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Is this battery life for my iPhone 5 considered "good" or "average?"

M

Mr. RPG

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 21, 2012
566
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Went from 100% this morning to now 69%.

Usage: 2 Hours, 13 Minutes
Standby: 16 Hours, 15 Minutes

Mostly was listening to music and on LTE. By the way, I do not have any mail being fetched or anything battery-heavy like that. Brightness is pretty low as well.
 
That is AWESOME battery life in my opinion. 18 hours and my phone is down to 20%. That was today where I did a lot of GPS, so another day might be different. I usually need to plug it in overnight though.
 
I have a brand new ( replaced due to calls not working except on speakerphone) IP5. One cycle so far, and your stats are better than mine...It takes a couple of cycles, but I'd say your battery is in great shape.
 
Mr. RPG said:
Went from 100% this morning to now 69%.

Usage: 2 Hours, 13 Minutes
Standby: 16 Hours, 15 Minutes

Mostly was listening to music and on LTE. By the way, I do not have any mail being fetched or anything battery-heavy like that. Brightness is pretty low as well.
Click to expand...

Impossible to say since you're being way too vague.

If you listened to music with the screen turned off for two hours and surfed for a few minutes with great reception, it's pretty bad. If you listened to music and surfed on LTE at the same time for most of that time with really bad reception, it's amazing.
 
I'm guessing you guys don't know what 'standby' means...

It means the phone is in sleep mode. And most of the time while it was in sleep mode I was listening to music.

During standby I should be getting 225 hours...
 
Last edited:
Mr. RPG said:
I'm guessing you guys don't know what 'standby' means...

It means the phone is in sleep mode. And most of the time while it was in sleep mode I was listening to music.

During standby I should be getting 225 hours...
Click to expand...

Your definition of 'standby' is playing music on your iPhone?
 
Mr. RPG said:
I'm guessing you guys don't know what 'standby' means...

It means the phone is in sleep mode. And most of the time while it was in sleep mode I was listening to music.

During standby I should be getting 225 hours...
Click to expand...

If you want to tell others they don't know what standby means, that's okay, but it would be less embarrassing if you knew that listening to music doesn't count as standby...

If those numbers you posted were taken from Settings -> Usage then it means the phone was taken off the charger 16 hours and 15 minutes earlier and that you used it during 2h13 - listening to music included, so for 14h02 you didn't use it all, not even listen to music.

See my previous post regarding whether that's considered good battery life.
 
Standby means your phone isn't being used at all.

Phone is locked but you get a notification? That's usage.
Phone is locked and using GPS?
That's usage.
Phone is locked and playing music?
That's usage.
Phone is locked and doing nothing at all?
THAT'S standby.
 
paulbennett95 said:
Standby means your phone isn't being used at all.

Phone is locked but you get a notification? That's usage.
Phone is locked and using GPS?
That's usage.
Phone is locked and playing music?
That's usage.
Phone is locked and doing nothing at all?
THAT'S standby.
Click to expand...

Just a little addition to the absolutely correct information. The iPhone reports standby time as total time off the charger. You need to take that number and subtract the usage to get the actual standby time.
 
If you are looking at the theoretical stats that a company gives you (this includes Apple, Samsung, HTC, etc.) about battery life, you are almost always going to be sorely disappointed. The numbers they report are under ideal conditions. I would say the numbers you have shown here are just fine, with the limited information you gave us. Since usage can be as simple as listening to locally stored music with the screen off (this is probably the least power consuming of all tasks I can think of) it is tough to look at just that number and say either way. I can watch a one hour movie Netflix or listen to an hour of locally stored music. Both will effect my usage numbers exactly the same, yet the latter will be drastically lighter on my battery drain.
 
codyst said:
Pretty sure no specs will ever match up for any phone.
Click to expand...

Then why put them out there? If the expected run time is two hours, then the specifications should list two hours. Two hours is nowhere near eight hours. That's not a minor embellishment if the stated specification is four times larger than the actual runtime.

When I look at runtimes for critical systems, they will list the runtime at load under conditions certain. Sometimes I get more, but I know what the minimum is and how not to overload. It's the same with the portable computers, or laptops. Apple says that the MacBook Pro has a seven-hour battery. No, it doesn't; the specifications have overstated the runtime by approximately four hours. When I look at a critical system, its battery specification lists N hours, and they mean N hours at some specific temperature, pressure, and load that can be defined by the customer.

A phone this expensive should not have to lie about its battery runtime specifications. The specifications page for the iPhone says "Video playback: Up to 10 hours." That's not as ambiguous as the Apple laptop specifications. It says that I can do video playback for up to ten hours. If it only lasts one or two hours under this load condition, then saying ten hours would be a lie. So, which is it, and if this specification can't be believed, then how can anyone believe the rest of the specifications as stated?
 
arogge said:
Then why put them out there? If the expected run time is two hours, then the specifications should list two hours. Two hours is nowhere near eight hours. That's not a minor embellishment if the stated specification is four times larger than the actual runtime.
Click to expand...
It's not an embellishment, it's the higher numbers they've gotten that can be considered to not be outliers, when testing them under conditions that they've posted on their website. But none of these numbers are four times higher than the expected run time, unless you're comparing something like wifi browsing with FaceTime on cellular data, but then you're not making a fair comparison.

When I look at runtimes for critical systems, they will list the runtime at load under conditions certain. Sometimes I get more, but I know what the minimum is and how not to overload. It's the same with the portable computers, or laptops. Apple says that the MacBook Pro has a seven-hour battery. No, it doesn't; the specifications have overstated the runtime by approximately four hours. When I look at a critical system, its battery specification lists N hours, and they mean N hours at some specific temperature, pressure, and load that can be defined by the customer.
Click to expand...
I've never gotten only three hours out of my early 2011 MBP 13". I've yet, after two years, to use the charger during a work day.

A few weeks ago I was at home sick, using the laptop as my entertainment. I watched a movie, surfed the web and edited some photos. I got more than four hours out of it before I plugged it in, and that was before it had warned me about low battery...

A phone this expensive should not have to lie about its battery runtime specifications. The specifications page for the iPhone says "Video playback: Up to 10 hours." That's not as ambiguous as the Apple laptop specifications. It says that I can do video playback for up to ten hours. If it only lasts one or two hours under this load condition, then saying ten hours would be a lie. So, which is it, and if this specification can't be believed, then how can anyone believe the rest of the specifications as stated?[/QUOTE]
Well, why don't you buy a movie from iTunes store and let it play on repeat, mimicking the settings Apple used, and let us know how long the battery lasted? http://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html
 
I've seen many stupid things posted in visiting forums since 1995 or so and listeng to music while the phone is in standby = standby has now been added to that list
 
Oh, sentence structure FAIL. You're trying to say that after 2 hours and 13 minutes, the battery indicator moved from full to 69%. You should have stated that your iPhone had a runtime of approximately seven hours before nearing a depleted battery. So, that would be consistent with the specifications.
 
hafr said:
I've never gotten only three hours out of my early 2011 MBP 13". I've yet, after two years, to use the charger during a work day.
Click to expand...

According to the OS X battery indicator, and my recent experience of leaving the system unplugged and having it suffer a power failure unexpectedly, my Apple laptop battery will fail after one hour and 30 minutes while running the CPU at speed for the entire time. Doing staggered tasks like photo development and batch-conversions results in an approximate 2.5-hour battery runtime, depending on the number of files opened and converted, and their file sizes. That's not much better than the Apple laptop battery from the early-2000s, although the new technology does better when running the system at idle. That's why it's important to state the actual load on the battery when listing expected runtimes, because for the people who do CPU-intensive work, the battery has less than two hours before anticipated depletion.
 
arogge said:
According to the OS X battery indicator, and my recent experience of leaving the system unplugged and having it suffer a power failure unexpectedly, my Apple laptop battery will fail after one hour and 30 minutes while running the CPU at speed for the entire time. Doing staggered tasks like photo development and batch-conversions results in an approximate 2.5-hour battery runtime, depending on the number of files opened and converted, and their file sizes. That's not much better than the Apple laptop battery from the early-2000s, although the new technology does better when running the system at idle. That's why it's important to state the actual load on the battery when listing expected runtimes, because for the people who do CPU-intensive work, the battery has less than two hours before anticipated depletion.
Click to expand...
Of course one could argue that they should give more specific information regarding the battery, but when they say 'up to seven hours wireless surfing', most people understand that running very demanding tasks such as the ones you're describing will drain the battery much faster.

If you're the kind of person that actually needs your laptop to do heavy lifting and not being able to use the charger, no matter which computer you're getting, you should consider either getting a larger battery in case it's easily replaceable, or an external power source.
 
hafr said:
Of course one could argue that they should give more specific information regarding the battery, but when they say 'up to seven hours wireless surfing', most people understand that running very demanding tasks such as the ones you're describing will drain the battery much faster.
Click to expand...

When "wireless surfing" on the laptop, I know what drains the battery even faster than doing real work, and that's Adobe Flash junk on Websites!
 
arogge said:
When "wireless surfing" on the laptop, I know what drains the battery even faster than doing real work, and that's Adobe Flash junk on Websites!
Click to expand...

I wouldn't know, I've got AdBlocker and Click2Flash to stop all those pesky, crappy things from running 😉
 
Mr. RPG said:
I'm guessing you guys don't know what 'standby' means...

It means the phone is in sleep mode. And most of the time while it was in sleep mode I was listening to music.

During standby I should be getting 225 hours...
Click to expand...

You don't know what "standby" is.
 
Mr. RPG said:
Went from 100% this morning to now 69%.

Usage: 2 Hours, 13 Minutes
Standby: 16 Hours, 15 Minutes

Mostly was listening to music and on LTE. By the way, I do not have any mail being fetched or anything battery-heavy like that. Brightness is pretty low as well.
Click to expand...

I would say that's pretty average for music and simple browsing. What really kills it is when you play games or watch videos, but even then I think that the iPhone 5 has a pretty good battery life.
 
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