Does the iPhone Air really have an ‘all-day’ battery life? Our test results are in – here’s how it compares

4 hours ago 11

(Image credit: Jacob Krol/Future)

We’ve put the iPhone Air’s battery life to the test
It performs surprisingly well in some tasks, given its super-slim chassis
It lags behind Apple’s other iPhones, though

The iPhone Air is here, and there’s one thing everyone wants to know about Apple’s super-slim phone: is the battery life any good? Because when you see a device as slimline as this, you’ve got to wonder if it can last throughout the day.

Well, we’ve put Apple’s svelte phone to the test to see how well its battery holds up in a variety of situations, and we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how it fared. Apple has claimed you’ll get “all-day” battery life from the iPhone Air, and in some cases that absolutely holds up – although it really depends on what you’re doing.

Take our web browsing test, for example. For this, we use a proprietary app that cycles through a series of 22 websites until the battery completely drains. We set the display to 150 nits of brightness and disable dynamic brightness, adaptive battery options, attention awareness features, location services and Bluetooth, and also sign out of iCloud.

In this test, the iPhone Air lasted for 12 hours and 2 minutes. That’s only 45 minutes behind the iPhone 17, but you might struggle to call it “all-day battery life" in this scenario. It’s also easily outclassed by the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but it still outperforms the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, as you can see in our chart below.

The iPhone Air did much better in our video-streaming test. Here, we streamed a nature video for five hours and noted the device’s battery life percentage at the end:

As you can see, the iPhone Air came out with 81% battery life, just behind the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s 88%, but well ahead of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge’s 67%.

Extrapolating from these results, we can estimate that you’ll get 26 hours and 19 minutes of juice while streaming video on the iPhone Air, which exceeds Apple’s own estimation of 22 hours. That’s pretty impressive.

How it compares

The amount of life you’ll get out of a single charge varies based on what you’re using the iPhone Air for, but it’s clear that some tasks (like video streaming) justify Apple’s “all-day battery life” claim. It won’t last as long if you primarily spend your day browsing the web, though, so make sure you manage your expectations there.

Still, squeezing so much battery out of such a thin product is a notable achievement for Apple. If you’re after a slim and light smartphone that still offers respectable battery life, the iPhone Air might be a better option than Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, at least according to our testing.

Alex Blake has been fooling around with computers since the early 1990s, and since that time he's learned a thing or two about tech. No more than two things, though. That's all his brain can hold. As well as TechRadar, Alex writes for iMore, Digital Trends and Creative Bloq, among others. He was previously commissioning editor at MacFormat magazine. That means he mostly covers the world of Apple and its latest products, but also Windows, computer peripherals, mobile apps, and much more beyond. When not writing, you can find him hiking the English countryside and gaming on his PC.

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