these are the iPhone 16s, and this should be a huge year for battery improvements. Apple said that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus should have a big boost. Yes, that was the official term they used. But then also that the iPhone 16 Pro Max should have the best battery life ever on an iPhone. So let's find out if they were telling the truth and just how long we're talking about here. So this is the $1,199 iPhone 16 Pro Max, the $999 16 Pro, the $899 16 Plus, and then the $799 iPhone 16. And we're doing something different this year. We're comparing these new phones to two iPhones from last year, the top-end iPhone 15 Pro Max and the base iPhone 15, but also Samsung to see where Apple sits against the competition. So this is the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, which is the best phone that Samsung makes. Okay, let's unplug. The test begins now. And since I wanted to base this test off a typical day's usage.

let's begin with a workout app that I've just started using. So, the big question: how has Apple achieved this supposed big boost in battery this year? Well, two things. The first is they've apparently added bigger batteries to all iPhone 16s, which sounds like the most obvious thing I've ever said, but you would be amazed how resistant phone companies are to doing this. I would guess because Apple knows how much people want bigger batteries, combined with how a bigger battery is one of the easiest ways to upgrade a phone, that they specifically save these battery improvements for years where there's not much else going on, kind of like a Band-Aid always ready to slap in and fix a slower year of changes. Okay, so that's an hour of workout, and oh, the base iPhone 16 is currently leading the pack. That seems like a strange result, but I'm not worried. I've done enough of these battery tests to know that the software of a phone will sometimes tell you it's on one percentage even when the battery

itself is actually on something quite different. The one thing that can't lie is the final result: how long till the phone completely dies. So let's jump into some work now. This is Slack. This is the messaging app that our team uses. So I have bravely asked them all to say something funny for the next hour. And I did want to add that there's another reason that I think phone companies have resisted battery improvements over the years: is that they don't just want you to buy one phone; they want you to keep upgrading phones. And so I imagine a big part of why they're so stingy with battery is it would hurt their businesses if they gave you too much. Like, imagine if one year Apple doubled the battery life on their iPhones. I would bet everything I have that 3 to 4 years after that, around the time where the people who bought that phone would normally start upgrading to the next thing, significantly less would do so because batteries degrading over time is one of the primary incentives to upgrade.

but if you start with more battery than you need, then you don't care even when it degrades. Time for Instagram, let's do some planned spontaneous Dooms growling. So yeah, the last time that Apple properly upgraded the batteries on their phones was between the iPhone 12s and the iPhone 13s. And even though that wasn't a massive year of other changes, battery is so important that I would say that one change alone made the iPhone 13 stand out as a good time to upgrade. My point being that even though the iPhone 16s feel like a smaller, more incremental update to the iPhone 15s, if the battery improvements are actually big, then that alone would be enough to put them on the map. So there's a lot resting on this, and so is it working for them? Well, you can see that the normal iPhone 16's battery has fallen back in line. It's still doing really well, but just now at a sensible, believable level. Samsung is the one who's taken the lead, which man would it

not be such a smooth move if on a table of six iPhones though one Samsung is the one that takes the win. Oh, can you see by the way that the iPhone 15 screen has gone super dim? Well, that actually ties perfectly into the second reason for the apparently improved battery life this year. The first is the larger battery, which we've talked about, but the second is the new chips in these phones. See, the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus are running Apple's new A18 chipset, and the 16 Pro and Pro Max are running the new A18 Pro. I won't get too technical here, but basically, these chips are designed using a new process that manages to get the transistors closer together. The transistors are kind of like the building blocks of the chip, so if they're packed in even closer together, it reduces the communication distance, making them faster, making them more energy-efficient, which is the thing that's good for battery, but also less hot, and that is a key part of why the iPhone 15's display is dimmed and the

new phones haven't yet, and this improvement to the chipset should actually be a particularly big jump for the base iPhone 16 and 16 Plus. Because those phones have actually jumped forward two generations. Before, Apple would only let the pro phones have the latest tech, and so the normal iPhone 15 is using a chip from 2 years ago, even though it's last year's phone. But this year, it's simple. Every new iPhone gets a new A18 generation of chips. I guess because all iPhones need to run Apple intelligence, and Apple intelligence requires this new hardware. That said, after 4 hours now that we're jumping into YouTube, is it looking like as big of a claim as Apple was making it seem? Well, so far, the new iPhones are outpacing their last-generation counterparts. The iPhone 16 is doing better than the iPhone 15, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max is doing better than the iPhone 15 Pro Max. But they're also, they're not exactly crushing them. It's really Samsung who seems to be running

away with this test. Now bear in mind this Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. I've never actually tested in one of these battery videos before, but I have used it as my main phone for a while, and I have been blown away by battery life. So if Samsung wins this, it doesn't mean that the new iPhones have poor battery, but it also wouldn't reflect great on Apple since battery is meant to be one of the big new things here. Also, just so you know, we've taken a lot of precautions to make this as fair as possible. All phones are on their latest non-beta updates, so that means every iPhone is on iOS 18, and the Samsung is on Android 14. We've bought new versions of each phone, so nothing here has had more than five charging cycles, and their battery is 100% healthy. The room temperature is controlled at 18° C because that's been the average of indoor and outdoor temps for us. They're all on light mode, their settings are calibrated, their screen brightness is matched. They will look very slightly

different to you because of natural variances in panels and also the viewing angle from the camera, but they are matched. My point being that there are things that you can't factor in with a test like this, like no phone has a SIM card in because that would introduce a whole new tier of variables. But at the same time, this should give you as accurate a representation as you can get of how all of these phones perform relative to each other. We're on the cameras now, by the way, and this is probably the most demanding thing that any normal person does on a day-to-day basis because recording 4K video pushes just about every single component in your phone to the max all at once. So, this is where you expect overheating and rapid battery drain, but oh boy, I'm actually particularly impressed with this Samsung, and it shows that serious work has been done somewhere here. The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a 5,000 mAh battery, and you might know that Samsung's had 5,000 mAh batteries for ages on their

Flagship phones, but they never used to be this good. There was a time not that long ago where iPhones that had less than 4,000 mAh were destroying Samsungs that had 5,000. The iPhones were just getting far more juice per milliamp hour. But that looks like it's flipped now. Apple doesn't disclose precise milli measurements, but the estimate for the battery size on this 16 Pro Max is around 4,700, which, if true, means that this phone has 95% of the capacity of the Samsung. But it seems like it's lasting less than 95% as long. So, its juice per milliamp hour, if that term isn't taken, I'm coining it, is looking lower. For the first time ever, the side note, isn't it actually kind of mesmerizing watching chat GPT write out 7 20,000-word essays at the same time? What a wild time to be alive. Now, as for why this Samsung is doing so good, I've been thinking about this. I thought it

could be a Samsung-specific thing, but that wouldn't be my first guess, as I've noticed Android flagships in general lasting a lot longer this year. It could be related to the new Snapdragon chip that most top-end Androids are being powered by, and maybe that's a factor, but that can't be the main thing because my new Google Pixel's battery is also really surprisingly good, and that doesn't use a Snapdragon. Then I realized the common thread: it's Android 14. Every phone I've tested that has surprised me with how good the battery is has been running Android 14, which has fixed basically a loophole that allows apps to consistently run in the background if they decide they want to. And based on how much of an improvement this software seems to have made, that loophole might well have been the thorn in Android's side that's now been removed. And well, it changes the entire landscape. So, the iPhone 15 is down and out after 7 hours and 45 minutes, just before we're about to enter

some heavier gaming, and oh look, the iPhone 16 has just started dimming too. It's good to see that the pro iPhones and the Samsung are not dimming, 'cause you know, you would expect that Pro phones are designed to be able to take more stress. Oh no, I'm wrong. The pro has just started dimming now too. iPhones sometimes do this just before they die, but the fact that I can't turn the brightness back up does mean that this is a thermal issue. Well, that's disappointing pointing, and now both phones are out in the exact same minute. But from this point, now that it's just the big Bo left, let's just get to it. Let's fast forward this test all the way to the Finish now. It's brutal, seemingly unending finish right into the late evening, which is when the editing starts. And I'm going to do something a little extra this time around. As soon as we've gone through the battery drain results, I'm also going to, while the phones are here, quickly stick them on charge so we

can see how fast they go the other way. So, as you've seen, in seventh place was the iPhone 15 with 7 hours and 45. Not an amazing result, but still, I would say sufficient battery for most medium users. Then there was a pretty large gap before the 16 died, which is good based on the intensity of this test. 8 hours 19 is a sign that I still wouldn't recommend the 16 to the absolute heaviest users, but you've got more than enough as long as you're not one of them. And then completely neck and neck with the 16 is the 16 Pro. And I'm kind of both glad that Apple has managed to make a compact phone with actually great battery life now, while also feeling a little disappointed that they didn't manage to make the Pro last well even a minute longer than the base iPhone. Isn't battery life like the single feature that power users are going to need more of than basic users? And then another large gap later, the iPhone 16 Plus.

called it at 8 hours and 45 minutes. This is great battery; there is no doubt about it, but it's also not as great as I expected. I actually assumed that this Plus would outlast the base 16 by at least an hour, and so the fact that its lead has ended up as just 26 minutes means battery isn't really a massive factor in going for the Plus this generation. The iPhone 15 Pro Max has top-end battery life. This one I expected to last a long time, and it absolutely did with 9 hours and 35, which I think is down to the extra efficiencies from the promotion display that can both scale up the refresh rate when you want things super smooth, but also scale down to really low refresh rates when your apps just don't need it. So, in apps where it can scale back, it will save you a lot of battery. In second place then, the iPhone 16 Pro Max does indeed improve upon the 15 Pro Max's already stellar battery life with 11 hours and 22 minutes, which

fair play, that's pretty amazing, but not amazing enough. The Samsung actually did just go and do it. It beat every iPhone, and while this isn't the longest battery life reading I've ever recorded, it's worth bearing in mind that every time we do this test, you shouldn't expect the same results, and you can't compare between them because I'm always updating the app list. And so, if we look at how well Samsung has performed compared to the phones in this test, then it's far enough ahead of supposedly the best iPhone battery life ever that I think this is the best battery on any phone that has been put through our tests. And now that all the phones are fully drained, this is our perfect opportunity to see how fast they can all charge. So, I've got each phone connected to the exact same 65 W plug that I got off Amazon, which since these companies don't send you their recommended charges anymore, I feel like is the best plug that most people might realistically have lying around. And while that happens

I want to show you something pretty cool that you can do thanks to the Opera browser. This vid sponsor. I am consistently surprised at how intelligent the baked-in Arya AI actually is. Like, check this out: command plus slash to bring it up on top of whatever you're doing. What's the battery life difference between an iPhone 15 Pro and an iPhone 15 Pro Max? I mean, the thing literally draws a table to present the information in a clearer way. That's actually crazy. But it gets better because Arya now has both image recognition and image generation. So, like, I mean, let's try this: make me a wallpaper for my phone that's pretty but also has a lot of black in it to save battery that I can download and apply. Okay, that's cool. It's by far the best browser for organization thanks to tab Islands, but also functionality thanks to being able to have your tabs all the way across the top and then your apps all the way down the side. Link below to download the Opera browser for free. So

After about 10 minutes of charging, these are the percentages: 22%, 22%, 22%, 21%. So basically, every iPhone 16 has the same charging speed. We got 19% on the 15 Pro Max and then 22% again. So the Pro Max iPhone last year was a tiny bit slower, 17%. Bear in mind this phone can charge a little faster if you specifically use Samsung's own 45W power brick and cable, but that's not cheap. So if you're using something more generic, then it seems like iPhone is likely to charge faster. Catch you in the next one.

iPhone 16 Ultimate Battery Test!

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I'm Arun Maini, I'm a 27 year old Economics graduate whose life's passion is Technology, and I'm on a mission to make the most FUN and USEFUL Tech videos on the Planet! 🙏



