iOS 26 battery life thread.

[Reverend Benny]

Day 3 of my Air (now on 26.6 RC) ignoring the charge limit and doing a 100% charge.

View attachment 2646910

There's a new high when phones start to ignore their users. Try and ignore it back and see what happens 😄

 

[James6s]

There's a new high when phones start to ignore their users. Try and ignore it back and see what happens 😄

I own the phone and it should obey me! Or does the phone own me as it’s part of my arm now 😅

 

[FeliApple]

Was playing around with an iPhone 13 on iOS 26.5.2 that had 76% battery health and man what a difference in terms of performance from a usability perspective. The phone was lagging quite a bit and was from time to time not a very good user experience.
Sure, the phone will throttle the CPU and other components but never thought it would be so noticeable. Have messed around with a good few iPhone 13 with a healthy battery on iOS 26 and that was a completely different experience.

Not saying the CPU/GPU throttling feature is a bad thing but it was very noticeable when it was active on device with below 80% battery health.

It is an utter and complete insanity how much the relevance of battery health changes once you update.

This clearly showcases that iOS updates increase their resource consumption so massively that the experience is entirely different.

It is especially evident on iOS 26, I assume, due to the massively increased resource consumption of the part of iOS in charge of rendering (widely shown and tested when 26 was released with specific watts comparisons).

I don’t replace batteries and I don’t update iOS. I have two iPhone 6s. One was forced by Apple to iOS 13 and one runs iOS 10. The one on 13 has 75% health. The one on iOS 10, 63% health.

The one on iOS 13 is unusable, it dies on standby within a few hours and drops to 60% after an hour of music playback, so much so that I finally retired it.

The one on iOS 10? Like-new. It can play music for hours on end and has a normal standby battery life.


I can’t imagine how poor 26 is on an older iPhone like the 11 with a severely reduced battery health. Resource consumption really skyrockets with updates, and what surprises me the most is that people just accept this as if it was fine.

I am absolutely, 100% sure that if that iPhone 13 were on iOS 15 it would be just fine. My own long-term experience with original versions has repeatedly been like that.

And 26’s introduction of Liquid Glass, sadly, only compounds the issue, as it skyrockets resource consumption to levels that were unheard of before.

 

[James6s]

@FeliApple battery health decline matters whatever software version it’s running, whether it be the original or a later supported version for the device.

In 2022 me and the other half got iPhone 14’s which launched with iOS 16. My other half kept theirs longer, over a year on the original software version, battery health was about 87% with a noticeable reduction in runtime they complained about before upgrading.

There is absolutely no way that a device with significant decline to 63% battery health operates like new even on the original software version. It cannot defy the laws of physics and how batteries degrade over time, if it could then you’d be having as new battery life even with 20% battery health which is impossible!

Anyone using an iPhone with battery health well under 80% will be getting a warning that the battery is significantly degraded and needs replaced, original software version or newer.

 

[James6s]

First day with 26.6 RC on my Air and I think it’s a decent update & improvement over the shambles that is 26.5.2.

 

[TwoBytes]

RC does NOT fix the overheating issue people are experiencing with the phone, doing nothing; or simple web browsing and it getting hot and so the battery drains faster.

I’m reading reports of this being fixed in iOS 27.