The results are in: the iPhone 16 Pro Max is Apple’s battery champ

(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

If you want the best iPhone with the best battery life, the iPhone Pro Max models are usually your best bet. Apple stuffs its most capacious batteries into these devices, and this year is no different – and a recent test has shown exactly the kind of longevity you can expect.

The benchmarking was done by Tom’s Guide, which put the entire iPhone 16 range through its paces. The process involved surfing the web using 5G connectivity and with the display brightness set to 150 nits, and by the end the iPhone 16 Pro Max was the clear winner.

It managed 18 hours and six minutes of browsing, compared to 14 hours and seven minutes for the iPhone 16 Pro, 16 hours and 29 minutes for the iPhone 16 Plus, and 12 hours and 43 minutes for the iPhone 16.

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That put the iPhone 16 Pro Max comfortably ahead of Apple’s other iPhone 16 products. In fact, it’s the highest score of any iPhone that Tom’s Guide has ever tested.

iPhone low battery image — (Image credit: Shutterstock / boyhey)

It also romped ahead of almost all the non-Apple competition. Tom’s Guide says that if you’re of the Android persuasion, only the Asus ROG Phone 8 Pro, the OnePlus 12R or the Asus ROG Phone 7 Ultimate offer longer battery life. In Tom’s Guide’s testing, these phones hit 18 hours and 48 minutes, 18 hours and 42 minutes, and 18 hours and 32 minutes, respectively.

As for Apple’s main high-end phone competition, the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra fell well short of the iPhone 16 Pro Max, clocking 16 hours and 45 minutes of battery life, despite having a larger 5,000mAh cell (compared to the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s 4,685mAh).

Compared to the iPhone 15 range, this year’s iPhones have increased their battery life considerably. For instance, in Tom’s Guide’s testing, the iPhone 15 Pro Max managed 14 hours and two minutes, falling over four hours short of the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

While Tom’s Guide used real-world benchmarking, there’s no guarantee that you’ll see similar numbers from your own iPhone, as these things can vary from user to user and device to device. But it’s certainly encouraging to see how much juice Apple has managed to cram into the iPhone 16 range. If battery life matters to you, you’ll likely be very happy with Apple’s latest efforts.

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Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.