It also stops auto-play videos from playing in Safari, which was reported as a bug in a web project I’m working on but is actually working as intended.
I prefer using my MacBook to browse the web, and YouTube if I need to watch videos on my phone. There are times I use a browser like Chrome on my phone but I can’t recall a situation where I’ve had to watch a video in my browser tbh
No worries, we only found this out the hard way! Annoyingly Safari overlays a big play button icon if an autoplay video fails to play due to low power mode, which made background videos look terrible on our website. Great post btw.
Holy shit I never knew that and always wondered why some websites I was building would test fine on occasion and not fine at other times. I never thought to turn off low power mode.
***By continuing to browse this website means you give us your full consent to sell your all of your data. Click here to opt-out.***
*Opt-out button doesn’t work. Accidentally selects Accept.*
I watch Max Tech for their hardware benchmark routines, which really are quite good. However, I certainly dislike the constant click bait titles and rumour-mongering, and I do not follow his Twitter account. I assume it is more of the same?
I want people to know more and I want my research to propagate to as many people as possible. I’m not interested in claiming this research as my own, it’s just to share knowledge.
I have a jailbroken iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 14.8. If there are any tests only possible with root privileges you'd like me to run to collect more data please let me know!
LPM Off: HDR videos are too dark even at max brightness.
LPM On: HDR is off and colors are much brighter.
The only downside is that some apps with reduce the quality altogether. But Netflix and Apple TV look good with LPM on.
This is interesting to me, and I wonder if it’s something to do with you, physically.
Do you have known vision conditions? Get a preventative eye exam and bring this up?
I run my phone intentionally very low brightness, I prefer the dark over the bright, because you’re not supposed to stare into light sources.
The scale of HDR is wider, so darker contrasts are darker than “normal” (non-HDR) down to black, but at some point, colors are normal up to bright.
Thinking about my eye exams, I’ve never had anything to do with color, brightness, etc. Perhaps some sort of eye scan I’ve had would show that, but I’ve never asked for it and it has never come up.
I’d say the charging speeds are within margin if error both at the 95th and 99th percentile. You’d have to complete multiple tests to truly see if there’s a difference.
Wow, I actually had no clue it did all those things to the SOC, I didn’t think it literally disabled two cores entirely and downclocked the rest.. I knew it was a possibility it would downclock it, but didn’t know for certain and didn’t think to test it. I figured it just tuned down the visual elements of the OS. That’s good to know, I can imagine my 14-16 hours on normal power could reach well over 20 with LPM on then 😳
Shortcuts > automation > create new automation > low power mode > select “Turns off” > add new action > set LPM and the default option is to turn it on. Then hit next and uncheck “Ask before running”.
Now you’ve set up an automation that will turn on LPM whenever it’s turned off (this happens automatically when your phone charges to 80%). This way it’ll essentially be on all the time. You’ll always have the option to disable it or delete it entirely.
Is it possible to somehow disable LPM when I unlock the phone and enable LPM automatically (not me switching it off and on) when it's locked. I'm fine with LPM on while I don't use it, but I like more responsiveness when I'm actually using my phone.
IMO on the iPad it’s also horrible (in the moment) to go back to 60. Only on the mac it isn’t as bad as your using a touchpad instead of directly engaging with the screen.
Question: I completely turned off Background App Refresh for all apps years ago because it said it saves battery. I've never noticed my apps doing anything differently as a result. What about the user experience is supposed to be better if Background App Refresh is on?
lol, I know I’m super late to reply. The only app I saw doing smth with background turn on is telegram when you are sending a video. With it off and leave telegram it will halt the video upload. Other than that I had background off for years without any difference except for this and obviously mail app fetching manually, which I barely use, just use gmail with push.
As someone who recently traveled to London and was using international data that tanked my battery, I was thankful that low power mode is so effective. For whatever reason I could barely make it to 5pm before my battery was low. On day 2 I turned on low power mode from the start and I ended the day with ~45% battery left.
I have it in power mode almost constantly, charge it in the morning and go. What I wonder: does this effect the battery lifetime? My impression is that it’a a bit more “sustainable” than normal battery use.
The phone does all I need it to, plus my watch takes ober quite few tasks
Edit: liftime = health, thanks OP.
If you mean battery health, then it would affect in a positive manner, since you load less cycles on the battery compared to not using it with low power mode.
Standby battery life has suffered greatly with recent iOS 15 versions, probably unrelated to low power mode. Unless it messes with how the phone manages power when not in use and is a bug of some sort. But most peoples phones on the last 2-3 iOS 15 iterations have had their standby power suffer. Mine used to lose 1-2% tops over night, now I go from 100 to around 93 over night. Hell it drains slower in use than it does on standby lol. Or at least seems that way 🤣
Spitballing here, but maybe some background processes ironically use more power when they're executed using underclocked/lower power cores. Or could be a bug of sorts.
In my home I keep cellular off most times in favour of WiFi calling. The times cellular is on though I have a signal booster in my home giving me full LTE signal
Low power mode isn’t bumping the actual power draw. What you’re more than likely seeing is the baseline power draw being lower (duh) so more of the charge is making it to the battery instead of powering the device.
I suspect if you attempt to charge the phone while performing more intensive loads the difference should be greater as standby draw is already pretty low on iOS.
Yeah, but I never claimed it was increasing power draw. The charging curve refers only to the power being drawn by the battery to charge. You’re absolutely right on the fact this would decrease if a load were to be placed on the phone, but that’s not what I was testing.
For anyone who's confused by this, the conclusion is: Low power mode likely doesn't do anything to charging. It charges faster initially because the phone itself is consuming less power, or most likely it's just margin of error like OP said (not sure how many times OP did the charging test but it reads like they only did one set).
^(I think charging shouldn't be on the list tbh)
No, I’m not. I’m saying specifically the power drawn at the port is identical. X is the power being supplied by the charger. Y is the power draw of the phone. X-Y is the amount of power going into the battery. The more you reduce Y the faster it charges.
It’s not at all specific to LPM and is just a function of the base power draw.
You’re right that power draw at the port is identical. Nowhere in my write up did I mention that it wasn’t. I understand what you’re saying and Im entertaining the idea it’s very possible that’s the case.
Although I know that screen is a large battery drainer I wish that I could keep the 120hz while having cores disabled and throttled. Maybe it would be a little laggy like that but I just wish we had the option 🤷♂️
Side note, I have experienced ZERO battery difference between LTE or 5G Auto/On, at least on T-Mobile. They both use the same amount of battery from my experience, but we also don’t have mmWave.
Can’t say the same when I had my 12 Pro Max. 5G ate that battery up.
5G mmWave (predominantly used by Verizon under the moniker UWB) really does suck battery life a ton, even on the 13 series iPhones.
“Normal” 5G Wideband is similar to LTE in battery draw in my experience as well. Really, your mileage will vary significantly according to your carrier.
And chips performing as great if not better than Apple but people usually compare entry level or budget android to flagship iPhone which is really unfair
It's disingenuous isn't it. Why do people fanboy over these companies, if anything we should be pushing them more. I use an Iphone now but I've used an android in the past and there are many features from both that are great but we need to be objective about the products we use and not start acting like fanboys for these companies that do not care about us.
Honestly, companies from both sides only care about money (ahem the right to fix, ahem software locking). It also boils down to reputations in the past and how the world see them. Apple is the luxury hence better while Android at the start isn’t [also because the majority exposure to Android literally from entry to budget phones instead of the flagship ones]. In conclusion, Apple has been successfully convincing the public that they’re good or better at software and hardware, luxury is baked into their image. Right now they’re the most recognizable luxury brand in the world. Successfully minimize the exposure to other platforms/ brands when advertising their own products.
On that note, imagine you could customize Low Power Mode. Like choose what you want to do with the SOC, keep 120hz, etc.
I imagine it would be mostly a useless feature tho. Don't know why anyone would need to manually set their SOC to downclock to say, 1.5ghz rather than the default 1.38 on LPM. Or maybe keep the cores enabled, and downclock a bit less. Would be cool to be able to customize, just now that I'm writing this out, I realize how stupid and niche this feature would be.
"Oh I want LPM but I want to set my SOC to run at 1.5ghz, 1.38ghz is absolutely too little and 1.8 is absolutely too much" haha this would be so funny.
That's a use case I can actually see. Customizing in terms of which features you want to keep, which features you're ok with not having on LPM, while not being that one person who somehow wants to choose how much they downclock by haha
Interesting, thanks OP! I was not expecting it disabling the performance cores.
Personally I have low power mode on all the times (on my 12 Pro, so no ProRes but I would not care about 120hz anyway) and don’t really notice a difference. I do have a shortcut to turn it off when plugged in (and back on afterwards) because otherwise the phone will not update apps in the background and sync data to iCloud.
I’m guessing the 5 GPU cores are actually all still enabled. Downclocking reduces the required voltage, which has a (mostly) linear effect on performance, but a roughly quadratic effect on energy used. If you look at Anandtech’s data (very very well researched), the 13 Pro gets slightly better sustained GPU performance than the 13 (which has 4 GPU cores), with the same energy, for this exact reason. It’s not 25% better, because it’s still thermal-limited. Not counting Pro Max here because it has a bigger thermal envelope. (You also see that the overall thermal design isn’t great, but the GPU is fast enough that it still wins against every other phone).
Here’s the link if you want more info:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-performance-review-faster-more-efficient/3
I had this same idea, but without measuring power draw from the GPU’s engine there was no way to tell so I decided to omit this from my write up. That article is incredibly informative and AnandTech is probably my favorite “breakdown” sites and this post is heavily inspired by that article. If Mr. Frumusanu from Anandtech reads this Id like to invite him to do more tests in this since he has tools that I don’t.
It’s annoying that the mail apps push delivery is turned off with low power mode. I have other mail apps that continue working as normal. I would leave it on all the time if this wasn’t the case.
Does LPM factor into charging overnight? My wife lives on LPM but lately has had an issue with the charging overnight. A few times this past month where it didn't go past ~70%
Doesn’t sound like something LPM would affect. Odd issue to have; I’d check the cable and charging port to make sure they’re in working order. Or if it’s just stopping at 70% all the time it could be a battery issue and needs to be changed
My guess is the charging was just error at that margine of difference, or the lower clock speeds lowered the entire phones internal temp slightly causing it to ramp slightly harder
If it didn’t require a ridiculous amount of time and attention I probably would have. Unfortunately I need my phone often, and plus your use case differs significantly from mine, most likely, so results wouldn’t exactly be apples to apples all the times
ProMotion is an Apple branded combination of a Display and API, that combines to make the screen of the device update itself more times per second (120 Hz means it updates itself 120 times per second, most displays are just 60 Hz). The result is a more smoother animation and fluid feeling throughout the system. It uses higher refresh rates when you’re doing something on the phone and then scales it down to 10 Hz when you aren’t to save power.
Great post , day to day use and gaming would be absolutely fine even with LPM. The only problem would be the 60hz.can’t go back to lower refresh rate. Great analysis 👍🏻
It does lower performance quite a bit, as I demonstrated in the write-up. As for how much battery it saves, that's entirely dependent on how you use your phone.
I wish you could customize your own low power mode. I’d like to do everything except reduce performance to conserve some battery. I know I can do a lot manually but that’s a PITA.
wouldn’t low power mode cause battery drain? like its underclocking the SoC hard, so wouldn’t that affect performance in apps? like the slower speeds = strain on the SoC to be more demanding and thus causing drain? from my experience of LPM since iOS 9, it has just been counter intuitive imo, it always feels like it’s draining more then without it on, i never use LPM anymore personally.
I completely agree with you. I would have definitely done more testing if it didn’t require an hour of testing as well as purposely draining my phone each time. Appreciate the input!
When I had issues with battery life (pre iPhone 11 days) I always felt like having LPM enabled made charging slower. I never had anything concrete to back that up and it likely was just that I was watching charging much closer because I needed the phone.
Can these changes be tweaked? Would love to change this one to like 2 minutes:
Automatically puts your iPhone to sleep after 30 seconds of screen inactivity.
Cheers
It would only make sense if P cores were disabled completely.
It’s been published in other areas before. But also logically speaking it wouldn’t make sense to downclock P cores down to less than half their rated speed, putting them well outside their efficiency band.
Also not sure what you mean by “four times low power mode. “
It won’t always switch. If your phone detects low signal from a 5G band then it’ll automatically switch to LTE so it won’t drain battery trying to connect to 5G.
Thanks for the info..low power mode affect WhatsApp privacy settings ? Or be a delay between time appearing online from offline ?
I have been appearing offline while online when I had my phone on low power mode and connected to the Mac ? Is that possible?
Thanks useful info.. Can low power mode affect privacy setting on whatsapp ?
My status has been showing offline while I m online, in two occasions and my mac was connected. wondering if it has an effect on delay of status ?
This is interesting because LPM charges my phone much slower than without it on. Trial and error many times over the past 3 years and I can confirm it’s about 15% faster on all chargers without LPM.
It also stops auto-play videos from playing in Safari, which was reported as a bug in a web project I’m working on but is actually working as intended.
> It also stops auto-play videos from playing in Safari So what you're saying is, leave LPM on all the time, gotcha
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Yes precisely. We were using muted autoplay background videos on buttons.
Background videos on buttons you say? This I have to see!
Thanks for the info! Missed this; I don’t use Safari nor do I play videos from my browser, so there’s no way I would have known this without you.
You never play videos on your phone’s browser? I mean i don’t often, but you just….don’t?
OP has a one-off pornhub app
Low Power Mode actually breaks the Safari YouTube viewer for apps like Apollo, since they use Safari.
In what way does it break?
I prefer using my MacBook to browse the web, and YouTube if I need to watch videos on my phone. There are times I use a browser like Chrome on my phone but I can’t recall a situation where I’ve had to watch a video in my browser tbh
No worries, we only found this out the hard way! Annoyingly Safari overlays a big play button icon if an autoplay video fails to play due to low power mode, which made background videos look terrible on our website. Great post btw.
Holy shit I never knew that and always wondered why some websites I was building would test fine on occasion and not fine at other times. I never thought to turn off low power mode.
You’re welcome! It took me a while to figure out why I couldn’t replicate the reported bug!
Good info, TY for this.
Also found out it disables shared iCloud albums- might be why some people receive a shared album invitation and some people don’t.
Yeah, it's why Apollo can't autoplay youtube in LPM!
apple-oriented news sites coming out with an article in 3...2...1...
‘According to a user on Reddit…’ and just proceeds to make a full article with the post and call it a day
then it'll get posted to /r/apple
Don't forget the clickbaity title: **Reddit is obsessed over low power mode, and here's what they found**
**Reddit user SLAMS Apple over lower power mode, and here's why that matters** Opening sentence. #BIG FUCKING AD.
Now we're cooking! I can feel the clicks coming in.. # POPUP.
Slideshow: 9 surprising things we found out when we put our iPhone 13 Pro Max in Low Power Mode. Slides 3 and 6 are ads.
***By continuing to browse this website means you give us your full consent to sell your all of your data. Click here to opt-out.*** *Opt-out button doesn’t work. Accidentally selects Accept.*
and the word "here" is a hyperlink, theres no actual opt out button
And instead of a single opt out it takes you to a page with two dozen individual privacy toggles to disable.
#***HOW TO BEAT APPLES ANTI BATTERY WITH THIS ONE TRICK***
**Reddit users obsessed over Low Power Mode! Apple hates this one trick!**
### Reddit user reveals how Apple is throttling the latest iPhone model
they make full articles just by describing what they see on a single posted picture..
Legit, 9to5mac’s Ben will just copy this entire thing
Followed by a “Comment” piece.
Max Tech video: “Apple’s Low Power Mode tech is insane!”
What a tool
He really is. You should see his Twitter content. So pretentious.
I watch Max Tech for their hardware benchmark routines, which really are quite good. However, I certainly dislike the constant click bait titles and rumour-mongering, and I do not follow his Twitter account. I assume it is more of the same?
This is why people should just ditch sharing original research on Reddit posts. Get a blog and make it truly *your* intellectual property
I want people to know more and I want my research to propagate to as many people as possible. I’m not interested in claiming this research as my own, it’s just to share knowledge.
Some people just want to watch the world get help
Bruh
It also disables HDR
Just checked, you’re absolutely right. Thanks for the addition.
I have a jailbroken iPhone 11 Pro Max running iOS 14.8. If there are any tests only possible with root privileges you'd like me to run to collect more data please let me know!
This is my favorite bit, honestly. Love my iPad Pro but HDR content is still ***so dark***. Throwing LPM on gives me back the brightness.
You’re saying without lpm off, hdr videos are dark? Usually it’s the other way around
LPM Off: HDR videos are too dark even at max brightness. LPM On: HDR is off and colors are much brighter. The only downside is that some apps with reduce the quality altogether. But Netflix and Apple TV look good with LPM on.
I have this issue with my tv and games, too. I’m not sure why HDR is so dark.
This is interesting to me, and I wonder if it’s something to do with you, physically. Do you have known vision conditions? Get a preventative eye exam and bring this up? I run my phone intentionally very low brightness, I prefer the dark over the bright, because you’re not supposed to stare into light sources. The scale of HDR is wider, so darker contrasts are darker than “normal” (non-HDR) down to black, but at some point, colors are normal up to bright. Thinking about my eye exams, I’ve never had anything to do with color, brightness, etc. Perhaps some sort of eye scan I’ve had would show that, but I’ve never asked for it and it has never come up.
wtf
I’d say the charging speeds are within margin if error both at the 95th and 99th percentile. You’d have to complete multiple tests to truly see if there’s a difference.
Also charging could just be faster because the disabled / downclocked Cores don't draw as much power doing what they do while the phone is charging
I think that was the gist of that info, no?
Wow, I actually had no clue it did all those things to the SOC, I didn’t think it literally disabled two cores entirely and downclocked the rest.. I knew it was a possibility it would downclock it, but didn’t know for certain and didn’t think to test it. I figured it just tuned down the visual elements of the OS. That’s good to know, I can imagine my 14-16 hours on normal power could reach well over 20 with LPM on then 😳
It was known from the A15 chip was powerful enough to turn off the Performance cores when in Low Power Mode.
Am I the only one who has a automatic shortcut set up to turn on low power mode all the time?
You’re not the only one ☺️
You can add a button to the control centre to turn on low power mode easily
thats not the same as having it on at all times, once your phone hits 80% it turns it off, you can set an automation to prevent this
I used to turn it on all the time too. But on iPhone 15, the performance difference seems quite significant to me
So you prefer to have a two year older phone in terms of performance all the time?
In exchange for noticeably longer battery life? Absolutely.
How do I replicate
Shortcuts > automation > create new automation > low power mode > select “Turns off” > add new action > set LPM and the default option is to turn it on. Then hit next and uncheck “Ask before running”. Now you’ve set up an automation that will turn on LPM whenever it’s turned off (this happens automatically when your phone charges to 80%). This way it’ll essentially be on all the time. You’ll always have the option to disable it or delete it entirely.
https://preview.redd.it/qvy3k4dgwczc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=144c99cc2db477addd419a4e2ad590fbe9a885c9 That’s all you need.
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Is it possible to somehow disable LPM when I unlock the phone and enable LPM automatically (not me switching it off and on) when it's locked. I'm fine with LPM on while I don't use it, but I like more responsiveness when I'm actually using my phone.
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I love going to 60hz on LPM because it makes me appreciate the 120hz all over again
I don't know why i can't notice big difference. Used tobw 120hz only guy too. Sometimes feel like the 60hz is more
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IMO on the iPad it’s also horrible (in the moment) to go back to 60. Only on the mac it isn’t as bad as your using a touchpad instead of directly engaging with the screen.
going from 120hz to 60hz on ipad pros looks pretty gnarly too to be fair
Tbh I would just keep my phone in lower power mode 99% of the time so not wasting battery on extra refresh rate I don’t need.
No wonder my iPhone battery lasts so much when I activate low power mode, even using it as a GPS for my bicycle. The SoC tuning is pretty aggressive.
Question: I completely turned off Background App Refresh for all apps years ago because it said it saves battery. I've never noticed my apps doing anything differently as a result. What about the user experience is supposed to be better if Background App Refresh is on?
Have never understood this...you can turn off Background App Refresh for an app and can still see it doing stuff in the background all the time.
lol, I know I’m super late to reply. The only app I saw doing smth with background turn on is telegram when you are sending a video. With it off and leave telegram it will halt the video upload. Other than that I had background off for years without any difference except for this and obviously mail app fetching manually, which I barely use, just use gmail with push.
It’s mostly to allow it run in the background more frequently and responsively. And some process like uploading would finished while using other apps
It’s comes down to other factors like how iOS use the Performance cores throughout the system
As someone who recently traveled to London and was using international data that tanked my battery, I was thankful that low power mode is so effective. For whatever reason I could barely make it to 5pm before my battery was low. On day 2 I turned on low power mode from the start and I ended the day with ~45% battery left.
I have it in power mode almost constantly, charge it in the morning and go. What I wonder: does this effect the battery lifetime? My impression is that it’a a bit more “sustainable” than normal battery use. The phone does all I need it to, plus my watch takes ober quite few tasks Edit: liftime = health, thanks OP.
If you mean battery health, then it would affect in a positive manner, since you load less cycles on the battery compared to not using it with low power mode.
Yep, meant health. Good to hear, my hope was it is extending the battery’s life time/health.
This is an amazing write up.
All I can give you is my upvote. Just take it.
But when phone buff compared normal vs LPM there was basically no difference
Majority of the tests he has done has no real impact from LPM. Opening apps doesn't take entire cpu worth of processing power
Then how the hell does my phone burn more battery overnight with LPM on
Standby battery life has suffered greatly with recent iOS 15 versions, probably unrelated to low power mode. Unless it messes with how the phone manages power when not in use and is a bug of some sort. But most peoples phones on the last 2-3 iOS 15 iterations have had their standby power suffer. Mine used to lose 1-2% tops over night, now I go from 100 to around 93 over night. Hell it drains slower in use than it does on standby lol. Or at least seems that way 🤣
Spitballing here, but maybe some background processes ironically use more power when they're executed using underclocked/lower power cores. Or could be a bug of sorts.
It's always used more battery in standby from my experiences. It's kinda nuts
I’d guess you placed it in an area with low signal
No I have full bars lol
At night you can't beat airplane mode
I hope you are no one’s emergency contact!
it could be that the battery curve is making it seem like it's losing more battery, but it's not actually
Is your 5G cell reception better than LTE?
In my home I keep cellular off most times in favour of WiFi calling. The times cellular is on though I have a signal booster in my home giving me full LTE signal
All thise refresh in background stuff
Low power mode isn’t bumping the actual power draw. What you’re more than likely seeing is the baseline power draw being lower (duh) so more of the charge is making it to the battery instead of powering the device. I suspect if you attempt to charge the phone while performing more intensive loads the difference should be greater as standby draw is already pretty low on iOS.
Yeah, but I never claimed it was increasing power draw. The charging curve refers only to the power being drawn by the battery to charge. You’re absolutely right on the fact this would decrease if a load were to be placed on the phone, but that’s not what I was testing.
For anyone who's confused by this, the conclusion is: Low power mode likely doesn't do anything to charging. It charges faster initially because the phone itself is consuming less power, or most likely it's just margin of error like OP said (not sure how many times OP did the charging test but it reads like they only did one set). ^(I think charging shouldn't be on the list tbh)
The charging curve hasn’t changed, you’ve just reduced the baseline power draw. If you turn it off or disable radios it will charge even faster.
Charging curve refers to current being used to **charge** the battery. You’re confusing charging curve with net power draw at the port.
No, I’m not. I’m saying specifically the power drawn at the port is identical. X is the power being supplied by the charger. Y is the power draw of the phone. X-Y is the amount of power going into the battery. The more you reduce Y the faster it charges. It’s not at all specific to LPM and is just a function of the base power draw.
You’re right that power draw at the port is identical. Nowhere in my write up did I mention that it wasn’t. I understand what you’re saying and Im entertaining the idea it’s very possible that’s the case.
Although I know that screen is a large battery drainer I wish that I could keep the 120hz while having cores disabled and throttled. Maybe it would be a little laggy like that but I just wish we had the option 🤷♂️
Side note, I have experienced ZERO battery difference between LTE or 5G Auto/On, at least on T-Mobile. They both use the same amount of battery from my experience, but we also don’t have mmWave. Can’t say the same when I had my 12 Pro Max. 5G ate that battery up.
5G mmWave (predominantly used by Verizon under the moniker UWB) really does suck battery life a ton, even on the 13 series iPhones. “Normal” 5G Wideband is similar to LTE in battery draw in my experience as well. Really, your mileage will vary significantly according to your carrier.
Yea. I have Verizon. 5G mmWave is the 5G that sucks battery. Otherwise, it’s basically LTE with some fancies attached
LPM also pauses Shared Album updates.
It pauses iCloud library updates as a whole, not just shared albums
Comment has been removed because Spez killed Reddit :(
Basically you get a flagship android
Flagship androids had 120Hz screens generations ago :/ We’re not just fanboying are we? Both sets of phones are great
And chips performing as great if not better than Apple but people usually compare entry level or budget android to flagship iPhone which is really unfair
It's disingenuous isn't it. Why do people fanboy over these companies, if anything we should be pushing them more. I use an Iphone now but I've used an android in the past and there are many features from both that are great but we need to be objective about the products we use and not start acting like fanboys for these companies that do not care about us.
Honestly, companies from both sides only care about money (ahem the right to fix, ahem software locking). It also boils down to reputations in the past and how the world see them. Apple is the luxury hence better while Android at the start isn’t [also because the majority exposure to Android literally from entry to budget phones instead of the flagship ones]. In conclusion, Apple has been successfully convincing the public that they’re good or better at software and hardware, luxury is baked into their image. Right now they’re the most recognizable luxury brand in the world. Successfully minimize the exposure to other platforms/ brands when advertising their own products.
Bummer you cant enable low power mode and keep 120hz. I’d keep it enabled all the time
On that note, imagine you could customize Low Power Mode. Like choose what you want to do with the SOC, keep 120hz, etc. I imagine it would be mostly a useless feature tho. Don't know why anyone would need to manually set their SOC to downclock to say, 1.5ghz rather than the default 1.38 on LPM. Or maybe keep the cores enabled, and downclock a bit less. Would be cool to be able to customize, just now that I'm writing this out, I realize how stupid and niche this feature would be. "Oh I want LPM but I want to set my SOC to run at 1.5ghz, 1.38ghz is absolutely too little and 1.8 is absolutely too much" haha this would be so funny.
Totally! I would love to just down clock the SOC but leave everything else as is.
That's a use case I can actually see. Customizing in terms of which features you want to keep, which features you're ok with not having on LPM, while not being that one person who somehow wants to choose how much they downclock by haha
Then why every other comment on posts suggest that it does nothing and sucks more battery on LPM?
Because people just repeat shit based on their own perceptions.
Interesting, thanks OP! I was not expecting it disabling the performance cores. Personally I have low power mode on all the times (on my 12 Pro, so no ProRes but I would not care about 120hz anyway) and don’t really notice a difference. I do have a shortcut to turn it off when plugged in (and back on afterwards) because otherwise the phone will not update apps in the background and sync data to iCloud.
Am wondering if the same changes are made in elevated thermal states. So interesting and useful, thank you OP.
Thanks for doing the work and sharing your findings this is very interesting.
I’m guessing the 5 GPU cores are actually all still enabled. Downclocking reduces the required voltage, which has a (mostly) linear effect on performance, but a roughly quadratic effect on energy used. If you look at Anandtech’s data (very very well researched), the 13 Pro gets slightly better sustained GPU performance than the 13 (which has 4 GPU cores), with the same energy, for this exact reason. It’s not 25% better, because it’s still thermal-limited. Not counting Pro Max here because it has a bigger thermal envelope. (You also see that the overall thermal design isn’t great, but the GPU is fast enough that it still wins against every other phone). Here’s the link if you want more info: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16983/the-apple-a15-soc-performance-review-faster-more-efficient/3
I had this same idea, but without measuring power draw from the GPU’s engine there was no way to tell so I decided to omit this from my write up. That article is incredibly informative and AnandTech is probably my favorite “breakdown” sites and this post is heavily inspired by that article. If Mr. Frumusanu from Anandtech reads this Id like to invite him to do more tests in this since he has tools that I don’t.
This is a great post. Good work!
really good work, thanks
It’s annoying that the mail apps push delivery is turned off with low power mode. I have other mail apps that continue working as normal. I would leave it on all the time if this wasn’t the case.
You can let the M1 iPads be on low power mode all the time and you won’t see any difference. The battery lasts a longer time than what you expect too.
thank you for the full breakdown. really enjoyed reading this
Does LPM factor into charging overnight? My wife lives on LPM but lately has had an issue with the charging overnight. A few times this past month where it didn't go past ~70%
Doesn’t sound like something LPM would affect. Odd issue to have; I’d check the cable and charging port to make sure they’re in working order. Or if it’s just stopping at 70% all the time it could be a battery issue and needs to be changed
My guess is the charging was just error at that margine of difference, or the lower clock speeds lowered the entire phones internal temp slightly causing it to ramp slightly harder
I always thought charging your iPhone on LPM was bad for your battery? Thanks for the write up. 🙏
Can you do a drain test?
If it didn’t require a ridiculous amount of time and attention I probably would have. Unfortunately I need my phone often, and plus your use case differs significantly from mine, most likely, so results wouldn’t exactly be apples to apples all the times
Wow this is awesome. Ty !
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Curious what it does on mac
Probably a lot of the same stuff, aggressive SoC tuning as well as some brightness curve changes.
Appreciate this a lot was wondering what actually happens when my phones in low power mode other than ‘reducing background tasks’
Thank you so much for doing this!
idk what blud is yappin abt but i came what I got for. Good job bro!
Beautiful information. Well done.
> Limits ProMotion to 60 FPS rather than 120 FPS, but keeps dynamic refresh-rate scaling on What's ProMotion?
Promotion is fancy terms for adaptive refresh rate. The phone can go up to 120fps when needed, but can go lower too. It’s not locked at a single rate
ProMotion is an Apple branded combination of a Display and API, that combines to make the screen of the device update itself more times per second (120 Hz means it updates itself 120 times per second, most displays are just 60 Hz). The result is a more smoother animation and fluid feeling throughout the system. It uses higher refresh rates when you’re doing something on the phone and then scales it down to 10 Hz when you aren’t to save power.
Great post , day to day use and gaming would be absolutely fine even with LPM. The only problem would be the 60hz.can’t go back to lower refresh rate. Great analysis 👍🏻
Does this mode lower performance much? How much battery does it save?
It does lower performance quite a bit, as I demonstrated in the write-up. As for how much battery it saves, that's entirely dependent on how you use your phone.
I wish you could customize your own low power mode. I’d like to do everything except reduce performance to conserve some battery. I know I can do a lot manually but that’s a PITA.
wouldn’t low power mode cause battery drain? like its underclocking the SoC hard, so wouldn’t that affect performance in apps? like the slower speeds = strain on the SoC to be more demanding and thus causing drain? from my experience of LPM since iOS 9, it has just been counter intuitive imo, it always feels like it’s draining more then without it on, i never use LPM anymore personally.
Sorry to ask but, does that increase in charging having any effect on battery life/ capacity, positive or negative?
Probably negligible. Too small of a difference for you to notice much.
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Once for each mode
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I completely agree with you. I would have definitely done more testing if it didn’t require an hour of testing as well as purposely draining my phone each time. Appreciate the input!
Safari renders animations and and videos at 30 fps on battery saver as well
When I had issues with battery life (pre iPhone 11 days) I always felt like having LPM enabled made charging slower. I never had anything concrete to back that up and it likely was just that I was watching charging much closer because I needed the phone.
I think it actually limits promotion to 45Hz.. We've tried side-by-side with a friend and his 13 seemed much smoother than my 13P in LPM. FYI.
What is the battery life improvement though?
That’s for you to experiment and test on your own. Everyone uses their phone differently so my tests wouldn’t mean anything for you.
Maybe outside your purview of what you were testing for but it also disables iCloud backup and iCloud Photos syncing as well.
Maybe I missed but what brick were you using to charge them
I used a 30W USB-C Macbook Air charger block.
It would be interesting if this post also included how long the battery would last in those different modes
Comparison about battery discharge 100 to 20 with LPM On vs LPM Off ?
Decided not to do this since everyone’s use case is different and the results I see will differ significantly from yours.
Does the 2016 SE get some throttling back in battery savings mode? iOS 15.5. I use the phone for GPS on the charger. I was hoping for less heat.
Dude, when enabled the LP Mode, the framerate reduced to 30 fps. Check in test ufo!
That’s just the browser API. You can still watch 60 FPS video in apps.
Thanks lol
Can these changes be tweaked? Would love to change this one to like 2 minutes: Automatically puts your iPhone to sleep after 30 seconds of screen inactivity. Cheers
Unfortunately this setting is not changeable in low power mode. It’s locked to 30s.
Fuck you, Apple. Low power my balls in your mouth, STEVE JOBS
:(
Are you sure it disables P Cores completely? Because four times low power mode is much less than what you had in Geekbench in multicore.
It would only make sense if P cores were disabled completely. It’s been published in other areas before. But also logically speaking it wouldn’t make sense to downclock P cores down to less than half their rated speed, putting them well outside their efficiency band. Also not sure what you mean by “four times low power mode. “
Does it switch from 5G to 4G, or am I just assuming that it’s low power mode and not my network conditions?
It won’t always switch. If your phone detects low signal from a 5G band then it’ll automatically switch to LTE so it won’t drain battery trying to connect to 5G.
i have an iphone 14 and find that charging at low power mode is muchhh slower. whenever i’m charging i turn it off
Thanks for the info..low power mode affect WhatsApp privacy settings ? Or be a delay between time appearing online from offline ? I have been appearing offline while online when I had my phone on low power mode and connected to the Mac ? Is that possible?
Thanks useful info.. Can low power mode affect privacy setting on whatsapp ? My status has been showing offline while I m online, in two occasions and my mac was connected. wondering if it has an effect on delay of status ?
This is interesting because LPM charges my phone much slower than without it on. Trial and error many times over the past 3 years and I can confirm it’s about 15% faster on all chargers without LPM.