TL;DR: My iPhone 16 Pro gives me garbage mobile speeds (more often than not), battery drain, and about 70% of my mobile data is mysteriously eaten by "System Services > General". Apple doesn’t care. Over two months of back-and-forth. Still no fix.
Now the whole thing: I’ve been a loyal iPhone user since 2013, but this might just be the end of the road for me.
I switched from an iPhone X to the 16 Pro on Jan 1, 2025, and also started working at a new location the same day. That’s when the problems began. More often than not, my mobile internet felt like it was stuck in 2005. Sending a single WhatsApp text would take ages. Naturally, with the phone struggling to get a signal, battery life took a hit too, I was getting barely 3–3.5 hours of screen time on an 80% charge limit, and that too with light usage.
Initially, I thought the issue was at my office location because sometimes I would get decent internet speeds until one day in May, a colleague sitting next to me was happily scrolling Instagram reels with zero lag. Same network. Same spot. That’s when I realized: it’s the damn phone.
I went to the Genius Bar. They ran diagnostics, found nothing wrong, and refused repair or replacement. Tried again the next month, and this time I got a new excuse: “Battery drains faster because you're using dual SIMs.” Wow, thanks for the insight! Again, no fix.
Frustrated beyond belief, I demanded escalation. They gave me a phone number to contact, saying those people have “more authority than the Genius Bar” (what kind of weird company structure is this?). I called them.
Meanwhile, I disabled my secondary SIM (which had unlimited data) and started using only my primary SIM (limited to 1GB/day). That’s when I discovered the real horror; over 70% of my mobile data while BROWSING was being eaten up by "System Services > General". Not by any app, just… iOS doing mysterious things in the background. Now mobile data is visible in settings but wifi data consumption is not! Your guess here is as good as mine. Privacy red flag? Who knows. Maybe my iPhone is busy sending hourly love letters to Apple’s servers. See it for yourself: (I have regularly reset the data statistics after I discovered this phenomenon to confirm if it is happening consistently or not, and concluded that it is in fact consistent. FYI the JioHotstar app is only used to download stuff and not for browsing so calculations are excluding that and other downloads)
I reported this to the Apple support rep, who was running remote diagnostics every other day (notice the arrows and screen sharing indicator in 2 of the above screenshots). He ignored it entirely.
Then came the final nail: he asked me to compare speeds with another iPhone on the same network. So I borrowed an iPhone 13 and ran side-by-side speed tests. My 16 Pro was pulling a miserable 3–10 Mbps, while the 13 was getting 250–350 Mbps in the exact same spot. The Apple rep was watching this by running 30-mins diagnostics on both the devices. You can watch this too in below screenshots (notice the dark mode one is mine and the light mode is the iPhone 13):
I finally felt some relief; surely this is now on record, with undeniable proof. An Apple-to-Apple comparison (pun 100% intended). Surely they’ll admit it now and fix/replace the phone, right?
Wrong.
Next day, the guy calls me back and says: “All diagnostics are normal. Please contact your network provider. Also, you're using model A3292, not A3293, which is officially sold in your region. That’s probably why you're facing issues.”
Excuse me??
Let’s break that down:
This is peak Apple gaslighting. I've seen it all:
It’s been over two months of back and forth. No solution. No accountability. Just scripted apologies and deflection.
At this point, I’m seriously considering:
Any help in this regard would be much appreciated. TIA
Now the whole thing: I’ve been a loyal iPhone user since 2013, but this might just be the end of the road for me.
I switched from an iPhone X to the 16 Pro on Jan 1, 2025, and also started working at a new location the same day. That’s when the problems began. More often than not, my mobile internet felt like it was stuck in 2005. Sending a single WhatsApp text would take ages. Naturally, with the phone struggling to get a signal, battery life took a hit too, I was getting barely 3–3.5 hours of screen time on an 80% charge limit, and that too with light usage.
Initially, I thought the issue was at my office location because sometimes I would get decent internet speeds until one day in May, a colleague sitting next to me was happily scrolling Instagram reels with zero lag. Same network. Same spot. That’s when I realized: it’s the damn phone.
I went to the Genius Bar. They ran diagnostics, found nothing wrong, and refused repair or replacement. Tried again the next month, and this time I got a new excuse: “Battery drains faster because you're using dual SIMs.” Wow, thanks for the insight! Again, no fix.
Frustrated beyond belief, I demanded escalation. They gave me a phone number to contact, saying those people have “more authority than the Genius Bar” (what kind of weird company structure is this?). I called them.
Meanwhile, I disabled my secondary SIM (which had unlimited data) and started using only my primary SIM (limited to 1GB/day). That’s when I discovered the real horror; over 70% of my mobile data while BROWSING was being eaten up by "System Services > General". Not by any app, just… iOS doing mysterious things in the background. Now mobile data is visible in settings but wifi data consumption is not! Your guess here is as good as mine. Privacy red flag? Who knows. Maybe my iPhone is busy sending hourly love letters to Apple’s servers. See it for yourself: (I have regularly reset the data statistics after I discovered this phenomenon to confirm if it is happening consistently or not, and concluded that it is in fact consistent. FYI the JioHotstar app is only used to download stuff and not for browsing so calculations are excluding that and other downloads)
I reported this to the Apple support rep, who was running remote diagnostics every other day (notice the arrows and screen sharing indicator in 2 of the above screenshots). He ignored it entirely.
Then came the final nail: he asked me to compare speeds with another iPhone on the same network. So I borrowed an iPhone 13 and ran side-by-side speed tests. My 16 Pro was pulling a miserable 3–10 Mbps, while the 13 was getting 250–350 Mbps in the exact same spot. The Apple rep was watching this by running 30-mins diagnostics on both the devices. You can watch this too in below screenshots (notice the dark mode one is mine and the light mode is the iPhone 13):
I finally felt some relief; surely this is now on record, with undeniable proof. An Apple-to-Apple comparison (pun 100% intended). Surely they’ll admit it now and fix/replace the phone, right?
Wrong.
Next day, the guy calls me back and says: “All diagnostics are normal. Please contact your network provider. Also, you're using model A3292, not A3293, which is officially sold in your region. That’s probably why you're facing issues.”
Excuse me??
Let’s break that down:
- A3293 has 51 network bands.
- My model, A3292, has all those 51 bands PLUS 8 extra.
- And somehow, that is the problem?
This is peak Apple gaslighting. I've seen it all:
- "You're holding it wrong" – iPhone 4 antenna-gate
- "You're sitting on it wrong" – iPhone 6 bend-gate
- "You just don’t understand battery chemistry" – iPhone 6s battery-gate
It’s been over two months of back and forth. No solution. No accountability. Just scripted apologies and deflection.
At this point, I’m seriously considering:
- Selling this overpriced joke of a phone
- Switching to Android (they provide much better after-sales service and actually admit when they're wrong)
- Running paid Instagram/Twitter ads with a full video breakdown of this issue until it gets at least 100k views; just to make some noise!
Any help in this regard would be much appreciated. TIA
