Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has attracted a lot of eyeballs, as well as trigged debates, recently regarding the type, price and performance of iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. As days go by after the recently released the two smartphones, more and more truths are uncovered regarding the same. Tom’s Guide recently subjected them to its signature battery life test, along with a couple of other smartphones in the same category. And the results were unimpressive, to say the least.
iPhone XS Max Battery Life: Disappoints, Once Again
As mentioned above, Apple iPhone XS and XS Max weren’t the only ones subjected to this battery life test. The other participants included Huawei P20 Pro, Google Pixel 2 XL, Samsung Galaxy Note 9 and OnePlus 6, to name a few. But unfortunately, Apple’s newest smartphone offerings couldn’t beat its competitors.
Forget winning, the battery life test failed to get iPhone XS Max and XS to the top 3 list. Android flagship models like Google Pixel 2 XL and Samsung Galaxy Note 9 beat the iPhone XS and XS max quite convincingly. However, the Huawei P20 Pro turned out to be the best out of them all in terms of battery life, offering a total of 14 hours and 13 minutes of endurance.
iPhone XS Max battery life lasts for 10 hours 38 minutes compared to last year’s iPhone X lasted 10 hours and 49 minutes. Surprisingly, in test results, the iPhone XS battery lasted for 9 hours 41 minutes only, which is even below than the smartphone category average of 9 hours 48 minutes.
How Tom’s Guide Conducted Reliable Battery Life Test
This is a classic example where the endurance of a smartphone is tested. Here, all the tested smartphones were subjected to continuous 4G web surfing at 150 nits of screen brightness. However, many settings were tweaked to ensure that all the smartphones experience exactly the same conditions. For starters, True-Tone and Auto-Brightness were turned off in the display settings to prevent them from interfering. All the smartphones were made to browse on a T-mobile network, that too with full signal strength. To ensure the latter, T-mobile signal boosters were also used. Thus, the result obtained through this is deemed reliable.
Apple’s Battery Specifications And Claims
Earlier in the week, iFixit teardowns revealed the existence of an L-shaped single-celled battery in the iPhone XS. However, the iPhone XS Max sports two cells, signifying the increase in battery life over iPhone XS. The battery capacities for the smartphones has also been revealed by the Chinese website, My drivers. The iPhone XS has a battery capacity of 2,658 mAh operating at 3.81V. On the other hand, the iPhone XS max sports a battery capacity of 3,174 mAh at 3.80V.
Earlier, Apple claimed that the iPhone XS users could experience an increase in usage time of about 30 minutes, over that of the iPhone X. However, the battery capacity of the iPhone X is 2,716 mAh at 3.81 V. This is, in fact, more than that of iPhone XS, thus refuting Apple’s earlier claims regarding its new model. This also gives testament to the fact that the iPhone X performed much better than iPhone XS in the same test, last year. In fact, iPhone X beat iPhone XS’s present time by almost an hour last year, with its numbers closer to those of iPhone XS Max.
What’s Next For Apple?
Apple has not really had a smooth ride since the release of the two new models of smartphones. Early adopters of the same have been quick to point out issues regarding Wi-Fi and LTE connectivity. However, things are not all doom and gloom. The iPhone XS Max was recently awarded The Best Smartphone Display award by Displaymate. However, it all boils down to how people are going to accept it in the long run. Still nascent in the smartphone market, it is too early to make a judgement regarding these smartphones at this point in time.
