From the iPhone X to the iPhone 16: Apple's battery life visualized

Through a combination of bigger batteries and greater efficiency, Apple has drastically improved iPhone battery life over the years.

- JASON CROSS

Premium smartphone manufacturers have been steadily improving battery life for years, and Apple is no exception. In fact, if you only look at the improvement of the current iPhones compared to last year's models, you may not realize just how far they've come.

The battery in today's new iPhones lasts several times longer than that of the iPhone X introduced just seven years ago! Fortunately, we have been testing iPhone battery life in the same way since then, so we wanted to illustrate just how much better iPhone battery life has become.

iPHONE BATTERY LIFE OVER THE YEARS

We have tested battery life using the Geekbench 4 battery life test going all the way back to the iPhone 8 and iPhone X. We perform the test the same way each time, setting screen brightness to 200 nits and disabling all notifications and autobrightness settings. We then run the test with the dim screen feature turned off to maintain consistent brightness.

The Geekbench 4 battery test runs the Geekbench 4 benchmarks repeatedly on a loop until the battery dies, with a small break between runs. It's a way to keep the screen active and the processor occupied in a consistent fashion over an extended period. It is, however, a little dated-the more modern Geekbench 5 and Geekbench 6 unfortunately did not include a battery benchmark.

Here's how long each of the regular iPhones lasted during this test. There are two tabs on this chart, one showing battery life (in minutes) and one showing the capacity of the battery (in milliamp hours).