Battery Life - Excellent
For all their strengths, battery life is the one aspect where things didn’t quite pan out for the iPhone XS and XS Max. Even though Apple promised that the phones would see longer battery lifetimes in day-to-day usage, in our tests we weren’t able to replicate this. The main reason for both models not being able to match the battery life of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus is because of their significantly higher base power consumption. I’ve attributed this to the OLED display – here either the OLED panel itself or the DDIC driving the panel see a big degradation in base power consumption, amounting to an extra 150mW. This is a figure that is unavoidable and a power drain that will be present any time the screen is on – no matter the actual display brightness.
The iPhone XR avoids this issue as it uses a more conventional LCD screen:
As expected, because the XR doesn’t suffer from the same high base power consumption, this significantly helps the actual battery life results for the phone. Here we see the iPhone XR reach the highest battery runtimes of any past iPhone – almost beating some of the record holders – and is only outmatched by the more recent Mate 20 with its 33% larger battery.
The results here are a lot more in line with the iPhone 8 Plus, and better represent the overall power efficiency improvements of the A12 SoC. Compared to the iPhone XS and XS Max, the XR lasts 37% and 25% longer respectively in our test.
Overall, if battery life is something you value the most, then the iPhone XR will absolutely not disappoint.
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