This killer new iPhone feature extends your battery life — but it's only available on these models

One of the more underrated features of iOS 26 is the new adaptive power mode that Apple introduces, which helps to extend the life of an iPhone by making “small performance adjustments to extend your battery life.”

Lowering screen brightness and “allowing some activities to take a little longer” are just two examples of how it can do this.

Unlike the existing low power mode, adaptive power mode continuously works “when your battery usage is higher than usual.” While this is great news, this new power mode isn’t available to all iPhones running iOS 26.

Instead, it’s limited to the best iPhones that support Apple Intelligence — which means an iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and any of the current iPhone 16 models. Here’s the full list:

• iPhone 15 Pro
• iPhone 15 Pro Max
• iPhone 16e
• iPhone 16
• iPhone 16 Plus
• iPhone 16 Pro
• iPhone 16 Pro Max

If you have anything older, like an iPhone 14 Pro Max, you’re out of luck because it appears that adaptive power mode is an AI-powered feature.

Usually AI-powered features are a bit more forward facing, like how generative AI is used with Image Playground to take text descriptions to create images, or how Visual Intelligence analyzes on-screen images, but this one’s a bit tougher to swallow with adaptive power mode.

Presumably iPhone 17 devices will offer adaptive power mode whenever they’re released, considering how they’ll likely be running iOS 26 out of the box. But still, having this feature exclusively tied to Apple Intelligence is a bummer for anyone without one.

Interestingly, the new Call Screen feature with iOS 26 that screens phone calls for you isn’t actually powered by Apple Intelligence feature — but rather an evolution of Live Voicemail.

For now, Apple’s keeping the feature exclusive to Apple Intelligence. It could be that the A17 Pro and A18 chips used by these supported iPhones are better optimized to handle this task, which would explain this decision.

iOS 26 is currently available as a public beta, with a full release tipped for the fall.

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