I installed iOS software update 6.0.1 After installing the software update early yesterday morning, I now seem to be getting about 20 hours on a charge.

After updating iOS at 8:00 am yesterday, I had my iPhone on continuously - listening to music (over the speaker - which should drain more than iBuds) and making some phone calls, and downloading some iTunes over wifi - until 11 pm. Then I shut iPhone off completely until 8:00 am this morning. Turned it on and had 33% battery left (same as when shut off). Obviously, battery drain was an operating system software problem, that now seems to be fixed. Curiously, the battery problem fix doesn't seem to be mentioned in Apple's list of bug fixes for 6.0.1. I wonder if there are two versions of 6.0.1 - an earlier version that didn't address the battery problem (per some comments right after 6.0.1 first came out), and yesterday's version which does indeed fix it. Whatever, now I'm a happy camper. 🙂

I forgot to mention above that just before I updated iOS to 6.0.1 on my iPhone 5 at 8 am yesterday morning, I had just completed fully charging the battery. So my experience of 20 hours of battery life since then on a single charge sincing updating to 6.0.1 starts with a full charge.

I have updated the operating system as well, but haven't seen any improvement. Is your phone 16, 32 or 64 GB?

My iPhone 5 is 32 bit.

I should add that yesterday and this morning, except for playing music over the iPhone's built-in speaker continuously, my usage was fairly light in terms of phone calls, browsing, and downloading - as compared with my usage the prior 3 days, when I downloaded a ton of iTunes. During all that earlier downloading activity I experienced about 5 hours of battery life per charge.

So maybe my usage since updating to 6.0.1 has been too light to be a fair test?

I'll do more phoning and wifi browsing with it today to see what the drainage is with heavier use, and will report back tomorrow.

I'm afraid I can't offer you any easy solution to your issues, all I can offer is that not all iPhone 5's are as bad at battery life as yours seems to be. I got a 64GB (black if that matters) iPhone 5 from an AT&T store near Indianapolis, IN on launch day (21 Sept). I couldn't pre-order, so I took my chances and got lucky getting a phone at an AT&T store (the local Apple stores had already sold out).

I regularly get 18+ hours from when i unplug in the morning until I plug it back in at night. Most days, I use the phone such that it reports about 4-5 hours of usage and I have somewhere around 15-30% battery remaining. So far today, it is reporting about 3 hours since I unplugged it, about an hour of that as "usage" and it is claiming I have about 92% remaining.

I haven't really disabed anything on the iPhone other than bluetooth, but that is because I don't like my iPhone broadcasting itself as being there when I don't use that feature. I left LTE on even though I am out of LTE service more than I am in it. When I am at work, I have poor AT&T coverage in general, but I have good wifi coverage. When I am at home, I have decent "4G" coverage, and good wifi. WHen I am a few miles from home, I can get LTE coverage, so I leave it on to take advantage of it when I can get it.

I don't know if the problem for you is hardware, or that you just happen to have the "perfect combination" of apps which exposes a software bug that is causing the battery drain for you. Since people are reporting this issue with iPhones restored as "new" and no additional apps loaded, that implies that this is not a software issue, so is it a batch of bad components, or possibly a procedural issue on one assembly line for a while, or is it just a failed single component i your iPhone? It is hard to tell, but since iPhone replacements from Apple under warranty are generally refurbished iPhones returned by other users, the chances of you getting a replacement that someone else returned for the same reason are probably higher than the odds of you getting a new one with the same issue...

So far today with my 32 bit iPhone 5, with moderate phone use, Safari browsing, calendar work, music listening, I'm consuming 4% of battery charge per hour, which requires less than one charge per day. This compares with needing a full charge every 5 hrs before I updated iOS yesterday with update 6.0.1.

This new level of battery consumption works fine for me.

Again, I suspect that yesterday's version of 6.0.1 may be different than its earlier version, because some have had no battery consumption improvement after downloading this update earlier. In my iPhone settings\general\about this update is listed as version "6.0.1 (10A525)".

Hope this info helps those still suffering high batt usage.

Return them to where you purchased.

Without doing so, Apple won't get the message.

Having same as your problem

Yesterday my iPhone battery was around 65% and I went to sleep and now my iPhone is off so more than 65% in around 8 hours and I am turning the wifi off and thats totally not acceptable

I wish they find a solution for that

I had awful battery problems with my iphone 5 after the new update... My battery would go from 100% to about 35% within 5 hours, where all of my previous iphones would last me days with the same amount of usage. I took it to the apple store in hopes of a new phone, but they ran a diagnostic test and said my software was corrupted, saved everything to icloud and did a complete reset of my phone, deleting EVERYTHING. Started iphone as a new phone and uploaded everything from icloud, which saved every single setting and app I had (completely surprised, thought I would have to tweek everything again) and as of the first 3 hours this morning, I am still at 100% battery. Maybe this is a defect and my battery is always going to say 100% and still drain completely, or maybe they fixed it......... Just an FYI for everyone out there... hard reset may have worked

That can't be right because I only got mine on Sunday (23rd Dec 2012) and my battery life is awful on iPhone 5 compared to iPhone 4! It will be very low after a day and 23% ish when I go to sleep. If I don't charge overnight it will die whilst at work! I know charging when it's not dead will kill the battery in the long run!