Adaptive power helps with heat management? I might use it purely for that since my 16 pro seems to heat up somewhat easily compared to iOS 18 where it always stayed cool.
Do I need to keep Apple Intelligence enabled for it to work?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iOS 26 battery life thread.
- Thread starter goldmac2006
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Do I need to keep Apple Intelligence enabled for it to work?
Apple Intelligence? ❌ not required for it.
That’s the only one of the benefits I noticed with adaptive power, less heat generated by the chip. Others caused display brightness issues, refresh rate issues and no effects on drainage .
I’ll give it a go turned on and see if it helps run cooler, even just running Spotify with my cars Bluetooth (screen off, no maps etc) it tends to get warm
I just reinstalled IOS 26 on my 13 Pro Max after a full DFU restore, fresh and it seems (so far) to be behaving better especially with standby drain. I’m gonna give it a week or so to see if it gets any better.
Yeah, I also made a clean install of iOS 26.2 on my A15 device (an iPhone SE 3) and I’m getting quite good battery life. So far so good!!
How long does it take more or less for the battery life to stabilise ?
I updated my 16Pro to 26.2 from 18.x one week ago and the battery is still draining fast
I updated my 16Pro to 26.2 from 18.x one week ago and the battery is still draining fast
Post-update, give 24 hours at a minimum to let the update settle in the background. Things should stabilize after that.
so I'm guessing is not a good sign that after a week after the battery is not that great, and before updating the max capacity was 99%, now down to 98%
Did you update to a beta or public release? Betas bring down battery capacity rapidlyso I'm guessing is not a good sign that after a week after the battery is not that great, and before updating the max capacity was 99%, now down to 98%
The new battery life system is pathetic. It is garbage. The “screen-on time” number you see there is from 00:00-23:59, regardless of whether you used it while charging or not. Unlike on iOS 12-18, this one does NOT differentiate between charging or not.
So the answer to your question of “how do I determine SOT since last full charge on iOS 26?” Is “you can’t do that”.
It is so pathetic. I can’t see how Apple ever approved that.
To run a battery test, charge it overnight while you sleep (don’t use it while charging) and unplug it as soon as you wake up.
Run the test until 23:59 at the latest and you will see the correct number in that pathetic graph. Otherwise the number is useless.
We’ll need to approach this a bit differently. Since it doesn’t quite align with the earlier versions, I’ve decided to hold off on testing my iPhone’s battery endurance. Instead, I’ll focus on the RC and public release versions, and I’ll prioritize settings that help the battery last, rather than just measuring how much it drains over time!
It clearly is worse, more confusing, and cumbersome.
I thought about doing what you said, but unfortunately I don’t have a schedule to charge it, and I usually use it while charging.
However, I’ve thought of another way of having a bit more knowledge about the battery behavior: despite charging it at 1AM or 1PM, despite using it while charging or not, I think the key is to do a snapshot when I unplug it. That way, I know how many SoT hours to substract from the final count at the end of the day.
Say I unplug it at 1PM, I make a screenshot of it, with -for example- 4h 36m SOT. Then I start using it… and at 11:55PM I do another snapshot. Let’s say I have 11h 36m of SOT and a 25% of battery remaining. That would mean I’ve consumed 75% of the battery with 7h of screen use of the phone. Then, for 100%, I calculate how many hours it would give me.
Yes, it’s cumbersome but I think this might work.
As long as you unplug it before 00:00 lf the following day, it would work. To extrapolate that, you would need to subtract the minutes used until it dropped to 99%. The 100-99% percentage points lasts several times longer than the rest. I’ve gotten up to 1h 58 mins of SOT before it dropped to 99%. Including that in the extrapolation would be incorrect.
That’s the only hurdle, but it can be done.
Same here that happened when I jumped from iOS 18.5 to iOS 26 beta… I went from 100% battery health to 91% in less than a month.