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iOS 26 battery life thread.
- Thread starter goldmac2006
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From what I’ve seen of Apple intelligence I don’t think I am missing out on much. But USB-C and 2TB storage would be nice. + faster charging, as long as I am wishcasting
Also since y'all get USB-C on the newest iPhones you can do the following with the port like you did w/ an iPad:
USB Hubs
Record with external storage and read/write files on it
On my 15 PM it only goes fast down (but still acceptable!) when using Chat GPT (using it a lot) - still think that’s the 15 PM itself with bad battery life overall.
And have to remember that I installed fresh yesterday so it’s close to 24 hrs only since going with the iOS 26 beta !
And have to remember that I installed fresh yesterday so it’s close to 24 hrs only since going with the iOS 26 beta !
Beta 3. Fantastic battery day. 12 hours off charger, over 5 hours SoT, and 63% left in the tank. Spent most of the day on WiFi, lots of web surfing and a fair bit of YouTube and Pocket Casts playing through the phone speakers.
Beta 2 was way better than beta 3 in terms of battery life and lagginess.
Me too, it was way better on beta 3 - but still rolled back to iOS 18.5 because of the excessive heat I got on my 15 PM
Hey everyone! It feels like ages since we last chatted 😂 I was on vacation and swamped with work before the week off arrived!!! Oh my goodness, I totally spaced on beta 3 for everyone!
Regarding battery life, it’s been pretty good. Just a heads-up: heat waves during the summer can cause charging to pause and also temporarily disable certain iPhone features like Apple Maps, flash on the camera, and even drain your iPhone while it’s charging, whether it’s MagSafe or not.
Before I left, I popped into the local Apple Store the day after getting my first Mac and chatted with an Apple genius 🧑💻. He took a look at my iPhone 15 Pro and ran some tests on his iPad mini 7th gen. He showed me that the battery diagnostics on my iPhone came back as fine, all green check ✅ marks. He mentioned that my worries about the iPhone 15 Pro battery health declining faster than expected were mainly due to the heat, which indeed caused it to go down so quickly, even on both iOS 18.5 public version and iOS 26 developer beta versions.
So, it turns out that even early iOS betas can be tough on your battery life! I told him all about my battery-saving tricks, like my charging habits, MagSafe use, charge limit settings, display settings, and the tips my friend gave me. He was super impressed and said I was doing the right thing for my iPhone’s battery. He also suggested reducing the display settings to just a minute or two while the iPhone is idle to save energy. Plus, emails can still be fetched as long as you set it to hourly, which is the least frequent setting in the Mail app to minimize background usage. And get this—my 15 Pro didn’t transfer the background app refresh settings from my old iPhone XR, even though I set it up on my iPhone! 🫣 So, the Genius told me to turn off background app refresh again, and it totally worked wonders. He also mentioned that since he checked my iPhone’s settings and did a diagnostics, it’s too early to replace the battery. But he said that everything I’ve done, plus these suggestions and settings he’s added, will help slow down the battery’s degradation.
Totally hate having to do a battery replacement even after such a short time of owning my 15 pro.
And guess what? After being out of town for a few days, I popped on my MagSafe power bank and charged my iPhone back and forth between wired and wireless charging, and the battery health didn’t take a huge hit during the trip.
15PM IOS26 B2 & B3 battery seem the same to me and both are good. Wife's 16P is samey same.
15PM & 16P B2, B3, & B4 all seem the same. Both have good all day battery life, FWIW.
Running Beta 4 on my daily driver 16PM and my IPad M4. Both heat up occasionally, but decent battery life overall. Getting all day on my iPhone. Strangely, my iPhone seems warmest when I take it off the charger first thing in the morning, almost like it works hardest when it’s waking for the first time. I can relate!
I didn’t really notice a difference in battery life from B1 to B3. However, B4 is much better. Not as good as 18.5, but not too far from it either.
15 Plus with 93% battery health.
15 Plus with 93% battery health.
Same here on my iPhone 15 pro… only time my iPhone had issues with heat in beta 4.
So far so good
Beta 4. iPhone 16 PM on WiFi (no SIM) getting great battery life. Average 1.5 hrs SoT per 10%. But M4 iPad Pro getting 0.5 hrs per 10%. Drastic difference.
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16 P I didn't notice any difference even though I always keep this feature turned on.
WOAH way more than me and still at 95%? How?! My 15 Pro's at 91% 330-ish cycles...
It should lower the brightness, lower the performance, and reduce the delivery speed of some notifications so it is pinging servers less often. Unlike low power mode, it doesn't seem to affect ProMotion or 5G.
My 15PM just went from 91 to 87 in the past week.