TL;DR
- EU energy labels offer a convenient way to see how many times you can charge your phone before losing capacity.
- Samsung’s been a leader there, claiming 2,000 cycles for devices like its Galaxy S25 phones.
- Apple only manages to hit 1,000 cycles, according to its iPhone 17 energy labels.
Shopping for a new smartphone can be seriously nerve-wracking, and while manufacturers throw plenty of specs at us, it can sometimes be really difficult to get objective numbers for making comparisons. That is a big reason why we’ve been so excited this year to see the debut of the EU’s new energy efficiency labels, providing important details about not just how power-efficient our phones are, but also how durable — and that includes the battery itself.
Beyond just reporting how long users can expect a fully charged battery to last, the labels give shoppers an indication as to how many charging cycles they might hope to get out of their phone over the course of its useful life. And as we already saw, Samsung phones are seriously leading the pack there, claiming battery performance that endures through 2,000 charging cycles. But how does that compare to the new iPhone 17 family?
Don’t want to miss the best from Android Authority?
When we last checked, Apple was still on the iPhone 16 series, and those handsets — along with all its other hardware we could find — reported being good for 1,000 charge cycles. Now we finally have the updated EU energy labels for the iPhone 17 series, and we’ve got some bad news if you were hoping for a boost there.
All four iPhone 17 handsets offer the same sort of high power efficiency — including the super-thin new iPhone Air — but they’re not making any progress when it comes to long-term battery endurance, still indicating an expected 1,000 charge cycles.
These EU models aren’t exactly the same iPhones you’ll get for sale in the US, and while Apple does indicate that iPhone 17 variants with a physical SIM tray are getting a slightly smaller battery as a result, we’re not expecting any differences there when it comes to battery chemistry that would impact these numbers.
Perhaps Apple is being exceedingly conservative — or Samsung, the exact opposite — but that’s still got to be a disappointing number to stomach for iOS fans who were hoping to see Apple step up its game in this department. We doubt the lack of forward momentum here will actually dissuade a huge number of iPhone users from upgrading, but even a modest boost would have been a nice feather in the iPhone 17’s cap. At least Apple’s got a rich ecosystem of power accessories to fall back on!
Thank you for being part of our community. Read our Comment Policy before posting.
