Latest iOS update doesn’t fix iPhone battery drain

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iOS update does not deliver promised iPhone battery improvement
iPhone battery life doesn't improve under iOS 16.4.1, as had been hoped.
Photo: Ed Hardy/Cult of Mac

Testing shows that the recently released iOS 16.4.1 does not fix an iPhone battery problem introduced by its predecessor.

This wasn’t the usual small change in battery life that’s usual with updates. Many iPhone models saw significant drops with iOS 16.4. And the latest version isn’t a fix.

iOS 16.4 hurts iPhone battery life

Despite what conspiracy theorists and Android fanboys claim, iOS updates don’t inevitably decrease iPhone battery life. iOS 16 brought a significant increase for every Apple handset released in the past few years, for example.

But iOS 16.4, which Apple released in March, did unfortunate things. Geekbench 4 battery tests done by the YouTube channel iAppleBytes on a iPhone 13, iPhone 12, iPhone 11, iPhone XR and iPhone 8 showed decreases when running iOS 16.4. All of their scores went down — and some models saw a double-digit decline in scores when compared to iOS 16.3.1. The battery score for the iPhone 13 dropped 11%, for example. iPhone 12 went down 12%.

iOS 16.4.1 doesn’t fix it

With Friday’s release of iOS 16.4.1, which fixes several bugs and addresses some potentially serious security vulnerabilities, there was hope that iPhone battery life would jump back up. But follow-up tests by iAppleBytes found only small changes. Some devices’ Geekbench 4 battery test scores went up, while others went down. But all the changes were minor, not returning the handsets to levels seen under iOS 16.3.1.

That leaves iPhone users looking ahead to the next operating system update. Apple already has iOS 16.5 in beta testing. Hopefully, it — or a smaller, bug-fix update coming sooner — will deal with the problem.

Watch the latest iAppleBytes video for more details.

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