Rumor Alert: The AI in iOS 19 Will Help Your iPhone Battery Last All Day

When iOS 19 arrives this fall, around the time that Apple unveils and releases the iPhone 17 upon the world, it’ll pack tweaks to the iPhone’s onboard Apple Intelligence AI to learn from its user’s usage behavior, making adjustments based on predictions for when to draw lower power for certain cases and greater power for others.

That, in turn, would maximize battery life by not drawing more power than is typically needed, based on the ways in which the iPhone owner uses the phone. The leak comes courtesy of Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, a veteran Apple analyst with a track record of spot-on and pretty-damn-close predictions and leaks.

On May 12, he posted on X, “NEW: Apple prepares a new Apple Intelligence feature for iOS 19 coming this fall — an AI-powered battery optimization mode to extend battery life. This will be particularly aimed at the iPhone 17 Air, which will use the feature to offset a smaller battery.”

ai for practical purposes

“Besides the AI additions and interface changes, Apple is pushing engineers to ensure that this year’s releases are more functional and less glitchy, writes Gurman. “Past upgrades were criticized for bugs and features that sometimes didn’t work properly.”

Because it’s a feature of iOS 19 and not a specific iPhone model, it stands to reason that the AI-assisted, improved battery life feature will apply to any iPhone that can use Apple Intelligence, once updated to iOS 19. That sounds like a longer list than it actually is.

Apple Intelligence demands a hefty amount of system resources, and so the oldest iPhones capable of running it are the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max. The regular iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus don’t count.

All iPhone 16 models, though, can run Apple Intelligence, including the mid-range budget iPhone 16e. Any upcoming iPhone models for the foreseeable future, including the iPhone 17 range expected in early fall later this year, will surely lean more and more heavily into Apple Intelligence.

The Cupertino company seems to be putting most of its Apples into its AI basket. Seeing it attempt to use it for squeezing out more energy efficiency was a natural progression, and one that I’m a lot more excited about than, say, creating weird images of nightmarish hands.