Home > News

Apple Said to Be Exaggerating iPhone Battery Life from 18% to 51% on Multiple Models

By Laura Tucker
News Apple Exaggerates Battery Life Featured

There aren’t many among us who don’t get irritated when our phones die. And the more we ask our phones to do, and the more features they include, the sooner they die.

Apple often touts the great battery life on iPhones, but an advocacy group ran tests that show Apple could be exaggerating the battery life of iPhones by up to 51%, more than half.

iPhone Battery Life Failures

The advocacy group, “Which?” tested nine iPhone models and none of them fell within the battery life Apple claims.

The iPhone XR was the worst when claimed battery life was compared to actual battery life. Apple claims talk time on a full charge of 25 hours. However, testing showed the battery only lasted for 16 hours and 32 minutes, landing at a 51% difference.

It should be noted that Digital Trends admits that when they reviewed the XR, they included battery life as one of its strengths. Perhaps it’s possible that it’s more of a consistency difficulty.

“We rigorously test our products and stand behind our battery life claims,” Apple told Business Insider when responding to the testing that showed their claims fall short. “With tight integration between hardware and software, iPhone is engineered to intelligently manage power usage to maximize battery life.”

News Apple Exaggerates Battery Life Lightning

The testing by Which? also found battery life discrepancies with another smartphone maker, though not as drastic. HTC claims 20.5 hours for certain models, but they really only lasted for 19.6 hours. This adds up to a 5% difference.

Nokia, Samsung, and Sony, on the other hand, appeared to underestimate their battery life compared to the testing. Sony makes claims of 12.6 hours, but they tested 21% higher for a total of 16 hours of talk time.

The Sony Xperia Z5 Compact was directly compared to the Apple iPhone XR. Instead of lasting 8.5 hours less, it lasted nine more hours. Sony claims 17 hours, but the phone lasted 25 hours and 52 minutes.

Accuracy of Testing

Again the accuracy of testing should be questioned here with such differences. While it’s very easy to assume Apple is exaggerating its phone claims, it’s a little absurd to think Sony is so grossly underestimating the performance of its smartphones.

When phone reviews are added in that claimed long battery life for Apple, it leads to more questioning. And most assuredly, every time you have someone say they have great battery life, you can probably find people to dispute that. So this news isn’t going to end the dispute, but it does add an interesting layer to it.

How does your smartphone measure up with battery life? Do you have an Apple iPhone XR or Sony Xperia Z5 Compact that either matches company claims or the claims of testing? Let us know your results in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.
In October 2002, a Russian scientist named Dimitri Malashenkov stood up at a space conference in Houston and quietly explained that the dog Laika, whom the Soviet Union had publicly mourned as a heroic week-long orbiter in 1957, had actually died of heat and panic within about five hours of launch.