iPhone 15 Pro battery life may set new records — here’s why

Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro is poised to fix one of our only major complaints about the iPhone 14 Pro and we think it may do so in grand fashion with iPhone 15 Pro battery life outlasting any Pro that came before it.

Now to be clear we aren’t talking about it beating the iPhone 15 Pro Max or even the iPhone 14 Pro Max, but there are two key new rumored updates coming to the iPhone 15 Pro in 2023 that should catapult its battery life to new heights.

Stacking the deck

The first upgrade is on one level the most obvious: a larger battery. This comes courtesy of a leak in early July that indicated the iPhone 15 Pro would get a roughly 12% larger battery than its predecessor at 3,650 mAh. 

That’s not the clever bit, it’s how Apple managed to fit that larger battery in without dramatically increasing the size of the phone that earns them a tip of the cap. A second leak in July confirmed reaffirmed the larger battery and revealed a new stacked battery cell for the iPhone 15. While this is new tech for the iPhone, it’s not new for Apple, the company used this same concept to jam as much battery as possible into the previous generation MacBook Air.

Not only should the stacked battery cells allow Apple to fit a larger battery into the same space, but it should also offer superior longevity. As someone whose iPhone 15 Pro is already down to 90% capacity, that sounds like a game-changer.

Thin to win

No, I’m not talking about the iPhone itself getting thinner, but the A17 Bionic chipset inside will be the first to be built on a 3nm process because reportedly Apple cornered the market on the first run of 3nm chips from TSMC.

What does that have to do with battery life? The more densely packed a chip gets the faster data can pass through it as the distance needed to travel between points is reduced. While we see some improvements in efficiency with each generation of chips, the major leaps come when they can move to a smaller process. This shift to 3nm from 4nm is rumored to offer 35% better power efficiency.

Outlook

The iPhone 14 Pro barely scraped past the 10-hour mark in our Laptop Mag Battery Test, the display winked out at 10 hours and 13 minutes. Now that’s not a terrible result, but it’s almost 2 hours short of the iPhone 13 Pro on the same test. What’s more, I’m not alone in seeing a massive reduction in my overall battery capacity over the year, meaning it gets nowhere close to 10 hours now.

So while the battery life wasn’t a dealbreaker on the iPhone 14 Pro, it was the biggest drawback that I would call attention to any time someone asked if I would recommend it. Typically I pointed them to the iPhone 14 Pro Max if they were ok with the size because it suffered from none of those problems.

Whether Apple knew the iPhone 14 Pro battery life was going to be a pain point or not, it appeared to have the solution waiting in the wings for 2023 as the larger battery and more efficient 3nm process is sure to catapult the iPhone 15 Pro battery life (and the iPhone 15 Pro Max) to new heights in 2023. I wouldn’t be shocked to see the iPhone 15 Pro come in at around 12 hours and 30 minutes and the iPhone 15 Pro Max could be the first flagship phone to hit 14 hours of battery life, which would cement it atop our phones with the best battery life.

The good news is we should only have a little over a month before we find out as Apple’s September event is like clockwork, so we expect to see the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro models debut by the middle of next month.