My favorite iOS 26 feature is something that has been has for years

The year is 2015. You plug in your Android phone to load, and a useful small timer tells you how long it should last. You arise in an episode of narcos. Life is beautiful. Your friend with an iPhone? Yes, they also connect their phone, while waiting to fill their tiny well optimized cell. The difference? They have no idea of ​​the time it will take.

Quick advance until the beginning of 2025. You plug your pixel 9A and limit its load to 80% of the capacity to preserve the health of the battery. Your friend with an iPhone? They also connect again, waiting again to fill their battery slightly smaller but always well optimized. Nothing has changed.

It was only now, in mid-2010, that Apple decided to catch up. He finally made the smallest but most practical battery changes, and that made me relive the year when I obtained my secondary school diploma. So congratulations, Apple, it’s time – literally.

I configured my iPhone 16 for automatic updates and, because it does not wear my main SIM, which includes beta updates. So, I didn’t think about it much when he picked up another version of iOS 26. Of course, it has changed the icons of my application again (something that seems to happen when it goes from clear mode to dark mode), but I have not noticed too many other changes.

Then, while I plugged in my iPhone for its regular recharge because iOS 26 is less than soft on the life of the battery, I finally noticed an improvement: Apple added a charging timer that tells me how long it will take until my battery is full. Well, it is default the time remaining up to an 80%load, but it is much better than plugging in my phone and waiting to discover it.

For fear that we forget, however, Apple is comically late. As I said, Android phones have this capacity since the Android 5 era, which means that the iPhone 16 is currently in competition with the Galaxy S6, Nexus 6P, LG G4 and HTC One M9 – and the last two companies do not even make phones.

Very well, so I think I was more than sarcastic about the way it is silly that it took a decade to Apple to add a feature that my Android phones have had from high school, but iOS 26 is not always too little, too late. It has another battery optimization which is just as good and much more appropriate. Yes, I love that iOS 26 now allows you to choose your power mode.

Essentially, the power mode is now the place where Apple is home to the low power mode, but it also has a second rocking, which allows you to try an adaptive power. According to my experience, the adaptive power is a bit like the automatic mode with low power in that it looks at for higher use than normal before making slight performance settings, such as the drop in brightness or the slowdown in specific processes.

In terms of Google, it is like health assistance to batteries, but it is not compulsory. That … was not perfect on my iPhone 16, but I’m ready for chalk to the fact that it is still in beta version and is not entirely optimized.

The good news is that the Power mode will probably work much better in the next iPhone 17 series. With a little luck, this will allow me to stretch which will probably be a little more the underdimensive batteries a little more, keeping them a little closer to the cells of 5,000 mAh or more which have become so common on Android phones.

Will this make me hand my main phone number in an iPhone? No, probably not, but I will be happy to recommend one to family and friends if I know that the anxiety of the battery will not be so serious.