Turning off 5G adds hours of battery life to iPhones, iPads

This is because of ENDC (E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity) as carriers transition to SA (Stand Alone) in 5G.<p>Back in the LTE days, you only had one transmitter. With ENDC in 5G, you have two transmitters, one LTE as an anchor and another for 5G.<p>The sooner we get to SA, we can drop the LTE anchor and go back to a single 5G TX with however many DLCA bands you want for UEs.<p>Twice the transmitters, twice the current = worse battery life.

&quot;The new SE lasted nearly an hour longer on 4G than on 5G, while the new iPad Air and iPhone 13 Mini went for about 1.5 additional hours. And while the iPhone 13 Pro ran a remarkable 12 hours and 50 minutes on 5G, it still lasted about 2.5 hours longer on LTE.&quot;

In San Francisco, I do have access to 5G Ultrawideband with my iPhone 13 Pro and can confirm I get about gigabit download speeds...which doesn&#x27;t matter much in practice since an iPhone isn&#x27;t a bulk-download device.<p>That said, battery life is still pretty fine for general use.

That’s not really news, was the same time when LTE was in its child stages. I have country wide 5G here and while it doesn’t really matter in general use, I love using it for video or voice calls on Slack etc. The latency difference is very notable.<p>Thankfully iOS devices also have the ability to only switch on 5G when deemed necessary, which is sometimes a little wonky but generally works okay and will turn off 5G when the display is off.

What is the number of 5G capable towers compared to 4G ones in that area? If the number of 5G ones was significantly lower, the phone could have been forced to link to a farther one using more power.

When I upgrade to a newer iPhone I&#x27;ll probably just force it to use 4G only, I mean, really what&#x27;s the point otherwise?

I do hope they checked YouTube gives them the same stream on 5G as on 4G; it’s not in the article.

Is this not obvious to everyone by this point?<p>Putting your phone in airplane mode, and generally restricting it&#x27;s radio usage reduces battery life? Shocker!

reminds me of when 4g started...

5G is a pretty big sham.