Editorials · Reviewer Insight
I tested the iPhone 18 Pro Max battery against the Galaxy S26 Ultra, and I did not expect this
The iPhone 18 Pro Max faces the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Pixel 11 Pro XL in this battery life battle.
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
iPhone 18 Pro Max has a nearly 10% larger battery than its predecessor | Image by PhoneArena
There are three big upgrades for the iPhone 18 Pro Max this year: the variable aperture camera system, the new A20 Pro chipset and the battery life.
And if you ask me, the battery life is what I'm most excited about.
The iPhone 18 Pro Max scores the largest single-year battery size upgrade ever on a Pro Max. It gets a nearly 10% larger battery than the previous model, and for the first time, the battery of the iPhone 18 Pro Max is actually bigger than on Android rivals like the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Google's Pixel 11 Pro XL.
But battery size alone does not tell the full story. The new 2nm A20 Pro chip is much more efficient than the previous generation, so this should boost real-world battery life even more.
Well, we at PhoneArena are all about real-world use cases rather than theory, so we ran the same YouTube video playlist on the iPhone 18 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and Pixel 11 Pro XL. Oh, and we also included the iPhone 17 Pro Max from last year for context.
PhoneArena YouTube Video Streaming test results
| Model | Battery level after 5 hours of video streaming | Battery level after 7 hours of video streaming |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone 18 Pro Max | 61% | 42% |
| iPhone 17 Pro Max | 48% | 22% |
| Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra | 50% | 27% |
| Google Pixel 11 Pro XL | 57% | 37% |
And we have a winner indeed. The new iPhone 18 Pro Max is a big improvement over the previous generation, and it also scores noticeably higher than its main rival, the Galaxy S26 Ultra.
So how did we run this test? First, we set the same fixed brightness level on all participating phones to ensure an equal playing field. We charged all the phones to 100% (and left them for at least 10 minutes over that to ensure that they are fully topped up). All phones are at 100% battery health, and ran the test on the same Wi-Fi network, playing the same playlist on all of the phones.
We let them run for five hours and looked at the battery levels at exactly the five-hour mark.
The iPhone 18 Pro Max (we used the global version with a 5,391mAh battery) wins the first place with 61% of battery left after five hours of continuous YouTube video streaming.
The Pixel 11 Pro XL (it has a 5,115mAh battery) was not too far behind, finishing with 57% of battery left.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra (with a 5,000mAh battery) was a distant third with 50% of battery left.
And the iPhone 17 Pro Max (with a 4823mAh battery) finished last with 48% of battery remaining.
These are strange times indeed, but it just shows that Samsung and Google have been a little complacent this past few years.
Take a look at flagship phones out of China — it's common to see much bigger battery sizes there. I have seen plenty of phones now sport a 7,000mAh battery size, and the latest Xiaomi Redmi Note 15 Pro Max actually comes with a whopping 10,000mAh silicon-carbon battery.
Sadly, those phones are not widely available in Western markets, but just imagine that kind of battery size with the efficiency of Apple's 2nm A20 Pro chipset.
We are on the cusp of a battery life revolution in smartphones, and the iPhone 18 Pro Max is a first sign of the things to come. And I think that's super exciting.
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