iPhone 13 Pro Max has twice the battery life of iPhone 12 Pro Max for video streaming

Amongst the battery life improvements in the new iPhone 13 models, the biggest change seems to be towards video streaming playback time. All iPhone 13 models have seen video streaming playback time improvements ranging between 3 hours (iPhone 13 mini) to 13 hours (iPhone 13 Pro Max).

iPhone 13 features massive battery life improvements for watching videos

As spotted by MacRumors, here are the improvements in video streaming battery life between the last generation iPhone 12 models, and the new iPhone 13 models:

iPhone 12 mini: 10 hours	iPhone 13 Mini: 13 hours
iPhone 12: 11 hours	iPhone 13: 19 hours
iPhone 12 Pro: 11 hours	iPhone 13 Pro: 20 hours
iPhone 12 Pro Max: 12 hours	iPhone 13 Pro Max: 25 hours

As you can tell, the improvement in video streaming hours has more than doubled with the iPhone 13 Pro Max. This can potentially be attributed to the new A15 Bionic chip, but also to the new ProMotion display that can not only use a high 120Hz refresh rate but also ramp down the refresh rate down to 10Hz depending on the content that is being displayed. Videos, especially movies and TV shows, are usually streamed at 24fps or 30fps, which means that Apple’s ProMotion technology can reduce the refresh rate on iPhone 13 Pro models to allow for longer watch times.

Even though the new iPad mini 6 also featured an A15 Bionic chip, just like iPhone 13 models, there is absolutely no change in its battery life. Similar to its predecessor, the fifth-generation iPad mini, the new iPad mini offers 10 hours of web surfing or video streaming on Wi-Fi, and 9 hours of web surfing or video streaming on cellular.