If you’ve been longing for longer battery life on your iPhone 15 Pro, recent tests conducted by MacWorld reveal the impact of the 120Hz display on endurance.
Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, along with their predecessors, the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro, feature the ProMotion 120Hz standard for their displays, providing a smoother experience when navigating menus, scrolling through social media, or watching high-frame-rate videos. However, while our battery life testing of the iPhone 15 showed improvements over the iPhone 14 models, the Pro versions fell short compared to the equivalently-sized iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus.
Fortunately, iOS offers a solution with the Limit Frame Rate option in the accessibility settings. By disabling the ProMotion smoothness, users can reduce the display’s refresh rate to 60Hz, matching the non-Pro models. However, this only resulted in a modest 5% increase in battery life for the iPhone 15 Pro and a 6% increase for the iPhone 15 Pro Max in a Geekbench 4 battery test.
This finding may surprise some, but it is a common occurrence. When testing other smartphones with 120Hz and 60Hz modes, the battery life improvement is not significantly substantial due to the enhanced efficiency of high refresh-rate displays. One notable technology that contributes to this efficiency is LTPO, a display material that allows for fully adaptive refresh rates. With LTPO, the phone provides 120Hz refresh rate only when necessary, conserving power by utilizing lower, less energy-intensive frequencies during other periods.
Despite these results, MacWorld’s report suggests that switching to 60Hz mode while playing games can still result in noticeable power savings. Although this is an anecdotal test rather than a benchmark, it makes sense that reducing the frame rate would consume less power from the display and chipset.
However, gaming is often when users want to experience the full refresh rate of their phone. Additionally, constantly toggling the refresh rate setting on and off may become cumbersome. Instead, it may be more convenient to invest in one of the best power banks available for more efficient power management.
In the near future, we plan to conduct our own experiment under controlled laboratory conditions to further explore these findings.
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