The iPhone 16 series smartphones, including the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, will arrive to customers and store shelves starting tomorrow. Although reviewers have gone hands-on with the smartphones, and Apple has shared a lot of information, some details remained a mystery, including the precise size of the new phones’ batteries.
However, the battery size mystery has been solved thanks to new regulatory documentation in Brazil. As reported by Blog do iPhone and MacRumors, each iPhone 16 model features a larger battery than their respective predecessors.
Battery capacity is a hot topic, with many smartphone makers touting annual increases in battery size, so it was notable when Apple talked about battery life improvements without mentioning the exact battery size in the iPhone 16 family. The questions intensified when Apple published no information in its technical documentation.
Apple is happy to tell prospective customers that the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max can display video playback for 27 and 33 hours, respectively, or play audio for 85 or 105 hours. And Apple is also keen to share that their latest smartphones can charge wirelessly faster than last year’s models — up to 25W with a 30W or higher adapter, up from 15W. The situation is more complicated with wired charging.
During its iPhone presentation, Apple explained these battery life improvements by saying that the new phones, which promise the best battery life of any iPhone models, feature new, more efficient Apple A18 and A18 Pro chips.
Those claims are true. The battery life improvements, by Apple’s metrics, are significant. The iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max offer four additional hours of video playback compared to their predecessors. The standard iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus gain less, adding two hours and one hour, respectively.
In PetaPixel‘s testing with the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max, these battery performance gains were readily apparent during real-world use, too. Even when shooting demanding log videos with the phone on the entire day, the phones stayed alive with juice to spare. There’s little doubt that for typical or even moderately heavy use, users will not need to charge their iPhones every day.
What Apple didn’t say is that each iPhone 16 model has a larger battery than last year’s models. The Brazilian regulatory agency, Anatel, published relevant legal documentation concerning the new phones, reporting that the iPhone 16 has a 3,561mAh battery and the iPhone 16 Plus has a 4,674mAh battery, while the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max have 3,582mAh and 4,685mAh batteries, respectively. These batteries are 6.3, 6.6, 9.4, and 6 percent larger.
In the case of the iPhone 16 Pro, which has the most significant jump in battery size, it has more than 15% better battery life than the iPhone 15 Pro. It’s clear then that the improved battery life is not due exclusively to hardware or software tweaks. Like many of the annual improvements in the iPhone series, gains result from a combination of across-the-board changes.
Image credits: Apple