Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iOS 18 Battery Life Thread
- Thread starter gwhizkids
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
So I just watched this iOS 18 battery saving tips video by zollotech (
) who is a well known and credible YouTuber and at minute 18:50 seconds of the video he starts discussing system services and according to him, turning any of the system services that we discussed yesterday including significant locations is NOT recommended and would not save any battery life at all. Now, that completely contradicts the informations that we were given by the ex Apple employee from the other video on YouTube which has 3 Million views (Payette Forward -
)
I’m not sure what to make of this, What do you guys think? Is it better to just turn all the system services including significant locations on if it makes no difference just for the sake of having the iOS run as it was intended without potentially disabling any core service by messing with these system service toggles?
Additionally, one tip that keeps on coming up is turning off 5G entirely switching to LTE, which is supposed to apparently save a lot of battery life have you guys tried this?
I’m not sure what to make of this, What do you guys think? Is it better to just turn all the system services including significant locations on if it makes no difference just for the sake of having the iOS run as it was intended without potentially disabling any core service by messing with these system service toggles?
Additionally, one tip that keeps on coming up is turning off 5G entirely switching to LTE, which is supposed to apparently save a lot of battery life have you guys tried this?
Last edited:
Turning off 5G definitely saves battery as it’s not a 5G SA. The way it is right now it still has to connect to both 4G for voice and 5G for data which would be a drain.
On the other hand if you’re on standalone 5G, you can leave 5G ON.
5G standalone is greyed out for me on AT&T and from what I’ve read thus far that setting should be off anyways but what I was referring to above in my previous post is that some YouTubers have made the suggestion to select LTE under the cellular settings page instead of 5G Auto and that it would save a great deal of battery life. If that’s the case, why isn’t everyone doing it? Have any of you tried that? Does visual voicemail and all functions of the iPhone work the same on LTE only with the only exception being the slightly slower data speeds?
Attachments
Interesting. Does having the SA toggle enabled mean you always have standalone 5G available? Or there is a map showing standalone 5G for the big carriers that we can reference? I currently have 5G Auto selected and 5G SA enabled on Verizon.
I believe it’s SA only where it’s available.
You can check out Cellmapper but not sure if you can filter out SA towers.
I’d keep the SA enabled if it’s available as it’s more efficient.
Sticking to LTE means you’re never connected to 5G frequencies which translates to battery savings unlike Auto which uses 5G when the signal’s good and the speeds are required but still isn’t the same as a standalone.
Everything works just fine even with LTE from what I can gather and you shouldn’t be having any issues. The only time you might see an issue with LTE is in crowded areas where a tower is congested and is less of a problem on 5G with higher bandwidth.
Most want to use 5G as it’s advertised as more advanced and using LTE alone means you’re not using a service you’re already paying for. But what we were sold on as true 5G is the standalone which is still not as widely available.
So I just gave it a try (put it on LTE only) for about an hour and the battery drain seems to be the same on LTE as it was with 5G auto so I’m just going to keep it on 5G auto.
As far as location services > system services go, I am going to enable all of them ON including significant locations, except for the 3 ones under product improvement. Based on my testing from the past two days with some of these unnecessary system services disabled to allegedly try and save additional battery life proved to not improve battery life at all in comparison to having the iPhone set up with all of the system services toggled on. I start my day off with 100% at 6:30 AM and my 15 Pro is at 27% around 3 PM irregardless of how these system services are set up, which is what made me come to this conclusion
Last edited:
My one day unscientific test yields the same result, battery seems to be the same for my use case so I'm leaving everything toggled on.
Regarding the 5G discussion, this is what verizon says for those settings. I imagine other carriers are the same.
Mine is also on 5G auto for best results.
They do have this note at the top but the 5G auto setting still seems to be the best choice.
You watched the video I posted a few pages back ?
I think longterm it will approve your battery life and more importantly do you want send that much unnecessary data and gps data to Apple?
I watched the various videos made by Payette Forward about what settings to turn off to save battery life months and years ago as he’s been a content creator on YouTube for a while so it’s nothing new to me. I’ve had my iPhones set up with many of these system services we discussed DISABLED for years out of fear of them draining my battery for no reason. With that being said, ever since I got my 15 Pro I was like you know what lets leave all these system services on (except for the 3 under product improvement) and see what the battery life is like and quite frankly it’s the same as far as I can tell whether they are are all on or whether some of them are disabled and as you can see in the post above, GuruGuy had the same experience.
Perhaps you could also give it a try (enable all system services including significant locations) for a day or two and report back and lets see what your experience has been
No noticeable degradation from 18.1 RC, which was great for me. 16 PM, off charger since 6 AM, 86% at 3 PM. Light usage all day over cellular, some wireless CarPlay, checking RSS, and playing podcasts. AOD off.
When it comes to unlocking your iPhone from the lockscreen, do you guys use FaceID to unlock the iPhone or a manual password input? I personally use FaceID. Now, obviously the FaceID sensor is initiated each and every time I go and unlock my iPhone and I wonder how much of an effect the amount of times that an iPhone is locked/unlocked throughout the day hence initiating the FaceID sensor each and every time has on the battery life of the phone daily. Just a thought
Last edited:
All this testing has led me to believe that the battery life issues are primarily software-related, which is what some of us had suspected all along. These poor battery life numbers are likely due to a bug in iOS 18. None of the settings being disabled will not significantly improve battery life.
Did you do any of the testing discussed yesterday with disabling the recommendations in the screenshot
I haven’t tried it because I was waiting to see what others found. It appears to have had no effect.
Only on Macrumors….
I’d rather lose 10% of my battery every day than have to enter my passcode every single time I pickup my phone.
Yeah well the thing is that when you set your iPhone to unlock with a passcode as opposed to with FaceID, you are given the option to NOT require a password unless a certain period of time has passed which makes unlocking the iPhone throughout the day even easier. That does introduce a minor sacrifice to security of course but if you’re home and don’t need the iPhone to lock itself every single time you place it down, having the ability to configure your phone to only lock after a certain period of time has lapsed is extremely beneficial. Too bad it’s not an option when FaceID is selected as the method of unlocking the iPhone.
Last edited:
If I recall correctly, manual calibration involves draining the battery to nearly 0%, then charging it to full capacity. Even after the display reads 100%, continue charging for at least an additional 30 minutes to allow for trickle charging. This process helps the operating system recognize the battery's full capacity, thereby calibrating it to the most current reading.
It feels like iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence enabled has worse battery life on iPhone 16 Pro, compared to 18.0 when I got the phone.
No wonder because AI is likely very tough for battery life overall…fingers crossed that they optimize it over the time
I’ve had poor battery life since the day I bought the 16 Pro. The battery life hasn’t improved with updates like 18.0.1, 18.1, or the current 18.2 beta. It’s evident that this is a software issue. There’s no logical explanation for why the battery life in 18.0.1 is the same as in 18.2 beta. Apple clearly hasn’t resolved this problem yet.
Sad to hear that!
I updated mine 15 PM to 18.1 RC and it’s great, not worse not better I believe so far.
Over 3hrs SOT so far and still 70% battery life - disconnected from charger at around 8am - now it’s 4:42 pm
I’m glad you finally resolved your battery life issue.
Yesterday, I unplugged my phone at 100% at 6:30 am. However, when I went to bed at 11 pm, I only had 43% battery left after only 3 screen on time and 6.5 hours of screen idle. I have no idea how the phone drains so quickly without so little screen usage.
Last edited: