iPhone XS and XS Max have worse battery life than last year's iPhone X

Earlier today, we reported on the iPhone XS and XS Max suffering from poor cell and Wi-Fi reception compared to previous generations of iPhones. Now, we have data suggesting that these two models may also have worse battery life than last year's iPhone X.

According to testing by Tom's Guide, the iPhone XS and XS Max lasted for nine hours and 41 minutes and 10 hours and 38 minutes, respectively. The former was not only slightly below the average of nine hours and 48 minutes but was also one hour and eight minutes less than the 10 hours and 49 minutes achieved by the iPhone X from last year. This is despite the Cupertino giant claiming that this year's flagships should have 30 and 90 more minutes of battery life for the XS and XS Max models, respectively, compared to the iPhone X.

The test involves non-stop web browsing at a fixed screen brightness of 150 nits and is done on the same mobile network to ensure consistency.

The above results are below Apple's advertised claims of up to 12 and 13 hours of internet use for the iPhone XS and XS Max, respectively, but these results do tend to vary depending on the exact workload. They are impressive, nonetheless, given the comparatively tiny batteries Apple puts in its smartphones, and are a testament to the power efficiency of the chips powering the phones.

For example, while the Galaxy Note 9 was able to eek out one hour and 45 minutes more use time than the iPhone XS, it also has a gargantuan 4,000mAh battery compared to the 2,659mAh battery found in the Apple product. That this is smaller than the 2,716mAh battery found in last year's iPhone X is clearly visible from these results, though, and leaves much to be desired.

Alongside having less endurance than the iPhone X, both phones were also seen to lag behind Android flagships in this metric. The OnePlus 6, Galaxy Note 9, Pixel 2 XL, and P20 Pro all had longer battery lives, with the P20 Pro pulling off an impressive 14 hours and 13 minutes, a whole 3 hours and 35 minutes longer than the iPhone XS Max.

It is possible that software could be part of the problem and Apple may be able to further optimise the phones' battery life via updates, but there could be a chance that the phones' connectivity issues are driving up their power consumption. Poor signal strength can be one of the biggest contributors to battery drain as the phone either boosts its power output to compensate or repeatedly attempts to send and receive data due to unreliable data flow. Time will tell whether or not these issues are in fact related.

Source: Tom's Guide