See the toms guide review. And the Macworld review. Smaller battery but higher efficiency seem to be this year’s MO, 5G being the exception. The Qualcomm modem may also be less power hungry in LTE mode than the intel.
I'm thinking the Qualcomm modem doing LTE better might be a lot of it. Also Apple tends to not only talk about performance improvements when it announces a next generation of the A-series SoC, it very often (maybe even usually, I haven't counted) talks about reduced power consumption as well. It didn't do that at the iPhone 12 launch but I'm wondering if that might not have been because it didn't manage to get better power efficiency in the A14 but rather because it knew all those gains would be cancelled out (and more) for people using 5G so it didn't want to talk about anything to do with battery life at all.
On the other hand, I have one nagging doubt about the Tomsguide results. Did they retest the 11 Pro for the article or did they simply look up the result from the test they did in their review last year just after the 11 Pro was released? If the latter then there is no way of knowing whether the reception conditions seen during the 11 Pro and the 12 Pro 4G tests were at all comparable.
I'm really hoping the Tomsguide test results are valid but given my maybe yes, maybe no speculations above I think it could go either way.
I hadn't seen that Macworld review. That is also very encouraging but I do feel the same as the author of that review (
https://www.macworld.com/article/3587406/iphone-12-pro-review-the-iphone-thats-future-proof.html) ...
An 8 percent reduction in battery capacity with a 14 percent increase in battery life, despite having a slightly larger display, speaks to the efficiency of the A14 processor. Still, we can’t help but dream of how long these phones would last if Apple stuck with the totally reasonable thickness of 8.1mm and used that extra internal space to give us a 3,400 mAh battery (still far less than comparable premium Android phones!).
I 100% agree with that. I really don't understand why Apple chose to reduce the battery capacities vs the previous year's models in an update cycle when it knew it would be adding a battery-unfriendly feature (5G). Maybe it thought it had hit the absolute limit of weight that people would tolerate. These thinner 12 Pros are pretty much exactly the same weight as the 11 Pros so presumably maintaining the same thickness as the 11 Pros and putting in a bigger battery would have resulted in a weight increase vs the 11 Pros. That's really the only reason I can think of.
And then next year we'll almost certainly have 120Hz and there are even rumours that this year's Pros already have reverse charging capability that is currently disabled both of which are additional challenges for getting good battery life.
I do hope that Apple starts trying to increase battery capacity again, hopefully next year.
[ Edited to correct typo: “from the article” -> “for the article” ]
