Some iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Professional customers have been experiencing extreme and unexplainable battery drain, in keeping with complaints on Reddit, the Apple Help Communities, and the MacRumors boards. Whereas most of the studies are from iPhone 16 customers, older iPhones operating iOS 18 may be experiencing battery life points.
There’s a long-running iOS 18 battery life grievance thread on MacRumors that was began whereas the replace was nonetheless in beta, however there have been a recent wave of complaints following iOS 18’s launch and the debut of the iPhone 16 fashions.
Affected iPhone 16 house owners have seen vital battery drain even when the iPhone shouldn’t be in use. From MacRumors reader T1aaj:
Sure I personal the 16 professional and battery life goes right down to virtually 60% from 100% midway by way of the day, by way of no heavy use. Undoubtedly must be mounted, 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% after I bought 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 costs vs what I bought with my 1 yr previous 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 cellphone features after I set all these settings so I’d as properly set them for optimum battery life). I bought my 16PM on launch day so it is 19 days previous now; any early days indexing and different background setup stuff needs to be properly and actually 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 could possibly be inflicting issues for some customers. Utilizing the cellphone appears to chop the battery drain in these cases.
From huanbrother:
The 16 Professional has horrible standby battery life when sleeping (it isn’t related to my Apple Watch), and as you possibly can 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, growth, the background craze disappeared! Nevertheless, the battery drain wasn’t mounted, 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 cellphone at 9 a.m., and it held at 95% (my charging restrict) for under 20 minutes earlier than beginning to drop quickly. Each 5 minutes, I misplaced a share 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 comparable 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 folks having issues.
From Reddit person Okay-Curiosity-6561:
I upgraded from my iPhone 12 and bought new 16 Professional. I upgraded principally due to battery and speaker points however I noticed that although 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 person 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 % battery life inside 36 hours, whereas the iPhone 14 Professional was at 85 %.
Battery drainage points are troublesome to diagnose as a result of iPhone utilization habits range a lot from individual to individual and from day after day. 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 completely resetting their iPhones. Some folks 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.
