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iPhone 16 Pro Seeing pretty lackluster battery life 1 week in. Going to run a battery test.

Tozovac said:
I didn't turn off gps, I just shut down the Apple Maps app and wasn't actively using the app. I fixed my post above.

I have yet to run my experiment (and I will) but I'm finding generally slower drain today so far. Here's a discovery -- I forgot I had downloaded 1 3rd party app Golf Battle during the setup process and I suspect it was doing something and draining my battery quicker especially 3am the other night. It connects to Facebook for "an account," so who he hell knows what it was up to. It was the only 3rd party app on my phone until this morning. The reason I downloaded it during setup 4 days ago was, my son and I accidentally ordered each others' replacement phone via our AT&T family plan using each other's phone # so we needed help from AT&T to walk thru swapping IMEI's. However, she didn't have us setup our new phones by importing from a recent backup of our older phones, instead we used the "setup from nearby iPhone" type of new-phone-setup, but where many of the things normally carried over to a new phone when updating from a backup of another phone did not port over. Like wallpaper, mail accounts, etc. And no 3rd party apps ported over. She had me try one (Golf Battle) while she was helping us, for her curiosity.

I deleted it today and we'll see if I don't experience the same drain as yesterday. So far this morning, after leaving the house at 100% at 830 and browsing safari about the same amount of time I did yesterday (20-30 mins) over the course of 830-1130 today, I'm at around 95%. That's with brightness at 50% and low power mode enabled, just like yesterday. Except yesterday I was losing 1% every 10 minutes.

Although others may judge otherwise since I was drawn to start this thread, I'm one who uses their device for what it should be used for and I don't baby it or sacrifice my usage convenience/enjoyment to maximize battery life. But yesterday the drain was so quick over a 2 hour period, and especially when using safari highly with only 2windows open for about 30-30 mins, it definitely stood out as abnormal even compared to my 3 year old 12 mini with 79% battery health.

I do want to do my test to see what kind of settings might be required to come close to the 22 hours. Streaming from wifi may be variable, so maybe I'lll download a video and try to replicate the 27 hours video playback. but then the variables...volume, brightness, promotion, etc. 27 hours seems like you'd need 10% brightness, 10% volume, and wifi turned off !
Click to expand...
Can you upload a screenshot of your “last 24 hours” screen?
 
Tozovac said:
I used GPS Apple Maps only for around 40 minutes then turned it off. It was an hour later when I was casually surfing in Safari that I saw a percentage drop every 10 to 20 minutes.
Click to expand...
1% drop every 10-20 minutes is 3-6% drop per hour, or 17-33 hours screen-on time while using the device. That sounds like excellent battery life to me.
 
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callumrd1 said:
1% drop every 10-20 minutes is 3-6% drop per hour, or 17-33 hours screen-on time while using the device. That sounds like excellent battery life to me.
Click to expand...

I know, right? I did the numbers too. But the % drop drop over 2 hours of very light use was much faster for my 16 Pro that day than it ever seemed with my 3 year old 12 mini with 79% health and over a typical usage/route. What can I say. :) Hoping it was an errant app.
 
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I got my 16PM yesterday morning. It went through battery like anything as I restored from the cloud. I even got the message telling me that device battery and thermals might not be great on account of the restore.

Everything finished today morning and the battery life seems to be good so far : 6.5 hours of screen time and battery is at 54%.

A lot of browsing, not much video.

Hopefully battery life gets even better !

I doubt I’ll ever get the Apple advertised hours though. It’s just too much of a controlled experiment to have any real life practical value. If I had to switch everything off just to save battery, I might as well use a 20 year old Nokia !

Edit: I do keep background refresh off except for Outlook, Slack and Gmail.
 
Honza1 said:
As someone above noted, maps - any mapping software - are very high drain on battery. You should not look at battery life while using maps. My phone routinely runs through most battery within few hours when I use (any) maps - and also gets very hot. Using mapping software was the only time I ever managed to drain/overheat my iPhone 14, but every iPhone I had did have poor battery life when using maps.
This makes sense - it is using GPS all the time to keep track where you are, downloading maps and other data from servers (and pushing reports on traffic up) and locally solving where you are and what to suggest as you drive around. This is all time dependent - if it delays turn instruction by few seconds, it is too late. Therefore the mapping processes seem to have high priority. Add to it that your data reception will vary a lot and you have high drain situation on any phone.
This is why wireless chargers/phone holders for cars are so popular.
Click to expand...
I beg to differ.
Apple Maps with downloaded maps should drain considerably less, but I only assume that.
However, using maps.me, offline, is far far more power efficient and doesn’t run hot on device compared to „traditional“ navigation apps.
 
Battery life has always been utter garbage on the regular pro phones. It’s the reason I use pro max models, even though I prefer the regular pro.
 
Wait for 18.4 to be released next Tuesday. Battery drain seems better on my 13P so maybe it could improve your 16P as well.
 
What I did with both my wife's iPhone 15 Pro and my 14 Pro was to deactivate numerous Apple's and developer's activities that have nothing to do with we do with our phones, including "statistics". There are several videos in YouTube that relate to options (which functions or settings) to turn off to prevent draining the battery too fast. Also, every day or two I clear the screen from the apps that are running in the background (memory?)

That said, new phones need some time for it to update all the apps and things like that, so at the beginning one has to give it a few days for it to settle down, first. I followed the instructions told in the video below, but be advised that you should consider what is important to you relating to turning settings off or on
 
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