iOS 26 brings a new AI-powered feature to extend your iPhone's battery life: Here's how it works

Apple's young iPhone set in motion is simply weeks aside which should be followed by the functionary rollout of company's new iOS 26 operating system. While Liquid Glass took the spotlight during the company's WWDC address earlier in the year, there are other nifty features in the UI that could be a real head turner as well. 

One of the rather lesser known features in iOS 26 is a setting called Adaptive Power which uses AI in order to extend the battery life on the iPhone when the battery usage is higher. 

iPhone users can already lower their brightness or turn off Always on Display in order to extend the battery life on their device by a little bit. And if worse comes to worst, there is always the option to activate Low Power Mode that reduces background activity in order to cut down on power consumption.

However, the new Adaptive Power feature works more intelligently than that and only kicks in when you are using your phone for higher power consuming things like recording videos, editing photos or playing games. 

Adaptive Power kicks in during such situations to intelligently make some minor adjustments in order to make the iPhone's battery last longer.

"When your battery usage is higher than usual, iPhone can make small performance adjustments to extend your battery life, including slightly lowering the display brightness or allowing some activities to take a little longer. Low Power Mode may turn on at 20%." the official description of Adaptive Power reads.

How to turn on adaptive power settings on iOS 26? 

The Adaptive Power setting is not turned on by default and users need to enable it first by going to the settings. Here's how you can turn on the new feature. 

• Make sure you are currently running iOS 26 Developer or Public Beta
• Go to settings, then click on Battery and then on Power Mode
• You should see a new option for Adaptive Power above Low Power Mode
• Turn it on in order to have intelligent savings in battery consumption

Which devices can use Adaptive Power? 

While Apple hasn't official confirmed Adaptive Power as an artificial intelligence feature, users on social media forums have stated that the feature is only available on device that support Apple Intelligence while other devices don't see the option to turn it on in battery settings. 

This means that Adaptive Power can only be turned on a handful of device since iPhone 15 Pro including:

iPhone 15 Pro

iPhone 15 Pro Max

iPhone 16

iPhone 16 Plus

iPhone 16 Pro 

iPhone 16 Pro Max

iPhone 16e

iPhone 17 series

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