iPhone 6S Plus Battery Life

[sunking101]

Needing to have that much off just to get 9-11 hours is some bull. Sounds like what you're saying is you basically just turn it into an iPhone 4.

How come? I don't need apps refreshing in the background and I select a few apps to have access to location services. All the system features in location services do nothing of benefit to me so I switch them off. I don't like parallax and I don't like the app opening & closing animations, so how am I in any way creating an iPhone 4 by doing all this?

 

[Captain America]

How come? I don't need apps refreshing in the background and I select a few apps to have access to location services. All the system features in location services do nothing of benefit to me so I switch them off. I don't like parallax and I don't like the app opening & closing animations, so how am I in any way creating an iPhone 4 by doing all this?

I suppose it more depends on your reasoning for it, which is to say that if you were to make those changes exclusively for the purpose of extended battery life, it's ridiculous. If it's personal preference, then that's fine.

 

[DynamicSausage]

On Saturday night I took my phone out with 100% at around 7pm, had some moderate use of all the "battery draining features" until about 4am, didn't charge, woke up at 2pm, more moderate use until around 3pm and still had 59% or something.

Last night I took my phone to work at 10pm with 99%, 4 hours of music followed by about 45 minutes of Facebooking and internet, then kept in my pocket until about 10:30am and arrived home with 59%.

I'm absoloutely blown away by how good the battery is compared to my 5S. All the time I've not adjusted any settings having auto-brightness turned on and Bluetooth to use my Watch.

 

[The Game 161]

I've been following these battery life threads and looking at the screenshots of usage and most people are pretty impressed. But to me most of those battery times are not very good. My nexus 6 I got back at launch easily out lasts any of the 6s plus numbers I'm seeing. Just one of the reasons I'm leary about switching to an iPhone.

What were your average stats then?

at the end of the day if you take your phone off charge at say 6am and you don't need to charge it till 11pm at night then thats stunning battery life.

Even better if you don't need to charge it till the following day.

took mine off charge at 5am and at 20:30pm it still has 53% left all with bluetooth on all day with my apple watch. Did an hours walk too.

 

[throwthedice]

What were your average stats then?

at the end of the day if you take your phone off charge at say 6am and you don't need to charge it till 11pm at night then thats stunning battery life.

Even better if you don't need to charge it till the following day.

took mine off charge at 5am and at 20:30pm it still has 53% left all with bluetooth on all day with my apple watch. Did an hours walk too.

Precisely. If around 11pm on a given day, after having unplugged at 6 or 7 that morning, if the phone (not just the iphone, any phone that you're using) still has about 15% of battery left then that's absolutely good battery life.

 

[The Game 161]

Precisely. If around 11pm on a given day, after having unplugged at 6 or 7 that morning, if the phone (not just the iphone, any phone that you're using) still has about 15% of battery left then that's absolutely good battery life.

Yep

Not like my S6 edge where I had to charge it by 4pm

 

[edlex]

I'm curious as to how many people did a restore versus set up as new and whether that plays a role in lower battery life.

 

[throwthedice]

Yep

Not like my S6 edge where I had to charge it by 4pm

My Nexus 4 was pretty similar. Off charge at 7:00 in the morning and 20-25% around 5PM - always had to plug in while in the office

 

[bchreng]

For what it's worth, I'm on my 6+ quite often and use it for browsing, chatting, social media, taking and editing photos, games and streaming and find it to barely last 7-8 hrs before needing to recharge.

 

[Zafla]

I took my phone off the charger at 5:10 this morning. It's at 75% now at almost 4:10PM. I keep my brightness right below the wi-fi icon and I was on wi-fi for most of the day. Mainly texting, checking FB, Insta, Twitter and Snapchat. I set my phone up as new. I just turned off the background refresh and turned off the notifications I don't care about. On my 6 Plus it was about the same, maybe a little better. I think the phone takes a few days to calibrate and I'm gonna give it some more time so I can get a better feel for how the battery is gonna be. Sucks that the battery itself is smaller but 3D Touch has been awesome so far.

 

[photogpab]

View attachment 587334 here is mine....on my 6 plus.

off and on since around 6am this morning, it's almost 2pm cst here, and i have played music for over 5 hours. and that's playing via bluetooth in the car and headphones at work. that's where most of my use is from...

how is this even possible? I'm being serious.. I think it's amazing you are at 70% with 6 hours of usage but I'm now down to 32% with LESS than 4 hours of usage and I'm barely even touching my phone. It's just sitting on my desk and I'm checking the occasional text here and there!

 

[Jigga]

My first day using it…

 

[ikenstein]

how is this even possible? I'm being serious.. I think it's amazing you are at 70% with 6 hours of usage but I'm now down to 32% with LESS than 4 hours of usage and I'm barely even touching my phone. It's just sitting on my desk and I'm checking the occasional text here and there!

It really depends on the TYPE of usage. If person A's usage is with the screen on, say reading a kindle book or browsing the internet, and Person B's usage usage is mostly just listening to music with the screen off, then Person B will have much more battery life left with equal usage times.

 

[dazb69]

Screenshot shows No Service and the first screenshot shows a low signal strength as well. Could this be the cause of your battery drain? If you are always in a area with poor signal reception that could be a contributing factor.

Step 8 covers the effect on battery drain caused by poor cell service

http://appinstructor.com/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain

Just an observation

I must really be doing something wrong... This doesn't seem great at all:

 

[Decimotox]

I'm curious as to how many people did a restore versus set up as new and whether that plays a role in lower battery life.

I restored from an iCloud backup of my previous 6.

Currently at 8 hours usage time, 18 hours and 2 minutes of standby time, and still have 40% battery left.

I'm guessing I'll get close to 10-11 hours total. This is with watching some Youtube videos, music constantly on (at work), on LTE...no wifi, and doing some fairly consistent Safari browsing.

 

[photogpab]

Screenshot shows No Service and the first screenshot shows a low signal strength as well. Could this be the cause of your battery drain? If you are always in a area with poor signal reception that could be a contributing factor.

Step 8 covers the effect on battery drain caused by poor cell service

http://appinstructor.com/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain

Just an observation

I'm down in the basement of an old building so we dont get cell reception. Therefor I have wifi on - wouldnt that actually help my battery? Isnt wifi more battery efficient than cell service?

 

[D.T.]

My battery life seems *astounding*

I'll swear on Saturday (when we got the phones), I did a full charge from the ~80% OOTB, and with all the use, it ran until noon the next day (though admittedly, I may have been plugged into my Mac a few times, so the charge was probably up and down ...)

I restored from an iCloud backup of my previous 6.

Currently at 8 hours usage time, 18 hours and 2 minutes of standby time, and still have 40% battery left.

I'm guessing I'll get close to 10-11 hours total. This is with watching some Youtube videos, music constantly on (at work), on LTE...no wifi, and doing some fairly consistent Safari browsing.

Yeah, my TIME SINCE LAST FULL CHARGE (which was a full charge and then _no_ additional charging) as of posting this is exactly 12 Hours with 18 hours, 55 minutes of Standby, that included 1.3 hours of a driving game last night - I'm currently at 14% and running it till it goes dark!




[edit]

Wanted to add, I've been 90% on WiFi, but I did make a few calls (using my Mac, routing the call through my phone), maybe 1-1.5 hours or so. So probably less cellular use than some folks with less hours which makes sense.

 

[Decimotox]

I'm down in the basement of an old building so we dont get cell reception. Therefor I have wifi on - wouldnt that actually help my battery? Isnt wifi more battery efficient than cell service?

It is...but your antenna will still be trying constantly to acquire reception, even if wifi is on (I believe this is how it works).

 

[dazb69]

Quoted from the link I posted.

"Often times you may get a strong signal on the top floor of a building, but simply moving to a lower floor, such as the basement, will immediately cause your iPhone to hang on to signal for dear life at the expense of your battery. Note that this severe drain will happen even if you have a strong Wi-Fi connection, because your phone still needs the cellular connection for calls and SMS message"

Maybe worth trying a few of the suggestions on there regarding enabling airplane mode when in low cell coverage areas and re-enabling wifi, or switching cellular data off so that the phone can still receive phone calls but will use your wifi for data.

My wife's 5C used to drain horrendously when she first got it due to poor reception despite being connected to wifi all day. It would have to be charged by lunchtime. We managed to resolve this by getting a signal box that is connected to our router which gives her full 3G coverage via our broadband indoors. Problem disappeared.

 

[Lobwedgephil]

how is this even possible? I'm being serious.. I think it's amazing you are at 70% with 6 hours of usage but I'm now down to 32% with LESS than 4 hours of usage and I'm barely even touching my phone. It's just sitting on my desk and I'm checking the occasional text here and there!

Your pic showed no phone service and not full wifi, it could be getting killed looking for service and stronger wifi.

 

[photogpab]

Your pic showed no phone service and not full wifi, it could be getting killed looking for service and stronger wifi.

thanks all... I never thought that no cell phone signal could be killing my service. I just enabled airplane mode and I'm on wifi. See if that helps.

However, I was home all weekend with great cell reception and wifi signal and my phone still died at 4pm so I must have some bugs somewhere. Maybe I'll reset since I set this phone up from an icloud backup? Maybe resetting and activating as a "new phone" will help?

 

[MacManTexas56]

how is this even possible? I'm being serious.. I think it's amazing you are at 70% with 6 hours of usage but I'm now down to 32% with LESS than 4 hours of usage and I'm barely even touching my phone. It's just sitting on my desk and I'm checking the occasional text here and there!

sorry man, i haven't been on here in awhile. and that is with playing music in the background through my bluetooth headphones for 5+ hours. It just depends on your settings and particularly which apps you are using. Using the phone and texting kills my battery life. Like someone else mentioned, signal strength will also kill battery life if you get terrible reception.

 

[SR71]

What does the battery stats say is using most of your battery? Your numbers are very low for a Plus. I saw better usage than that on my iPhone 6! For reference on my 6S+ (which I restored from a backup of my iPhone 6) is getting 11-13 hours medium to heavy usage with 16-18 hours of standby. There's been a few days where my usage has been lighter, though and I've gone about 10 hours of usage with 30 hours of standby. This is closer to what your battery life should probably be. I've added some notes below so you can get a good idea of what kind of usage

Some notes:

• This is without low power mode being used at all
• Brightness varying throughout the day (walking between classes/different lighting in certain classrooms) between 30%-100%, hands-free Hey Siri turned on.
• Bluetooth always on.
• Background app refresh on (although I have disabled it for numerous apps that I don't think need it on.)
• Wifi always on (switching between wifi and LTE constantly as I move from class to class, to dining hall, to library, and eventually back to my dorm) with probably 70-80% use over wifi and the rest on LTE.
• Two Gmail accounts with constant push emails coming in, one iCloud email with very few emails coming in
• Music playback isn't being used to pad my numbers up (aka make usage seem higher than it is) and usually when I play music I'm replying to texts, browsing the web, Snapchatting, checking Twitter/Facebook, etc.
• All animations turned on, none of that reduce transparency or anything.
• Constantly texting (group chats and stuff) through both the regular Messages app and Facebook Messenger, Snapchatting, checking Twitter/Facebook, browsing the web and Reddit, listening to Spotify (usually while simultaneously doing the other tasks I've listed), the occasional YouTube video, and occasionally some Netflix at night before bed.

Did you restore from a backup or setup as new? Also what do your background app refresh settings look like? As I said before, the only real settings I've changed as I mentioned are the customizing my background app refresh settings, so I'd recommend going through that and turning it off for apps that you don't think need it. If that doesn't help I'd recommend visiting an Apple Store and replacing it or just return it and get a new one. Hope this helps!

 

[th3r3ds0x]

I use my 6S Plus pretty heavy and it lasts all day with quite a bit left to spare, usually 25-40%. I don't turn all sorts of stuff off, mainly just background refresh for apps that don't need it. I love to use Siri etc and I have an Apple Watch so Bluetooth all day. I'm satisfied.