iPhone 16: New battery leak is good news for Pro Max, but sad news for Plus

The iPhone 16 Plus might be the black sheep of this year's iPhone family.

Well, that's maybe a little dramatic, but a recent leak paints a somewhat concerning picture regarding its battery size.

iPhone 16 reported battery sizes

Someone going by "OvO Baby Sauce OvO" on the Chinese social media platform Weibo (spotted by Phone Arena) posted leaked battery sizes for all four new iPhones set to come out this year. Here's what we are reportedly working with:

• iPhone 16: 3,561mAh

• iPhone 16 Plus: 4,006mAh

• iPhone 16 Pro: 3,355mAh

• iPhone 16 Pro Max: 4,676mAh

Those numbers might look like some hot nonsense out of context, but Phone Arena did the lord's work and compared them to last year's iPhone 15 models, expressed as percentage differences. Every new iPhone's battery is slightly larger (up two to six percent) except for the 16 Plus, which has a reduction of 8.6 percent compared to the iPhone 15 Plus.

There are, of course, some caveats to this. One is that these numbers could simply be wrong. Another is that, even if true, they don't tell the full story about each phone's practical battery life. It's possible that the 16 Plus gets more juice out of a single charge than the 15 Plus due to back-end wizardry that makes the battery more efficient, if not actually larger. We just don't know yet.

But this is something to keep an eye on for the folks who like bigger iPhones.