Battery life is down across the board compared to iOS 6.
This worries me. If it's because of the background downloading then at least it has a benefit (and is disable-able), but if it's the extra GPU cycles for the UI then that's a real shame.
This worries me. If it's because of the background downloading then at least it has a benefit (and is disable-able), but if it's the extra GPU cycles for the UI then that's a real shame.
They found that battery life was degraded mostly in standby mode (with iOS7 losing 12% of battery after 16 hours of standby time, compared to 7% on iOS 6.1.4).
With a more active usage pattern, they found the differences were smaller: their iPhone 5 running iOS 7 lasted 16 hours, compared to 17 hours on iOS 6.1.4.
This would suggest the increased consumption is more likely to come from background stuff than from visual UI effects.
[1] http://tweakers.net/nieuws/91361/accu-iphone-5-sneller-leeg-... (Dutch)
I'm guessing it's something similar to you – a wonky app draining my battery that is handled better on 7.
I've heard someone suggest that perhaps background sync actually might help battery life in some situations since it is done in batches. this would mean that users are spending less time looking at a power hungry screen that's just showing a loading spinner, assuming that some of this saved time is spent not using the phone at all, there might be a gain.
edit: To expand, although I am unfamiliar with everything that could be/has been done to maximize battery life:
Is it possible that "tweaks" are made in ways that are more relevant to actual usage patterns? (And perhaps ways that sacrifice battery life in the for speed in other areas, in the hopes of maintaining the baseline or improving battery life overall while still improving perceived performance)
What might these kind of changes be?
I'm not trying to be an apologist, genuinely curious about how what sort of optimizations might be made, and trying to make sense of the difference between what Ars is seeing and the anecdotal evidence.