iPhone Air has a battery like a 2018 phone. And it still lasts longer than Samsung

Imagine releasing a phone with a 3,149 mAh battery in 2025. That’s a value the Galaxy S9 had seven years ago. Today, even cheap Xiaomi phones for five thousand have at least 5,000 mAh. Yet, the new iPhone Air surprisingly didn’t end up at the bottom of endurance tests. Quite the opposite.

David vs. Goliath, but with optimization

YouTuber XEETECHCARE conducted a classic battery drain test – all phones at the same brightness, performing the same tasks until they ran out. The iPhone Air lasted 8 hours and 57 minutes. The Galaxy S25 Edge? 8 hours and 45 minutes. This wouldn’t be so surprising if Samsung didn’t have a 3,900 mAh battery – a quarter larger.

Tom’s Guide tested it differently, and the results were similar. While browsing, the iPhone Air lasted 12 hours and 2 minutes, Samsung only 11:48. When streaming video, the iPhone still had 81% battery after five hours, while the Galaxy S25 Edge had only 67%. That’s no longer just a minor difference.

How does Apple do it? An old trick in a new package

The secret lies in a combination of several factors. The A19 chipset, manufactured with a 3nm process, is extremely power-efficient. iOS controls every process, and nothing runs unnecessarily in the background. The LTPO OLED display can reduce the refresh rate to as low as 1 Hz when nothing is happening.

While Samsung has the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is also power-efficient, Android simply isn’t such a tightly integrated ecosystem. Apps do what they want, and the system has to support a thousand different standards and features. A larger battery thus only compensates for poorer optimization.

In the iPhone family, it’s still the weaker relative

Don’t be fooled – among iPhones, the Air is still at the bottom. The Tech Chap measured 6 hours and 43 minutes in a more demanding test. The iPhone 17 with a 3,692 mAh battery lasted a whole… 12 minutes longer. That’s not much, is it? A nearly 550 mAh larger battery only brought an extra fifteen minutes.

For comparison – the iPhone 17 Pro Max with 4,685 mAh lasts over 10 hours even in the most demanding tests. There, the difference is noticeable. But that’s also an entirely different weight class, literally and figuratively.

What do you think about the endurance of the new thin iPhone?

Source: Notebookcheck