Yeah, iOS 26 will be true production on Jan 2026 - as its version number implies.
So… not 100% sure, but I’d be willing to bet that anyone at Apple uses measurement tools with MAAAYBE a few more points of precision. And, that are built for the purpose of accurate measurement first and foremost and not… I mean, a power strip.
It's pretty simple actually : reduce transparency still renders Liquid Glass, it just applies an opaque background above it .
So you're in denial uh. Battery tests corroborate those findings . Animations and glass rendering drain a tremendous amount of power . It's okay if you want to believe it comes for free or that it's well optimized . but don't gaslight others
Difificult to compare because the batteries increased, perhaps in an attempt to counterbalance this heavy pwr drain
They’re likely paying attention to the measurements. They’ve got measurements right at the chip level that that exclude the charger’s consumption. And, they probably know what frame rate the screen is running at any given time and they know the split between the OLED screen (where the state of the pixels on the screen determines how much power is being used at any moment) and the SoC. It just comes as no surprise to them (me either) that “using the phone” reduces the power in the battery over time.
The OLED screen drains FAR more power than the CPU. If what reduce transparency does is to make some pixels, that would have been darker, show up as brighter, then of course it’s going to use more power to show brighter pixels. There’s no way looking at a number on a power strip can show the difference between the higher consumption of a brighter screen and a “tremendous amount of power” drain by the CPU.
Click, got it thanks!
I just enabled it on my iPhone 17. With Liquid Glass, pulling down the Control Center reduces the brightness of the screen quite a bit. It’s very noticeably darker. So, anything that doesn’t reduce the brightness of the screen when Control Center is opened is going to appear to use more power. And that TOTALLY makes sense because the total brightness of the OLED pixels directly affects how much power is being consumed.
A screenshot does not need brightness settings or any image processing beyond compression. Higher Wattage for compression and writing to disk is acceptable, anything longer than that seems like a bad trade off between superficial eye candy and real function.
A screenshot turns the whole screen white for a few milliseconds, that split second the OLED screen consumes a lot of power.
I think the core idea that “a cell phone showing larger numbers when connected to a power strip MUST be showing precisely how much power the processor is using” completely misunderstands how an OLED screen factors into power usage. Just Googling “what component in a smartphone uses the most power” would have helped to understand it better.
Check your screen when in low transparency mode versus NOT in low transparency mode. I don’t use the mode, but when I did, the screen was across the board brighter when I had low transparency mode on. Even more so for the test case presented here (transparency mode darkens the screen when pulling down the control center low transparency makes the whole screen brighter). A brighter OLED means more power consumption.
