I wanted to dig deeper into what can be expected of the air's battery.
The values shown in iphone compare tool on apple's site are pretty bad for comparing phones in actual usage. They might be good when someone only watches videos saved locally (video playback) or streamed (presumably wifi, that would be video playback, streamed).
YT battery tests prove this by doing other things than video only. They do some benchmarking, gaming, sitting in camera's viewfinder for a long time etc. All in all, maybe not ideal for picturing real world usage, but they paint a better picture than the apple's compare tool values.
To show some discrepancies, per apple, one would expect 16 pro to have better battery than 15 plus.
Results from a yt test (Darius K video).
Clearly the 15 plus is a winner (vs 16 pro) there. Not a shocker since it's battery is larger than 16 pro - 4383mAh vs 3582mAh. Efficiency of components plays a big role, but battery capacity is the driving parameter here.
With that out of the way, let's go back to the air.
How to approximate it's battery? Let's take the closest tech, available phone apple has, and scale it with battery capacity ratio between air and it. I'm picking 16 pro.
3149 / 3582 = 0.879
Now go to gsmarena battery test database and scale down the values of 16 pro. That's what I did and those are the values I got:
calls: 20:47
web: 12:17
video: 16:07
game: 7:24
active user score (default split): 12:33
Those would be the actual values for iphone air if it was a 16 pro with 3149 mAh battery. Air has got a bigger display (pretty much the same tech), it will draw more power. SoC + radios will be also different and the actual results will depend on how apple handles A19 pro and C1X + N1 radios in the air. Maybe A19 pro takes less power than A18 pro, maybe there's also additional cpu downclocking. Maybe the C1X and N1 combo is more power efficient than what's in 16 pro, maybe not
.
I'd assume SoC and radios power consumption will be at least on par with 16 pro, probably better, so I'm gonna take the calculation results at face value. Let's consider the active user score because it combines various use cases. The air lands 25 minutes behind iphone 15 pro, 40 minutes ahead of iphone 16e and a minute ahead of Google Pixel 9 Pro XL with 12:32. All compared with the default usage split on the site. I'd say that's some proper battery life for such a thin phone.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading my TED talk 😜
The values shown in iphone compare tool on apple's site are pretty bad for comparing phones in actual usage. They might be good when someone only watches videos saved locally (video playback) or streamed (presumably wifi, that would be video playback, streamed).
YT battery tests prove this by doing other things than video only. They do some benchmarking, gaming, sitting in camera's viewfinder for a long time etc. All in all, maybe not ideal for picturing real world usage, but they paint a better picture than the apple's compare tool values.
To show some discrepancies, per apple, one would expect 16 pro to have better battery than 15 plus.
Results from a yt test (Darius K video).
Clearly the 15 plus is a winner (vs 16 pro) there. Not a shocker since it's battery is larger than 16 pro - 4383mAh vs 3582mAh. Efficiency of components plays a big role, but battery capacity is the driving parameter here.
With that out of the way, let's go back to the air.
How to approximate it's battery? Let's take the closest tech, available phone apple has, and scale it with battery capacity ratio between air and it. I'm picking 16 pro.
3149 / 3582 = 0.879
Now go to gsmarena battery test database and scale down the values of 16 pro. That's what I did and those are the values I got:
calls: 20:47
web: 12:17
video: 16:07
game: 7:24
active user score (default split): 12:33
Those would be the actual values for iphone air if it was a 16 pro with 3149 mAh battery. Air has got a bigger display (pretty much the same tech), it will draw more power. SoC + radios will be also different and the actual results will depend on how apple handles A19 pro and C1X + N1 radios in the air. Maybe A19 pro takes less power than A18 pro, maybe there's also additional cpu downclocking. Maybe the C1X and N1 combo is more power efficient than what's in 16 pro, maybe not
.I'd assume SoC and radios power consumption will be at least on par with 16 pro, probably better, so I'm gonna take the calculation results at face value. Let's consider the active user score because it combines various use cases. The air lands 25 minutes behind iphone 15 pro, 40 minutes ahead of iphone 16e and a minute ahead of Google Pixel 9 Pro XL with 12:32. All compared with the default usage split on the site. I'd say that's some proper battery life for such a thin phone.
What do you think?
Thanks for reading my TED talk 😜
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