iPhone 17 Pro Max Could Get a Battery Upgrade Over Its Predecessor; May ‘Reach’ 5,000mAh Capacity

iPhone 17 Pro Max is expected to debut in September as the top-end model in Apple's lineup. According to a tipster, the purported handset could be in line to receive a battery upgrade over the current flagship, which is the iPhone 16 Pro Max. The purported flagship's battery capacity may reach the 5,000mAh mark, becoming the first iPhone in the Cupertino-based tech giant's lineup to do so.

iPhone 17 Pro Max Battery Upgrade

In a post on the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, tipster Instant Digital (machine translated from Chinese) suggested details about the battery size of the iPhone 17 Pro Max. It is said to feature a battery with a capacity that will reach the 5,000mAh mark, a first for Apple.

While the Cupertino-based tech giant usually prefers to advertise the screen time rather than the capacity, the iPhone 16 Pro Max is reported to feature a 4,676mAh battery. The company says it can deliver up to 33 hours of video playback and up to 105 hours of audio playback on a single charge.

Thus, the larger battery of the purported iPhone 17 Pro Max is expected to offer more hours of usage. If this rumour turns out to be true, the iPhone 17 Pro Max would leapfrog every iPhone model released to date in the list of Apple smartphones with the largest battery capacities.

Previous reports suggest that Apple will equip the iPhone 17 Pro models with a new vapour chamber cooling system, ditching the graphite sheets which the company currently uses for heat dissipation. This is because the A19 SoC is reported to "generate substantial heat” during graphics intensive workloads or AI inference.

A big jump in performance is also expected with the upcoming iPhone lineup. Leaked Geekbench listings of the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max reveal single and multi-core scores of over 4,000 and over 10,000, respectively. They are expected to ship with the A19 Pro chip, paired with 12GB of RAM. This SoC may be fabricated using TSMC's third-generation 3nm process, known as N3P.