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iOS 26 battery life thread.

Artemiz said:
Are you seriously asking about battery life 3 hours after release?
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The great thing about forums is that when you post the expectation is not for an immediate response. People read these posts and respond over days.

Aside from that, considering how rapid the battery drain is that myself and others are experiencing, three hours is enough time to tell if it’s as bad.
I’ve lost 3% since updating, which is a phenomenal improvement so far. Based on my observations since the release of iOS 26, I would expect closer to 10-15% lost by now. I’ll continue to monitor and hope that this initial finding lasts.
 
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Inland-Empire said:
The great thing about forums is that when you post the expectation is not for an immediate response. People read these posts and respond over days.

Aside from that, considering how rapid the battery drain is that myself and others are experiencing, three hours is enough time to tell if it’s as bad.
I’ve lost 3% since updating, which is a phenomenal improvement so far. Based on my observations since the release of iOS 26, I would expect closer to 10-15% lost by now. I’ll continue to monitor and hope that this initial finding lasts.
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Did you do OTA update?
 
The first reports on the 26.0.1 thread said the 16 pro max seems to have a better battery life right after the update but I personally doubt that someone can see a difference so quick after an update.
 
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SoYoung said:
The first reports on the 26.0.1 thread said the 16 pro max seems to have a better battery life right after the update but I personally doubt that someone can see a difference so quick after an update.
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Using the example of downgrading from the terrible iOS 26 to iOS 18, I can say from my own experience that the difference in power consumption is noticeable immediately from the first minutes of phone operation.
 
I’ve been having some success with LPM over the past few days, seeing dramatically improved battery life on my 16 Pro.

I’ve installed 26.0.1 and will run it today without LPM and report back.
 
At this point, I’m starting to thing there’s an issue with the CPU scheduler and core assignment (ie where tasks end up being actioned e.g. performance, efficiency etc)

An example.

MeteoSwiss - Swiss weather app - has a useful radar map, which gives a scrubbable timeline to see rain etc. Scrubbing over the timeline in iOS 18 never heated the phone.

In iOS 26, it gets hot hot hot, giving me a hunch that this action is being performed in a performance core.

With iOS 18, I suspect it was being done on an efficiency core. The phone never heated during this interaction.

And just like that, writing this message, battery percentage has dropped from 93% ➔ 91%.
 
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Phone completely froze up this morning. Bluetooth was disabled and when I tried to re enabled it. Phone completely locked up and was lagging. Restarted phone and lost 10% of battery just like that. iPhone 16 Pro Max
 
Is there anyone else since iOS 26 that their battery percentage is never the same after a restart? Before, my 16 pro max always stayed at the same % after a restart, but now, every time I restart my phone I lose between 2-4%. So it make the impression I don't even have the real percentage anymore.
 
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Marginal, if any, battery improvement observed running iOS 26.0.1 on iPhone 14 Pro.

38 minutes of casual use screen time was the first 10% of my battery.

As an experiment I swiped to my App Library and back about 20 times with reduce transparency off and my phone got hot. Crazy stuff. I strongly suspect Lowfi22mac’s guess is correct about core assignment.
 
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SoYoung said:
Is there anyone else since iOS 26 that their battery percentage is never the same after a restart? Before, my 16 pro max always stayed at the same % after a restart, but now, every time I restart my phone I lose between 2-4%. So it make the impression I don't even have the real percentage anymore.
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When you reboot the processor is pegged at 100% for like 3-5 minutes so it’s not a surprise that it uses about that much when you reboot.
 
Lowfi22mac said:
At this point, I’m starting to thing there’s an issue with the CPU scheduler and core assignment (ie where tasks end up being actioned e.g. performance, efficiency etc)

An example.

MeteoSwiss - Swiss weather app - has a useful radar map, which gives a scrubbable timeline to see rain etc. Scrubbing over the timeline in iOS 18 never heated the phone.

In iOS 26, it gets hot hot hot, giving me a hunch that this action is being performed in a performance core.

With iOS 18, I suspect it was being done on an efficiency core. The phone never heated during this interaction.

And just like that, writing this message, battery percentage has dropped from 93% ➔ 91%.
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It’s got to be something like this. I’ve never had any iPhone get this hot randomly before. I’ve restored from my backup twice now. Once on 26.0 and last night I did 26.0.1. Still getting the random heating. It literally feels like the processors is cranking up to 100% sometimes but when it’s happening I have an app that shows the cpu usage that I will check from time to time to see if there is a stuck process and it isn’t even high! Something weird is going on.
 
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SoYoung said:
The first reports on the 26.0.1 thread said the 16 pro max seems to have a better battery life right after the update but I personally doubt that someone can see a difference so quick after an update.
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O dang forgot to install it yesterday after the game. I’m getting it sorted now.

Hopefully these refresh rate issues on my 15 pro go away
 
imagineadam said:
It’s got to be something like this. I’ve never had any iPhone get this hot randomly before. I’ve restored from my backup twice now. Once on 26.0 and last night I did 26.0.1. Still getting the random heating. It literally feels like the processors is cranking up to 100% sometimes but when it’s happening I have an app that shows the cpu usage that I will check from time to time to see if there is a stuck process and it isn’t even high! Something weird is going on.
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An adapted System Monitor for iOS would be ideal to know what processes are doing what with CPU/GPU/RAM
 
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Ha, I was about to come here to write that I've been using an app called System Status to try and get a read on what's going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, it doesn't give any process details, but you can see load averages, which is somewhat helpful.
 
Lowfi22mac said:
Ha, I was about to come here to write that I've been using an app called System Status to try and get a read on what's going on behind the scenes. Unfortunately, it doesn't give any process details, but you can see load averages, which is somewhat helpful.
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Been using that app for years. When the phone was hot in the past I’d go and look to see the load and sure enough it would be high when hot… but not since 26 even when it’s getting hot cpu usage is still low… I don’t get what it’s doing to get so hot and NOT be using high cpu unless apple has somehow hidden away background cpu usage.
 
imagineadam said:
Been using that app for years. When the phone was hot in the past I’d go and look to see the load and sure enough it would be high when hot… but not since 26 even when it’s getting hot cpu usage is still low… I don’t get what it’s doing to get so hot and NOT be using high cpu unless apple has somehow hidden away background cpu usage.
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What a puzzle! GPUs suddenly being taxed?

I've just checked system status and found that it's got load averages of 11.25, 4.98, 4.56.

The phone has been sat idle, doing nothing for the past 10 minutes.
 
15 Pro Max here, purchased on launch day so 2 years old. Battery health 86% but was still on about 30% at midnight before I went to bed. With 26.0.1 I’m currently on 12% at 8pm. Dreadful now and the whole OS seems buggy to me like a beta, when you slide up its jerky. I turned off Liquid Glass straight away as you could hardly read the notifications on the lock screen. Seems like a massive step backwards to me.

Is it worth resetting and starting as a new phone? Has anyone done that with good results?
 
Lowfi22mac said:
What a puzzle! GPUs suddenly being taxed?

I've just checked system status and found that it's got load averages of 11.25, 4.98, 4.56.

The phone has been sat idle, doing nothing for the past 10 minutes.
Click to expand...
Finally caught it doing something been chilling for 10 minutes and it’s hovering between 18-22% cup usage. All apps closed in the background. So it’s doing something. Probably the indexing.
 

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Found this on Reddit:
Huge test

Some interesting results.
  1. iPhone 16 Plus (iOS 18) — 8 h 50 min
  2. iPhone 16 Pro Max (iOS 18) — 8 h 28 min
  3. iPhone 17 Pro Max (eSIM) — 8 h 6 min
  4. iPhone 16 Plus (iOS 26) — 8 h 4 min
  5. iPhone 17 Pro Max — 7 h 57 min
  6. iPhone 16e (iOS 26) — 7 h 48 min
  7. iPhone 16e (iOS 18) — 7 h 40 min
  8. iPhone 16 Pro Max (iOS 26) — 7 h 29 min
  9. iPhone 17 Pro (eSIM) — 7 h 9 min
  10. iPhone 16 (iOS 18) — 7 h 3 min
  11. iPhone 17 — 6 h 51 min
  12. iPhone 15 (iOS 18) — 6 h 35 min
  13. iPhone Air — 6 h 29 min
  14. iPhone 16 (iOS 26) — 6 h 19 min
  15. iPhone 16 Pro (iOS 18) — 6 h 5 min
  16. iPhone 16 Pro (iOS 26) — 5 h 58 min
  17. iPhone 16 Pro (iOS 26) — 5 h 58 min
  18. iPhone 15 (iOS 26) — 5 h 43 min
 
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