Apple’s iPhones are sometimes accused of offering only minor upgrades between generations, but there are a few improvements customers can generally rely on when a new model comes out. Such as a faster chip, a better camera, and a bigger battery. That is likely to remain the case this fall, when the iPhone 18 Pro arrives, but the latest report suggests that the latter upgrade will be very minor indeed.
According to the prolific Weibo leaker Digital Chat Station, who posted about the topic today, the battery capacities for the U.S. (or eSIM-only) and Chinese (or nano-SIM) versions of the iPhone 18 Pro will be 4056 mAh and 4288 mAh respectively. If those figures are accurate, and despite the leaker’s claim in the comments that this is “a normal iteration,” those would represent the smallest year-on-year increases since the iPhone 12 Pro in 2020, both as a percentage and in absolute numbers.
The iPhone 17 Pro, the first model to take advantage of the extra space left by removing the SIM tray, offered capacities of 3998 mAh (nano-SIM) and 4252 mAh (eSIM). So this year’s models would offer an increase of just 1.5 percent and 0.8 percent.
By contrast, the nano-SIM version of the 18 Pro saw an increase of 11.6 percent on the 16 Pro, which was in turn up 9.4 percent on the 15 Pro. Those two generations received particularly impressive battery boosts, but the 15 Pro, 14 Pro, and 13 Pro all managed to outperform the claimed improvements of the 18 Pro too.
In fact we have to go all the way back to the iPhone 12 Pro in 2020 to find a Pro-branded handset that offered less of an increase in battery capacity. That year the capacity actually went down, dropping to 2815 mAh from 3046 mAh on the 11 Pro. Other than the speculative 18 Pro specs, the following figures all come from GSMArena:
- iPhone 18 Pro (eSIM): 4056mAh (+58 mAH/1.5%)
- iPhone 18 Pro (nano-SIM): 4288mAh (+36 mAH/0.8%)
- iPhone 17 Pro (eSIM): 4252 mAh (+670 mAh/19%)
- iPhone 17 Pro (nano-SIM): 3998 mAh (+416 mAH/11.6%)
- iPhone 16 Pro: 3582 mAh (+308 mAh/9.4%)
- iPhone 15 Pro: 3274 mAh (+74 mAh/2.3%)
- iPhone 14 Pro: 3200 mAh (+105 mAh/3.4%)
- iPhone 13 Pro: 3095 mAh (+280 mAh/9.9%)
- iPhone 12 Pro: 2815 mAh (-231 mAh/7.6%)
- iPhone 11 Pro: 3046 mAh
It’s worth pointing out that this is just a rumor, so the numbers may be off, as Digital Chat Station themselves acknowledge. They include a ± symbol after each one, indicating that they are only rough, and refer to them as prototypes. There are still at least three months to go before the handsets are unveiled, and Apple may yet tweak the tech specs before launch. Or, as is always a possibility with unsourced reports on social media, the claimed specs may never have been accurate in the first place.
Readers should also bear in mind that lower battery capacities do not necessarily correlate with lesser battery performance. The new phones will benefit from software optimisations and the new more powerful processors.
For all the latest news and rumors as we count down to the launch, bookmark our regularly updated iPhone 18 Pro superguide.
