Some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Professional customers have been experiencing extreme and unexplainable battery drain, based on complaints on Reddit, the Apple Assist Communities, and the MacRumors boards. Whereas most of the studies are from iPhone 16 customers, older iPhones operating iOS 18 might also be experiencing battery life points.
There’s a long-running iOS 18 battery life criticism thread on MacRumors that was began whereas the replace was nonetheless in beta, however there have been a contemporary wave of complaints following iOS 18’s launch and the debut of the iPhone 16 fashions.
Affected iPhone 16 house owners have seen important battery drain even when the iPhone will not be in use. From MacRumors reader T1aaj:
Sure I personal the 16 professional and battery life goes all the way down to nearly 60% from 100% midway by means of the day, by means of no heavy use. Positively must be fastened, ought to’ve stored my 15 professional!
From JulianL:
I am getting horrible battery life with my new 16 Professional Max. I upgraded from a 15 Professional Max – upgraded to iOS 18 and with battery well being of 99% once I offered it. With Apple quoting higher battery life spec for the 16 I used to be excited to see how rather more run time I’d get. The reply? I now get 50 to 60% of time between prices vs what I acquired with my 1 12 months outdated 15 Professional Max. Actually disappointing. All Settings the identical together with background refresh globally disabled, display max refresh set to 60Hz and information locked to 4G (as a result of for my use I see completely no distinction in how my telephone features once I set all these settings so I would as nicely set them for optimum battery life). I acquired my 16PM on launch day so it is 19 days outdated now; any early days indexing and different background setup stuff must be nicely and really over by now.
In some instances, a lot of the battery drain occurs in standby mode when the iPhone is not in use, suggesting a background exercise may very well be inflicting issues for some customers. Utilizing the telephone appears to chop the battery drain in these situations.
From huanbrother:
The 16 Professional has horrible standby battery life when sleeping (it’s not linked to my Apple Watch), and as you’ll be able to see from the graph, it runs background actions like loopy. However, guess what, I turned off AOD(however this should not be the case when in sleep mode it was off in any case) and turned on body restrict in accessibility (not low energy mode) to show off ProMotion, increase, the background craze disappeared! Nevertheless, the battery drain wasn’t fastened, 4hours and 20minutes it drained 11%, from 70% to 59%.
From kirbysmartdawg:
Clearly, one thing is not proper on Apple’s finish. The idle battery drain is extreme. This morning, I unplugged my telephone at 9 a.m., and it held at 95% (my charging restrict) for less than 20 minutes earlier than beginning to drop quickly. Each 5 minutes, I misplaced a proportion till I lastly picked it up to make use of it. Now it appears to have stabilized a bit, however I am actually puzzled by this conduct.
There are related complaints in regards to the iPhone 16 fashions and older iPhones operating iOS 18 on Reddit, and whereas we all the time see studies of battery life points when a brand new model of iOS comes out, there appears to be a particular uptick within the variety of individuals having issues.
From Reddit consumer Okay-Curiosity-6561:
I upgraded from my iPhone 12 and acquired new 16 Professional. I upgraded principally due to battery and speaker points however I noticed that regardless that 16 has “higher battery” and extra battery life, it drains round 10-15% in a single day doing nothing simply laying on my bedside desk.
On Reddit, one consumer did an experiment with an iPhone 16 Professional and an iPhone 14 Professional, and claimed to have used each in the identical method. The iPhone 16 Professional dropped to 58 p.c battery life inside 36 hours, whereas the iPhone 14 Professional was at 85 p.c.
Battery drainage points are tough to diagnose as a result of iPhone utilization habits range a lot from individual to individual and from everyday. Impacted customers have tried turning off ProMotion, disabling the At all times On show, turning off background app refresh, eradicating widgets, turning off mobile, and fully resetting their iPhones. Some individuals have seen enchancment with a few of these strategies, however not all have, and the battery life points persist for a lot of regardless of troubleshooting.
Some customers reported enchancment with iOS 18.0.1 and the iOS 18.1 beta, however software program updates haven’t labored for everybody. It’s not clear precisely what is going on on to affect battery, however it’s sounding like there may be an underlying bug that Apple might want to repair in a future iOS 18 replace.