I want Apple to squeeze a OnePlus 15 battery inside my next iPhone
One year on, my iPhone 16 Pro barely lasts a day, yet iOS says it’s fine. It’s not. But it’s not broken – the battery’s just not big enough
I mostly couldn’t give two hoots about phone specs. Shove a bullet-point list in my face, while banging on about RAM and megapixels, and my eyes are likely to glaze over. Start waffling about GHz and flavours of Wi-Fi and there’s a non-zero chance I’ll pass out from sheer boredom. However, I recently realised there’s an exception: mAh. That stands for milliampere-hour or milliamp-hour, depending on who you’re arguing with. It’s all about electric charge – the current a battery can supply over time. In short, the bigger the number, the longer your phone is likely to last.
Stuff has already written about the OnePlus 15, which rocks up at precisely 13:30 on 13 November here in the UK. One article suggested its most exciting feature might be its “tougher than titanium” body. Another griped about the display resolution, presumably because some fans have electron microscopes for eyes and won’t be satisfied until smartphone visuals are so smooth that your eyeballs literally can’t focus on them without slipping away.
I don’t care about any of that. A OnePlus 15 spec I do care about, though, involves this number: 7300. Because when you plonk that in front of mAh, it suggests a battery that’ll last longer than most relationships do.
OK, slight exaggeration, but unless the OnePlus 15 gleefully chews through its battery by ramping the screen brightness up to ‘retina searing’, randomly playing several AAA games in the background for fun, and constantly downloading globs of data over 5G for no obvious reason, it’s easily going to make it through a day. And that’s something I’d very much like myself, because my one-year-old iPhone 16 Pro is struggling to do the same.
Power up
I’m not even the world’s heaviest iPhone user. Sure, I waste too much time playing games, but my iPhone spends most of its life on Wi-Fi rather than battery-ronching 5G. For much of the day, it just lurks on my desk while I get on with other things. Yet dismayingly often, it’ll start grumbling by the evening that it’s running low on juice. It’ll threaten to conk out unless I slap it on a charger, or tether it to one of the combination charging cable/trip hazards strewn around the house.
A quick look at Settings says it’s all business as usual. My iPhone’s battery health is ‘normal’. Maximum capacity sits at 96%. (And battery usage by app merely suggests I should spend less time on Reddit and trying to better my score on Drop7. Zynga! Why did you take this classic away from the world? Gits.) So Occam’s Razor suggests the battery… just isn’t big enough.
To be fair, I’ve spent years with Pro Max devices but decided last year to buy a smaller Pro, after one too many incidents of Smartphone Pinky Syndrome. But even if I’d gone Pro Max this year, I’d still only be getting 4823–5088mAh, depending on the model. The 17 Pro drops further, to 3988–4252. My iPhone? It ekes out 3582. Or at least it theoretically did a year ago.
Android smartphones and iPhones steal from each other all the time. But I don’t care about displays with individual pixels so small you’d need to visit the quantum realm to see them, phones that fold up like origami, or blowers that can simultaneously charge 47 other devices. If Apple pilfers one idea from an Android flagship in 2026, I want it to be a bigger battery. Even if that means even more comically sized camera lumps and the eradication of Apple’s obsession with phones that desperately want to have profiles that mimic a wafer-thin mint.
- Now read: I’ve spent one month with the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and iPhone Air: here’s which you should pick
Craig Grannell
Contributor 
