The iPhone 16 Pro Max Dominates in Battery Life
Toggle Dark Mode
We’ve heard many compelling arguments over the years that Apple’s iPhones suffer when it comes to battery life and charging compared to many Android rivals. Still, even among those debates, there’s never been any doubt that if you want the best battery life, you should go for the largest iPhone model. The same holds in the Android world.
After all, a bigger phone has room for a larger battery, which typically translates to longer run times. Of course, size isn’t everything — the efficiency of the processor, display, and other components factors in — but it’s still hard to argue that more power is better.
While most folks don’t have any problems getting comfortable all-day battery life out of an iPhone 15 Plus or iPhone 15 Pro Max, Apple appears to have taken it up a notch with this year’s iPhone 16 models, and that’s particularly true with the iPhone 16 Pro Max.
We’ve been hearing rumors for a while that this year’s Max model would deliver even longer battery life, and while such rumors aren’t uncommon, it looks like Apple delivered this year. Apple doesn’t typically disclose its battery capacities in raw milliamp-hours (mAh), but we heard last-minute reports of a 4,676 mAh cell that turned out to be accurate according to iFixit’s teardowns.
Apple prefers to rate its batteries in hours of video and audio playback, and while those don’t apply to every scenario, the numbers it boasted this year were impressive — up to four hours more video playback time — both local and streamed — and ten hours of additional audio playback time, breaking the 100-hour barrier.
Of course, most people use their iPhones for far more than just watching videos or listening to music for days, so it’s not always easy to understand how these numbers apply to real-world use involving surfing the web, messaging, checking social media, gaming, taking photos, and more.
The good news is that it seems that Apple’s promises for increased longevity have borne fruit in nearly every area of iPhone use. The folks at Tom’s Guide did some in-depth battery tests on all four iPhone 16 models, discovering that every one exceeded its predecessor by a handy margin.
Of the four new models, the iPhone 16 Pro Max showed the most gains, running four hours longer than last year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max during the site’s standard battery test, “which involves surfing the web over 5G at 150 nits of screen brightness.”
In that test, the iPhone 16 Pro Max lasted 18 hours and 6 minutes, coming in just behind the OnePlus 12R at 18:42 and the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro at 18:48. That puts it in third place on Tom’s Guide’s Best phone battery life roundup, but it’s also worth noting that Apple is doing more with less here.
The two Android sets that beat out the iPhone 16 Pro Max did so with batteries that are over 800 mAh greater in capacity. Both pack in 5,500 mAh cells compared to Apple’s 4,676ish mAh cell (Tom’s Guide lists the iPhone as 4,685 mAh versus iFixit’s 4,676). However, they also only got 36–42 minutes more runtime under the same conditions.
On the other hand, the iPhone 16 Pro Max beat out the OnePlus 12 and Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, both of which are typically held up as beacons of good battery life. They came in at 17:41 and 16:45, respectively.
Nevertheless, the only other iPhone 16 model to make the list was the iPhone 16 Plus, which came in eighth at 16:29, just a hair behind the 16:32 of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus.
To put these numbers in perspective, last year’s iPhone 15 Pro Max only ran for 14 hours and 2 minutes, while the iPhone 15 Plus actually beat its Pro Max sibling out at 14 hours and 14 minutes. That makes this year’s iPhone 16 Pro Max gains even more impressive.
Unsurprisingly, at 14:07, the iPhone 16 Pro didn’t make the top 15, which cut off at 14:21 for the Nothing Phone 2, but it still saw a very healthy improvement over last year’s 10:21 for the iPhone 15 Pro. The iPhone 16 similarly jumped to 12:43 from the 11:05 of the iPhone 15.
While both of this year’s Pro models saw healthy four-hour jumps, the iPhone 16 Pro Max saw the most meteoric rise since it can now easily hold its own against even the best-performing Android rivals. Of course, your mileage will vary depending on how you use your iPhone — it’s highly doubtful you’ll get even half that time if you want to indulge in a marathon game of Assassin’s Creed Mirage — but for most folks, the iPhone 16 Pro Max should easily get through a day of more typically heavy use and likely still have a fair bit left in the tank.
