The iPhone 16 Pro Max is the top smartphone for battery life.
It’s not surprising that the largest smartphones by the likes of Apple and Samsung have the longest battery lives, because they have the biggest batteries — but new testing shows that the iPhone 16 Pro Max beats them all.
Technology enthusiast site Tom’s Guide has updated its rankings of battery life in popular smartphones for manufacturers’ latest models. Its testing showed that the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s battery, rated at 4685mAh, lasted for 18 hours and six minutes.
By comparison, Chinese smartphone OnePlus 12 managed 17 hours and 37 minutes. That’s the closest to the iPhone 16 Pro Max — but the OnePlus 12 has a larger 5,400mAh battery.
Samsung’s Galaxy S24 Plus and Ultra models scored significantly lower at 16 hours 46 minutes, and 16 hours 45 minutes respectively.
Both of these were better than Apple’s iPhone 16 Plus with its 16 hours and 29 minutes. However, the iPhone 16 Plus has a smaller 4674mAh battery, compared to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus’s 4,900mAh.
Big jump in battery life
The regular iPhone 16, at 12 hours 43 minutes, has a significantly shorter battery life than its larger siblings in the range — but still it showed well over an hour’s improvement in battery life over the iPhone 15, which came in at 11 hours 5 minutes. Similarly, the iPhone 16 Plus added over two hours more battery time than the iPhone 15 Plus, which was rated at 14 hours 14 minutes.
That’s a significant increase in just a year, and perhaps especially so for what are the regular iPhones. There is an even more marked increase for the iPhone 16 Pro models.
Specifically the battery life in the iPhone 16 Pro Max beat the iPhone 15 Pro Max by just over four hours. The smaller iPhone 16 Pro topped the iPhone 15 Pro‘s battery life by three and a half hours.
By comparison, Google’s Pixel phone lineup lagged behind the industry leaders. The regular Pixel 9 and Pixel 9 Pro both came in at around 13 and a half hours, while the Pixel 9 Pro XL managed 14 hours 37 minutes.
Note that while the figures were all measured using real-world tests, such as web surfing over 5G, in practice users will not necessarily see such significant improvements. That’s because for consistency, the testing had the brightness of all smartphones set to 150 nits, where the iPhone 16 range can all go up to 2,000 nits.
As ever, battery life is directly dependent on usage. But the iPhone 16 Pro Max has the longest potential battery life, and all users will see a benefit from that.