Rumor Says iPhone 14 Pro Max Will Pack Smaller Battery Than Last Year’s Model
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If there’s one thing that Apple strives to improve with each year’s iPhone, it’s ensuring that users can get the best battery life possible. This year’s iPhone 14 lineup isn’t going to be an exception.
While Apple’s battery improvements don’t always translate to significantly longer run times, they do allow the iPhone to do more without sacrificing battery life. The camera upgrades, display features, and other improvements added to each year’s flagship iPhones naturally take more power, and the iPhone has to be able to keep up.
After all, no matter how amazing something like an always-on display would be, almost nobody wants to sacrifice battery life to get it. Hence, Apple’s engineers need to develop new ways to optimize power management on each year’s new iPhones.
Usually, this involves a two-pronged approach; Apple combines more efficient hardware components to save power with bigger and better batteries that can provide even more. This usually results in a slight improvement in battery life while allowing the newest iPhones to do even more incredible things than the prior year’s models.
With the iPhone 14 lineup likely to arrive in less than three months, we’re starting to see leaks of some actual specs, and a post on China’s Weibo social media network may have just revealed the exact battery sizes for each of the new iPhone models.
The information comes to us in a pretty roundabout way. It was initially posted on Baidu, another Chinese social media site, and then shared to Weibo before it was picked up and posted on Twitter by leaker ShrimpApplePro.
iPhone 14 vs. iPhone 13 Battery Sizes
This makes its accuracy questionable at best. However, if the numbers are genuine, Apple’s two 6.1-inch iPhones will be getting a slight increase in battery size, while the 6.7-inch “iPhone 14 Pro Max” could actually shrink a bit over last year’s iPhone 13 Pro Max.
- 6.1-inch iPhone: 3,279 mAh (14) vs 3,227 mAh (13).
- 6.1-inch iPhone Pro: 3,200 mAh (14 Pro) vs 3,095 mAh (13 Pro).
- 6.7-inch iPhone Pro Max: 4,323 mAh (14 Pro Max) vs 4,352 mAh (13 Pro Max).
- 6.7-inch “iPhone Max”: 4,325 mAh.
The fourth model in the upcoming iPhone 14 lineup can’t be compared to anything that came before, as the 6.7-inch “iPhone 14 Max” will be an entirely new entry, replacing the 5.4-inch iPhone 13 mini. Apple’s smallest iPhone model naturally also had the smallest battery of the lot.
As interesting as this sounds, it doesn’t tell the whole story. The battery differences are pretty minimal — between 1.6 percent and 3.4 percent — and not enough on their own to contribute to longer running times. Even if run times were entirely proportional to milliamp-hours (mAh) — which they’re not — it would translate to about 40 minutes of additional streaming video playback on the iPhone 14 Pro over the iPhone 13 Pro, which already gets 20 hours. The iPhone 14 would see 15 minutes tacked on to the 15 hours the current model already promises.
However, the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max are also expected to feature an always-on display. While this will be designed to consume as little power as possible, it will still impact battery life.
In other words, these battery size improvements are likely to be meaningless. If the iPhone 14 lineup does end up promising more battery life than last year’s models, it won’t just be due to larger batteries — it will be Apple’s efforts to reduce the amount of power required by the rest of the iPhone’s components.
[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]
