Turning off this iPhone 14 Pro feature could save you 20% battery every day

(Image credit: iMore / Stephen Warwick)

The iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max are the first iPhones to offer an Always-On Display (AOD) after years of Android phones having the same feature. But now that it's here, how much does it impact an iPhone's battery life?

Does it impact it at all?

Well, the answer turns out to be more complicated than you might think.

Battery drain

The iPhone 14 Pro devices allow users to have their display remain on even when not using it, which obviously uses more power than if turned off. Just how much that AOD impacts battery life is something YouTuber PhoneBuff set out to discover.

The AOD impacts battery life, but it isn't as cut and dried as that. See, the iPhone allows users to disable or display their wallpaper while it's locked, so PhoneBuff set about finding out what impact that option had on battery life.

As it turns out, after 24 hours of idling, the iPhone 14 Pro used zero battery when the AOD was turned off. After 24 hours, it somehow remained at 100%, which is mighty impressive.

With the AOD and wallpaper enabled, the battery fell to 80%, which might or might not surprise some. But with the wallpaper disabled, the iPhone 14 Pro finished the test at 84%.

That means anyone who wants to get the very best battery life out of their iPhone 14 Pro should disable that AOD. But if you absolutely must have it turned on and the clock and your widgets visible, disabling the wallpaper is the way to go.

Of course, in real-world use, these numbers mean little. Using your phone will impact its battery life much more than the AOD, after all. And whether the AOD is on or off, there's no denying the iPhone 14 Pro is the best iPhone money can buy.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.