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I’d be willing to bet the one thing most of us want from our iPhones is quite simple: more battery life. Apple can keep adding new features and designs with each new smartphone iteration, but if the company just announced a new iPhone with record-breaking battery life, customers would be thrilled.
While we may have to wait for a time when the iPhone can go a couple days in between charges, Apple has added a new option to iOS 26 in an effort to help extend your iPhone’s battery life. The feature, Adaptive Power, uses on-device AI to analyze your iPhone usage and guess the times you’ll need additional battery life. This is exactly how I want to see AI being used—not for generating hyper-realistic videos or musical slop.
How Adaptive Power tries to boost your battery
When Adaptive Power decides it’s time to engage, the feature can adjust your iPhone’s performance level. This will make some tasks take longer than they normally would, but that slower speed supposedly saves on battery life. In addition, Adaptive Power lowers screen brightness by 3%, limits background activity, and, when your iPhone reaches 20%, kicks on Low Power Mode without asking you first.
Apple isn’t totally clear here about the difference between Low Power Mode and Adaptive Power in general. From what we know, it seems that Adaptive Power simply reduces processing speeds at select intervals, and only slightly lowers brightness, while Low Power Mode slows speeds and display refresh rate, and limits brightness, 5G, iCloud syncing, and mail fetch, among other tasks.
Adaptive Power is enabled by default on Apple’s newest iPhones, including the iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone Air—the latter of which could most likely benefit from such a feature. For all other compatible iPhones, which includes iPhone 15 Pro and newer, the feature is turned off by default. That means, unless you have an iPhone 17 device, you’ll need to turn this on yourself.
What do you think so far?
How to turn Adaptive Power on or off
Whether you have an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPhone 17, you’ll find the controls for Adaptive Power in the same place. Open Settings, then head to Battery > Power Mode. Here, you can tap the toggle next to “Adaptive Power” to turn the setting on or off.
Since Adaptive Power turns on and off throughout the day, Apple also offers you the option to receive alerts whenever the feature is active. You can adjust this setting from the “Adaptive Power Notifications” toggle.
I’ve been using Adaptive Power since iOS 26 dropped on Sept. 15, but it’s tough to say whether the feature has had a noticeable impact on my battery life. I think it would help if Apple added Adaptive Power information to my battery stats, so I could compare the impacts before and after using the feature. For now, I’ll continue using it, if for no other reason than to offer my battery the best possible chance of making it through the day without its charger.
