5G may cost up to 20% battery life on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro

Much has been made of Apple bringing 5G connectivity to the iPhone 12 series, even if true 5G is only heading to the US. Nonetheless, while it is good to see Apple adopt new connection standards, Android smartphones have already shown us that 5G heavily impacts battery life. Now, Tom's Guide has revealed how much enabling 5G impacts the battery life of the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro.

For context, Tom's Guide ran its battery tests with the two devices set to 150 nits and a browser script that refreshed a webpage every 30 seconds. The good news is that the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro perform comparatively well, only when set to 4G though. The bad news is that enabling 5G cuts battery life by around 20%.

Worse still, the two new iPhones are outshone by some Android smartphones running at 90 Hz or 120 Hz, despite the inclusion of 60 Hz panels on the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro. The Galaxy S20 and Galaxy S20 Plus outlasted the two iPhones when set to 60 Hz, too.

Overall, these battery benchmarks are only representative of using the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro constantly on 5G. Additionally, we suspect that the non-5G mmWave models will last longer too, which Apple sells outside of the US. Nonetheless, it still shows how hard 5G is on battery life.