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iOS 26 battery life thread.
- Thread starter goldmac2006
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Question: The yellow bars, is that "low power" mode that you have enabled manually? Or is it the AI battery thingy that enables that automatically?
I’m not a huge fan of the new battery menu interface, I’ll get used to it I guess!
I enabled the low power mode for a short time yesterday as I was taking a lot of photos and doing some editing, and low power mode reduces the heat and battery drain whilst doing so.
I’ve left feedback for this which is the only problem in iOS 26 public beta 5 that I’ve come across.
And also enable low power mode whilst I sleep, always have.
Just got this pop up notification for the first time
Neither do I! Nothing felt different, like there wasn’t any noticeable change in performance or adjustments to screen refresh etc.
I have it enabled but not sure exactly what it does. Makes no difference to usage that I can tell
Pretty astonished by 16e battery life right out of the box - beta 8 not even 24 hrs installed and still that high SOC !
There’s not much of a difference for me between Adaptive Power Mode and Adaptive Power Notifications — feels more like a marketing trick than an actual feature.
Well, the first impression is solid — no surprise since we’re basically talking about a near-stable release.
You’re a pretty heavy user in terms of brightness and apps used right?
6.5 hours of SOT 100-20%, by itself, looks quite poor, but I know that heavy users kill batteries far quicker than me.
For reference, yesterday I had 8h 30 min of SOT with 67% remaining. I’m a light user, however.
I guess I’m just surprised that people keep managing to burn through those battery life improvements.
I got 8 hours of SOT with my 6s on iOS 9. I got 11-12 hours of SOT with my 7+ on iOS 10. I got 16 hours of SOT with my Xʀ on iOS 12, and I’m getting about 27 hours of SOT with my 16 Plus on iOS 18.
My usage pattern hasn’t changed much, but even if most people’s pattern has, there is no improvement.
I saw about 8 hours with the Xs, with the Xʀ, with the 13, with the 15, with the 16e, and with the regular 16.
I’m guessing that that’s where people’s intensity or “heaviness” of their usage really skyrocketed. By iOS 12 or so. I recall looking at 7+ threads here and battery life was good, with many, many users getting to 10 hours or so, which was pretty close to my heavily optimised experience.
By the time I got the iPhone Xʀ and started getting 16 hours, most people’s screenshots showed they were getting about half. It never got any better; in fact, it got worse. Today, I see many 8-hour cycles with iPhones that are rated for 27, 30, 35 hours. I’m getting three times more battery life with light use, which was unheard-of until now.
You class 8.5hrs of SOT in a day a light user? What do you class as a heavy user lol
What does your usage look like in a typical day, do you have any screen shots for this?
My SOT dropped to only 3.5 to 5 hours on average since I went back to school.
beta 8 iOS 26 on my 15 pro, and I kept my iPhone connected to my Mac while in class.
On my off days it’s more since my iPhone is off the charger while in the gym 💪 playing music and watching Fitness+ workout videos
Yes, I’m a light user. This is a common misconception. Light vs heavy is not “hours used in a day”, but usage intensity when discussing battery life. Why? Very simple.
Let’s assume there’s a user B who doesn’t have a high screen-on time, but they use a 16 Plus with intensive use. High brightness gaming, for example. They are, at the end of the day, at 80% remaining with 1.5 hours of SOT. I’m at the same 80% after 6 hours of SOT, but my usage is light: the apps I used aren’t too draining.
Light vs heavy is how “efficient” your usage is. How many percentage points you consume with the same amount of hours of SOT, not how many hours you use your phone.
If someone with an iPhone 16 Plus drops it to 80% after 1.5 hours of SOT, they’re a very heavy user, a very intensive one. Calling themselves “light” users because they haven’t used their iPhone too much in the context of a battery life discussion is wrong: their intensity is so high that their efficiency is very low: (the amount of percentage points used per hour of SOT on a percentage point other than 100% is very high).
Therefore, heavy users, even if they use their iPhone for one hour in a 24-hour period.
The perfect example of why this new iOS 26 reporting system is garbage and useless.
You unplugged at 6am, charged it back up a little at 8 am, and plugged it back in at 12pm.
I see 3h 54 mins of SOT since 00:00, yet I have no clue. How much of that SOT was while charging? What’s your charge limit? The cycle in the middle, 10 to 12:00, how much SOT did it have and how much battery life did it use? I have absolutely no idea.
The only way this garbage works is if you unplug once per day and you do NOT use it while charging… the latter part (use while charging) is NOT shown anywhere on the screenshot. Whereas before, it was. Pathetic. I thought the person or team who manages battery screens understands battery life reporting far better than I ever could. They don’t. They are clueless. And they can’t read a graph like so many can’t read the iOS 12-18 one.
You can’t even see more of the rough breakdown even more.
That screenshot was today’s one. Yesterday was when I had class all day:
Would you like for me to do a battery endurance test on my iPhone tomorrow? I done it for my watch to determine how long it can last, as I had to minimise charging my watch when I used to work overtime on my internship from my old job.
A test would be nice but I’d wait until the final iOS 26 release, otherwise I’d be comparing numbers from a stable iOS 18 release vs a beta, not too fair. Thanks though, I’d love that!