The results are in: the iPhone 16 Pro Max is Apple’s battery champ

Charging ahead of the competition

News By Alex Blake published 30 September 2024

If you want the best iPhone with the best battery life, the iPhone Pro Max models are usually your best bet. Apple stuffs its most capacious batteries into these devices, and this year is no different – and a recent test has shown exactly the kind of longevity you can expect.

The benchmarking was done by Tom’s Guide, which put the entire iPhone 16 range through its paces. The process involved surfing the web using 5G connectivity and with the display brightness set to 150 nits, and by the end the iPhone 16 Pro Max was the clear winner.

It managed 18 hours and six minutes of browsing, compared to 14 hours and seven minutes for the iPhone 16 Pro, 16 hours and 29 minutes for the iPhone 16 Plus, and 12 hours and 43 minutes for the iPhone 16.

That put the iPhone 16 Pro Max comfortably ahead of Apple’s other iPhone 16 products. In fact, it’s the highest score of any iPhone that Tom’s Guide has ever tested.

It also romped ahead of almost all the non-Apple competition. Tom’s Guide says that if you’re of the Android persuasion, only the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, the OnePlus 12R or the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate offer longer battery life. In Tom’s Guide’s testing, these phones hit 18 hours and 48 minutes, 18 hours and 42 minutes, and 18 hours and 32 minutes, respectively.

As for Apple’s main high-end phone competition, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra fell well short of the iPhone 16 Pro Max, clocking 16 hours and 45 minutes of battery life, despite having a larger 5,000mAh cell (compared to the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s 4,685mAh).

Compared to the iPhone 15 range, this year’s iPhones have increased their battery life considerably. For instance, in Tom’s Guide’s testing, the iPhone 15 Pro Max managed 14 hours and two minutes, falling over four hours short of the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

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