iPhone 12 Pro Max seemingly doesn’t max out on battery size

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Smaller than the iPhone 11 Pro Max

iPhone 12 Pro
iPhone 12 Pro (Image credit: Apple)

With its 6.7-inch screen the iPhone 12 Pro Max is a big phone, but one component that’s seemingly not as big as you might expect is the battery, as a regulatory filing suggests it’s smaller than the one in the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

MacRumors has spotted that TENAA (China’s telecommunication equipment certification center) has listed the iPhone 12 Pro Max as having just a 3,687mAh battery, which is down from the 3,969mAh one in the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

That’s despite the iPhone 11 Pro Max having a smaller 6.5-inch screen, and neither of those batteries are particularly big compared to some Android rivals. The Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra for example has a 4,500mAh one.

A smaller size with the same life

However, Apple claims that the iPhone 12 Pro Max lasts exactly as long between charges as the iPhone 11 Pro Max, with up to 20 hours of video playback quoted for each. So how is that possible?

Well, for one thing it’s always possible that the size listed on this regulatory filing is wrong, though we’d expect it to be right, especially as we’ve recently seen a similarly reduced battery size listed for the iPhone 12, suggesting that Apple really is using lower capacity ones.

More likely, the supposedly decent life is down to the chipset, which is a more efficient A14 Bionic one in the iPhone 12 Pro Max. We’ll let you know exactly how strong the battery life is once we’ve put the phone through a full review, but for what it’s worth the iPhone 11 Pro Max performed well in our tests.

This filing also reveals that the iPhone 12 Pro Max apparently has 6GB of RAM, which, while not a surprising figure, is a notable boost on the 4GB in the iPhone 11 Pro Max – though still a long way short of the 12GB that many Android phones now come with.

Still, if past form is anything to go by we wouldn’t expect that to lead to lesser performance. Again though, we’ll let you know once we’ve put the iPhone 12 Pro Max through a full review.

James Rogerson
James Rogerson

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.