iPhone 16 Pro Max battery test results are in: it's a big upgrade

Battery life might be the most underrated upgrade for the iPhone 16 series, and particularly for the iPhone 16 Pro Max.

Apple claims this is the iPhone with longest battery life ever, but we had to put these claims to the test, and now, after days of extensive testing, we have the results from our battery testing.

At PhoneArena, every phone we review goes through three separate battery tests, where for each one we look at the time it takes to fully drain the phone with a particular use case:

1. Web browsing test – we cycle through a set of webpages with scrolling behavior baked in

2. YouTube video streaming test – we run the same YouTube playlist on all phones

3. 3D Gaming test – we run a 3D game at identical settings on all phones until they are drained

To understand how good the iPhone 16 Pro Max performs, we pit it against the iPhone 16 Plus, the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and of course the biggest Android rivals including the Galaxy S24 Ultra, S24 Plus, Pixel 9 Pro XL and the OnePlus 12.

Interestingly, despite the notable ugprade in battery size, the iPhone 16 Pro Max battery capacity is still not as big as that of Android phones. Here are the battery sizes for all the phones in this comparison:

And here are our test results:

PhoneArena Battery Test #1: Web Browsing

This is the lightest of our three tests, shows how the iPhone 16 Pro Max has improved a great deal compared to its predecessor, but it also crushes the Android competition.

Compared to the 15 Pro Max from last year, the new iPhone scores nearly three hours more, which is a very good improvement.

PhoneArena Battery Test #2: YouTube Video Streaming

For YouTube video streaming, the OnePlus 12 dominates the test, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max and iPhone 16 Plus are the closest followers with pretty solid results as well.

Galaxy phones typically underperform and drain faster than others with YouTube videos, and we still don't know the reason for that, but it's a consistent trend that we have observed throughout the years. Optimizing this one aspect of their performance would be a really welcome improvement.

PhoneArena Battery Test #3: 3D Gaming

The Galaxy S24 Ultra manages to win the gaming test as it seems most efficient when it comes to GPU usage.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max, however, ranks second ones again.

Overall, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is one of the biggest battery upgrades in years, and while we are still waiting for Apple Intelligence, the longer battery life might actually be the biggest reason to convince some users to buy the new model.

And here is our final battery use estimate for all the phones in this comparison: