A new test from YouTube channel PhoneBuff suggests that the iPhone 14 Pro’s disappointing battery life may be due to the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display door being firmly set in the door. (opens in new tab).
We’ve already seen from our own experience that the iPhone 14 Pro’s always-on display wastes power, but PhoneBuff’s lab tests give us a more reliable and accurate result of the magnitude of the impact.
For testing, PhoneBuff drained the battery on a locked iPhone 14 Pro and displayed it in three different states: default AOD, wallpaper disabled AOD (showing clock and notifications only), and AOD completely off. turned on all the time. All phones were reset prior to testing, so there were no third-party apps that could affect the results, and they were all tested under the same lighting conditions.
Here are the results after 24 hours: Regular iPhone 14 Pro AOD (left image below) drains battery by 20%, clock-only AOD (middle) drains 16%, and no AOD option (right) drains battery at all. It looked like it and stayed at 100% the whole day. Considering the elapsed time, the difference between the two his AOD settings isn’t that big, but the 20% extra battery drain with AOD enabled is far more significant.
That said, it’s highly unlikely that the iPhone 14 Pro’s AOD will be active for this long. Using certain features like sleep focus or covering the screen disables AOD. This means that even with AOD fully enabled, your battery won’t drain overnight or while in your pocket.
Users, including mobile phone editor Jordan, find Apple’s approach to an always-on display that shows clocks and widgets in addition to selected wallpapers overkill. With iOS 16.2, Apple introduced the ability to remove wallpaper and/or notifications from his AODs on the iPhone 14 Pro or iPhone 14 Pro Max, but as testing shows, these new settings have a significant impact on power consumption. Not very effective problem.
PhoneBuff’s final test was to compare the iPhone 14 Pro’s AOD to the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra. The results here are a tie, with both draining to 84% over 24 hours of standby when the iPhone was set to his AOD for Watch Only.
The iPhone 14 Pro’s battery life is disappointing compared to last year’s iPhone 13 Pro, and testing shows the same for the iPhone 14 Pro Max. AOD seems to be the main cause of this durability difference, but it’s one of the big new features of the iPhone 14 Pro, so many iPhone 14 Pro owners won’t want to turn it off.
Those who aren’t put off by the current iPhone’s declining battery life should instead look to the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro (and possibly the iPhone 15 Ultra) later this year. There are currently no rumors of his AOD upgrade for these models, but we can expect it between new hardware and a new version of iOS. iPhone13 series.
