Big changes are coming to the iPhone 16 Pro Max this year, including an upgrade to the battery that'll deliver the best battery life of any iPhone ever. That's according to a new report citing multiple supply chain sources – people involved in actually making the components for Apple's devices – who say that Apple's iPhone 16 flagship is going to be a significant upgrade.
The report comes from Korean site Naver, as reported by MacRumors, and says that multiple iPhone 16 rumours are correct: the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max are getting a bigger screen, 6.3 inches compared to the current 6.1, and the combination of a larger chassis and internal layout changes means that there's room for useful improvements such as a much larger optical zoom range in the Pro, enabling Apple to give it the same zoom capability as the current iPhone 15 Pro Max.
The report also suggests that the Pro models will continue with 8GB of RAM, and offers hope that we might not get a price rise this year: Apple has apparently improved the manufacturing of its titanium frames and reduced costs as a result.
Better efficiency and a much bigger battery for the biggest iPhone
The most interesting part of the report says that in addition to the usual power efficiency improvements we'd expect from the next iPhone generation, Apple is also sticking a really big battery into the iPhone 16 Pro Max – a battery so big that it'll mean the best battery life of any iPhone that Apple has ever made. Given that the official battery life of the iPhone 15 Pro Max is currently 29 hours, that could mean the first iPhone with 30 hours of stamina or more.
A previous report suggested that the iPhone 16 Pro Max battery will only be 5% bigger than the current one in terms of capacity, but it's possible that the combination of that larger battery and the power efficiency improvements deliver more than just incremental increases in overall battery life.
It's certainly an appealing prospect, but it's also quite possible – and based on previous Pro Max models, very likely – that the improvements in power and battery size will be negated by more demanding processing. My iPhone 15 Pro Max is still a daily recharge even when I'm not doing anything hugely demanding, and if the rumours of a really significant iOS 18 update with big AI improvements are true, that means that the next iOS version could be the electronic equivalent of a gas guzzler.
