When software engineer Joshua Fonseca recently connected the GameCube simulation classic Animal Crossing to a modern AI language model like the kind that powers ChatGPT, he decided to shake things up. By programming the AI to roleplay as villagers growing aware of their debt situation, and giving them a shared memory to track conversations, Fonseca orchestrated a scenario where the residents began to organize against their raccoon landlord.

In Animal Crossing, Tom Nook runs the town shop and provides home loans (paid out in bells, the in-game currency) that keep players perpetually in debt, which is a core mechanic of the game.

“Predictably, it escalated into an anti-Tom Nook movement,” Fonseca wrote in a detailed post documenting his hack that bridges a 2002 game to cloud-based AI without modifying any game code. While Fonseca frames the uprising as a type of emergent phenomenon in his post and a YouTube video, examination of the source code by AI researcher Simon Willison shows that Fonseca specifically instructed the villagers to behave this way and even escalate the unrest over time.

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The rumor mill is working overtime about news that might drop at next week’s Meta Connect 2025. Two new pieces of gossip: Meta may announce that its rumored AR smart glasses are powered by a smart watch, and the company may reveal Meta-powered Prada frames during the event.

Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer Glasses With Meta AI (Clear Lenses, Shiny Black)

$299.00
at Amazon

$299.00
at Amazon

Both a potential Prada Meta release and a Meta watch-controller for its expected AR glasses require a little “internet rumor math” and conclusion-jumping, so take it with a grain a salt, but here’s the breakdown:

Meta’s rumored smart watch

The “Meta smart watch” speculation comes from a late July post on Digitimes suggesting Meta will roll out its own smart watch at Meta Connect 2025. Since Meta’s next-gen smart glasses are expected to need a wrist controller, it makes sense that Meta would make it a watch. Almost everyone would prefer wearing a smart watch to a dedicated tech bracelet, right?

If Meta’s wrist controller/watch actually exists, we have no idea what other “watch-like” features it might include (beyond telling time, of course) but if Meta is planning to release a functional smart watch and a linked pair of display-enabled smart glasses, while charging only $800 (the rumored price) for the bundle, I predict a lot of interest.

The rumor about a Prada-Meta collab

What if Meta’s new glasses look really cool too? Like, something Prada puts out? Prada’s boxy, thick frames seem tailor-made for tech, and Meta already partners with its parent company, EssilorLuxotica, which also owns Ray-Ban and Oakley. Plus, rumors of Prada Meta glasses date back to June, and EssilorLuxotica also makes watches, so all the dots seem to connect and suggest that Meta could either add Prada to its lines of glasses with AI and cameras, or launch new display glasses under the Prada name.

Or not. This is all speculation. It’s not baseless speculation, but it could all turn out to be wrong. Maybe Meta thinks the public wants a wrist device that controls our glasses but doesn’t tell time. Maybe Meta Prada frames will be announced at some later date. Maybe the gigantic corporations involved have decided the two brands don’t fit together well enough to elicit consumer interest. Only time, as they say, will tell.

If you’re keeping score at home, though, below are five things that could be announced at Meta Connect 2025, in order of my own, personal excitement:

Meta display smart glasses

There is so much smoke around the idea that Meta plans to announce smart glasses with a built in display in one of the lenses, there has to be fire, right? Actually, no. But the rumor says that Meta’s next smart glasses will feature a dedicated display on one lens for alerts and mini-apps, as well as all the AI, audio, and camera/video features of the current generation of Meta Ray-Bans and Meta Oakley smart glasses. All of this will theoretically be facilitated via a wireless wristband or a smart watch(!).

Next-generation Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta smart glasses

Meta announcing a better version of its two already successful audio-and-AI focused smart glasses seems extremely likely. I’d put money on “third generation” Meta smart glasses having a better camera, longer-lasting battery, and vastly improved AI, but that’s not going very far out on a limb. I’m a huge fan of my Ray-Ban Metas, and I’d love an upgrade.

Prada Meta smart glasses

Just on vibes, Prada-Meta glasses make so much sense: there’s a kind of person who wears Ray-Bans, and a different kind of person who wears Oakleys, but neither of them are the kind of person who wears Prada. Personally, I expect the Prada glasses to be added to the audio and AI line of Meta smart glasses, as opposed to being rolled out as the flagship frames for Meta’s rumored AI style smart glasses.

Third-party apps for Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta glasses

Meta opening its smart glasses infrastructure to third-party developers isn’t likely to drive many headlines, but it could low-key change the game for Meta users. Having a suite of apps for different uses would be amazing.

Improvements to Meta Horizon OS

Smart glasses may be hogging all the attention, but Meta is expected to announce some improvements to the Horizon operating system that powers its VR headgear too. Specifically, expect better graphics in Horizon Worlds and your virtual home, and easier connectivity too.

If you want check out the event as it happens, Meta Connect 2025 will begin with a keynote from CEO Mark Zuckerberg on September 17 at 8 p.m. ET and continue through September 18. You can stream the keynote and developers conferences on Facebook or the official Meta Connect site.

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Late last month, Google launched the Pixel 10 and the Pixel 10 Pro. They’re the latest big releases in the Android world, which might carry more weight given the muted response to the iPhone 17 from some corners of the internet. But even if you are thinking of making the move to a new operating system, I wouldn’t recommend either flavor of Pixel 10 as your first port of call.

Instead, I think the Pixel 9a is easily Google’s best phone for almost everyone. It’s technically got the Pixel 9 name, but it’s also Google’s most recent budget variant, so it’s as current-generation as anything else. And while it does make some concessions to bring the price down, they’re fairly minor—and the device actually offers a few unique benefits of its own.

You don’t need the Pixel 10’s AI

“But what about all the fancy new Pixel 10 AI features?” you might ask. I’ve tried both the base Pixel 10 and the Pixel 10 Pro, and here’s the truth: You don’t need them.

Google’s announcement for the Pixel 10 series went hard on AI, and it’s true that the search giant is ahead of Apple and other smartphone makers on this front. But even with its head start, it’s clearly starting to run into diminishing returns. Existing AI features like the Gemini assistant and the Screenshots app are available on the Pixel 9, but most of the Pixel 10 exclusives focus on the camera app, and I don’t see most people sticking with any of them for long.

Case in point: 100x zoom. This Pixel 10 Pro exclusive feature sounds handy on the surface, supposedly letting you zoom in by 100x while still getting hi-res photos in return. But in truth, it just uses the same blurry digital zoom as other phones, then runs your shots through an AI to try to fix them up. It’s not really a reason to buy the Pixel 10 Pro—you can now get a similar result by just posting a photo to Gemini’s free, browser-based AI image generator as a prompt—and it frequently served me up photos with dreamy, unreal imagery that I wouldn’t feel comfortable posting. Just look what it did to my beloved Chrysler Building, and ask yourself if you would want to take a photo of a famous landmark only to get back a half-melted bizarro version instead. If you ask me, it’s firmly in the realm of novelty, at best.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

I had a similar reaction to the other big camera AI developments this year, like using Gemini to edit photos or getting an AI to coach you while trying to frame a shot. Gemini image editing, which lets you use natural language to alter your photos, is handy, but also wrests control from you, and doesn’t tell you when it’s doing a simple job like a crop versus a more hallucination-prone one like generative fill. You can check the metadata of your new photo to know for sure, but frankly, the results aren’t good enough to be worth the time for me.

Photos taken on the Pixel 10 (left) vs. those same photos edited by Gemini (right)
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

The same is true of Camera Coach, which uses AI to help you take shots. This has the benefit of not actively putting AI imagery into your photo, but the advice it gave me was rarely more complex than, “make sure the subject is in frame” and “follow the grid lines the previous generation Pixels could already put on your phone for you anyway.” It’s mostly unobtrusive—even when you’re using Camera Coach, you can take your final shot whenever—but it’s so inconsequential that I doubt most people will even take the extra time needed to boot it up.

To Google’s credit, there are a few AI additions unrelated to the camera that sound a bit more handy, like Magic Cue and Voice Translate. But you’re unlikely to run into these often. Magic Cue will use AI to pull information from Google apps like your Gmail to display when it might be relevant in other Google apps, like a phone call. For instance, it could display a boarding pass from an upcoming flight while you’re calling to check on it. But it doesn’t work with third-party apps, and since that’s how I use my phone most of the time, I actually didn’t see it pop up while I was testing either the Pixel 10 or Pixel 10 Pro.

I also didn’t get Voice Translate to work during my testing. This uses AI to translate both your voice and the person you’re calling’s voice if you’re speaking to each other in different languages, using what sounded like some pretty impressive voice cloning during its Made by Google demo. But it also needs both callers to have a Pixel 10, and since you can’t count on having a lot of multilingual friends that all use the same phone, that means it won’t be much more than a tech demo for most people.

Basically, Google’s new AI makes big claims, but the features are either so niche or so unreliable that they aren’t a major selling point save for a very specific type of user. It could be fun to toy with, but is it $300 to $500 worth of fun?

The Camera is thinner and not much weaker

But even if the Pixel 10 and 10 Pro aren’t worth it on their AI alone, the hardware still gets a bump, right? Well, in the case of the base Pixel 10, it actually got a little worse in one specific way, putting it in range of the Pixel 9a.

One of the things I dislike most about Google’s Pixel phones is the camera bar, which is the long horizontal bump across the entire top width of the device. This houses the camera sensor, but personally, I’d much prefer a weaker camera that’s flush with the device instead.

Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

With the Pixel 9a, Google granted my wish. This phone is the first Pixel in a long time to omit the camera bar, instead putting a single and much thinner pill in one corner of the device and leaving it at that. With the camera bar returning on both the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro, that alone makes the Pixel 9a worth considering as an alternative to me.

And the best part? The smaller camera on the Pixel 9a isn’t actually any weaker than the camera on the base Pixel 10. It’s just missing a lens.

Yep, while Google added a new telephoto lens to the Pixel 10 that allows it an up to 5x optical zoom, it also downgraded that phone’s ultrawide lens down from 48MP to 13MP, which is the same as on the Pixel 9a. And because both phones also have the same main lens, that means for everything but zoomed shots, you don’t lose anything by going with Google’s budget phone.

A close up photo taken on the Pixel 9a
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

To be fair, the Pixel 10 Pro is stronger than both phones on all fronts, but I’d argue that’s overkill for most users. If you never or rarely touch the zoom lens on your camera, whether to zoom in or out, you’ll actually get a similar experience across all three devices. So why pay more? Especially when the Pixel 9a’s camera is so much sleeker. If you’re a casual photographer, it could give you the same results, while taking up less space. A hidden upgrade.

Better battery life and a smooth OLED display

If the Pixel 9a’s camera is arguably on par with the more expensive Pixel 10 phones, then its battery life just straight up surpasses them. Packing a 5,100 mAh capacity, it puts both the Pixel 10 and Pixel 10 Pro to shame. To put that into more everyday terms, Google promises 30 hours of battery life on the 9a, but only 24 hours of battery life on either Pixel 10 model.

That held up in my testing. While the Pixel 10 died after about 18 hours of watching a video at 50% brightness (my standard test), the Pixel 9a was only a little under 50% capacity at the same time. And it was actually closer to half capacity when the Pixel 10 Pro died, which was after 16 hours of viewing. I actually haven’t had a full day to dedicate to draining this thing yet, but I assume that’s what it would take based on my tests, which easily puts the other Pixels to shame.

Granted, 50% brightness on the Pixel 9a isn’t quite as bright as on the other phones, since it only hits 2,700 nits of peak brightness as opposed to 3,000 nits on the Pixel 10 and 3,300 nits on the Pixel 10 Pro. But 2,700 nits is still plenty bright—the iPhone 16 maxes out at 2,000 nits. And on all other fronts, the display doesn’t compromise: The Pixel 9a has the exact same size (6.3-inches) and resolution (1,080 x 2,424) as the Pixel 10, and also works with Smooth Display for a responsive 120Hz refresh rate. It’s even an OLED, so you’re not making any compromises by going cheaper here.

Half the cost of a Pixel 10 Pro

Perhaps the biggest reason to opt for a Pixel 9a over a Pixel 10 is the same reason it was worth it compared to the other Pixel 9s—it’s just cheaper.

While the Pixel 10 starts at $799 and the Pixel 10 Pro starts at $999, the Pixel 9a is a mere $500. Given how closely it compared to even Google’s current-generation flagships, that’s a heck of a deal. And that doesn’t even come with any cuts to storage space, since both the Pixel 9a and all models of the Pixel 10 Pro begin with 128GB of storage. The cost to upgrade storage is also the same here—a simple $100 markup—although the Pixel 10 Pro does uniquely offer capacities over 256GB.

I’ll miss Pixelsnap, but the Pixel 10a is probably months away

I’ve been pretty high on the Pixel 9a so far, but I will make one concession—it doesn’t have PixelSnap, and I will miss that.

While the iPhone has had MagSafe since the iPhone 12, it took until this year for the Pixel to get its own version. Called Pixelsnap, it allows you to magnetically connect your phone right to compatible accessories and chargers on their own, with no need for cables or adhesive metal circles.

The Pixel 10 resting on a Pixelsnap Carger with Stand
Credit: Michelle Ehrhardt

I won’t lie, it’s convenient. It works with Qi2 charging for faster wireless top-offs, and while Google has its own official Pixelsnap accessories, it also worked fine with my Belkin iPhone charger, as well as a third-party MagSafe wallet I bought for my iPhone.

I’d miss that convenience by opting for the Pixel 9a instead of the Pixel 10, but I don’t know if I’d miss it enough to spend another $300 to $500. If there’s one reason to get a Pixel 10 model phone instead of a Pixel 9a, I think this would be it.

But what about the Pixel 10a?

As it did with the 9a, Google is sure to release a budget version of the Pixel 10 series down the line, and at that point, this article will probably become irrelevant. Granted, it’s not guaranteed to have Pixelsnap, but given how close the 9a already is to the 10, I bet it will—it’ll be an easy way to set the 10a apart from its predecessor.

However, the 9a didn’t come out until this April, and you can bet the 10a will follow a similar pattern. That means waiting over half a year from now, and frankly, I don’t like to prognosticate quite that much. Better tech is always on the horizon, but when making purchasing decisions, we have to live in the here and now. And right now, the Pixel 9a is still the best Google phone for most people.

An anonymous reader shares a report: European Union countries have shelved plans to approve a new climate change target next week, after pushback from governments including France and Germany over plans to quickly land a deal, three EU diplomats told Reuters on Friday. Countries are discussing a legally-binding target to cut net EU greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, from 1990 levels – with a share of this covered by buying foreign carbon credits.

The European Commission has said this would offer investors certainty and keep Europe on track for net zero emissions by 2050. Climate change has made Europe the world’s fastest-warming continent, unleashing deadly heatwaves and record-breaking wildfires. But EU governments are divided over how ambitious to be in tackling global warming, as governments also try to increase defence spending and support struggling industries.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With hackers looking for any way they can to gain access to your personal information via every form of phishing scheme, it’s critical to take every precaution to protect your data. Multi-factor (MFA) authentication is one way to boost account security, but it has to be employed correctly, and even then, you should be on the lookout for malicious prompts that give bad actors the codes they need to log in easily.

Two-factor authentication can be compromised

First, a reminder that two-factor and multi-factor authentication are not necessarily made equal. 2FA uses exactly two factors to verify a user’s login, and both can be something the user knows, such as their password plus a PIN or SMS code. MFA, meanwhile, requires at least two independent factors, like a password (a knowledge factor) plus a biometric ID (an identity factor) or a time-based, one-time password (a possession factor) from an authenticator app.

Knowledge factors (and some possession factors) can be phished relatively easily, which is why 2FA codes sent via SMS are the worst option for authentication, especially if you have alternatives. Bad actors may also try to trick you into engaging with fake 2FA prompts.

How to identify malicious 2FA prompts

One way hackers get past 2FA is by wearing you down with repeated authentication requests, a tactic known as prompt bombing. You may get dozens, even hundreds of push notifications to your phone in a short amount of time or late at night when you’re less likely to be thinking clearly. Threat actors are counting on the fact that if you get annoyed enough, you’ll eventually approve one of them. Don’t. If you get a 2FA prompt when you’re not trying to log into one of your accounts, that’s an instant red flag.

Another sign of a malicious prompt is that the attempted login is coming from an unfamiliar device or region—for example, a Google notification for a Windows machine when you’re a Mac user or a location in an entirely different country. You should also be wary of prompts with pop-ups that request permissions unrelated to the app or service itself, like the ability to access all of the contacts on your device.

Hackers may also contact you by phone, text, or email to request your 2FA SMS codes. It is easy to spoof phone numbers and email addresses, so you shouldn’t trust caller ID or a sender even if it looks legitimate. Companies won’t call unsolicited to demand your password or authentication code, so hang up or ignore these messages.

Bottom line: If you receive suspicious 2FA requests via push notification, text, or other method, ignore them, and change the password on the related account by going directly to the website or app, never via the prompt itself, as this may lead you to a phishing site that could further compromise your information. If you do accidentally interact with malicious prompts, look for signs of a scam, such as sneaky or lookalike characters in web addresses and poor spelling or grammar.

US colleges face a prolonged enrollment decline beginning this fall as high school graduating classes shrink for the first time since the Great Recession. The incoming freshman class marks the start of a 13% drop in high school graduates through 2041, falling from 3.9 million to 3.4 million students. The decline stems from reduced birth rates during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent years.

Regional four-year institutions in the Northeast and Midwest states face potential applicant pool contractions of 15% or more. Small liberal arts colleges, comprising 40% of the higher education market, are particularly vulnerable. 40% of private colleges posted financial losses in 2023. Top-ranked schools in the US News top 50 are expected to experience minimal impact due to sustained national demand for limited seats.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

US retail coffee prices surged 21% year-over-year in August, the largest annual increase since October 1997, according to Thursday’s Consumer Price Index. The monthly 4% jump marks the steepest rise in 14 years. Trump administration tariffs on major coffee exporters — 50% on Brazil, 20% on Vietnam, and 10% on Colombia — are driving costs higher as 99% of US coffee consumption relies on imports.

J.M. Smucker plans its third price increase this winter for Folgers and Cafe Bustelo brands after raising prices in May and August. New Orleans chain French Truck Coffee has implemented a 4% tariff surcharge. Starbucks expects peak cost impacts in 2026 due to its advance purchasing practices. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk predicts prices will exceed historical records as Brazilian tariff effects reach retail shelves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s some good news for a Friday afternoon: For 2025 through August, global electric vehicle sales have grown by 25 percent compared to the same eight months in 2024, according to the analysts at Rho Motion. That amounts to 12.5 million EVs, although the data combines both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs for the total.

However, that’s for global sales. In fact, EV adoption is moving even faster in Europe, which has grown by 31 percent so far this year (Rho says that BEV sales grew by 31 percent but PHEV sales by just 30 percent)—a total of 2.6 million plug-in vehicles. In some European countries, the increase has been even more impressive: up by 45 percent in Germany, 41 percent in Italy, and by 100 percent in Spain.

But despite a number of interesting new EVs from Renault and the various Stellantis-owned French automakers, EV sales in France are down by 6 percent so far, year on year.

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Instagram fixed a bug that caused the reach of some users’ Stories to shrink when they posted more than one Story a day, Instagram head Adam Mosseri shared on Friday. The fix addresses a common complaint shared by creators in the last year that they were disincentivized to use Stories because of how regularly using the feature impacted the number of people who actually saw their posts.

“People were complaining about getting less reach with their Stories if they posted lots of Stories in the same day,” Mosseri said in a video announcing the change. “That is not at all the intended behavior of Instagram.” Fixing the bug doesn’t mean every Story you add will be watched, but Mosseri says posting multiple Stories a day won’t negatively impact the reach of your Stories overall, especially your first Story.

For anyone who primarily uses Instagram to keep up with their friends, the change might not matter all that much. But much like YouTube, Instagram is an increasingly professionalized platform where people post in the hopes of expanding their reach and earning a living off their content. That creates an interesting dynamic between Mosseri’s regular announcements and users trying to suss out the nuances of the platform’s algorithm. For every new feature, like adding of comments to Stories, there’s subtler tweaks that can totally change creators’ content strategy.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/instagram-fixed-an-issue-that-caused-posting-multiple-stories-to-tank-your-reach-184714482.html?src=rss

Fans will have to wait a little bit longer for the hotly-anticipated Balatro 1.1 update. Developer LocalThunk just announced it will not be coming out in 2025, despite previously promising a release this year. Instead, it’ll come out “when it’s done.”

It’s worth remembering that Balatro was created by a single person, and the same goes for this update. The lone developer also made the original balance patch and the well-regarded mobile port. He says he’s “well and truly burned out.”

LocalThunk apologizes for the delay and says “it has become clear now that it won’t happen by the end of the year.” It’s actually nice to let us know now instead of forcing us to wonder where the update is for the next several months.

“I still consider this my hobby,” he wrote. “The prospect of rushing the work and going back into crunch mode to get it out this year just felt terrible.”

Now for some good news. The update is definitely coming, just not right now. It’ll be free for all players on all platforms. The developer also hinted that this update would not be the final DLC drop for the game.

For the uninitiated, Balatro is a deckbuilding roguelike that’s loosely based on poker. Consider it the highly addictive sequel to poker we never knew we needed. It has proven to be a bona-fide phenomenon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/balatros-big-2025-update-wont-be-coming-out-this-year-after-all-183511401.html?src=rss

California’s legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider.

The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must “allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy.” If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant “may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent,” and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating.

The bill passed the state Senate in a 30–7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April.

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Apple didn’t necessarily make it easy to pick a new iPhone this year. The $799 iPhone 17 comes with features previously exclusive to the Pros, without raising the price; the iPhone 17 Pros, once again, have the best and most varied camera system of the bunch; and the iPhone Air is just cool.

There are a lot of reasons to consider any one of these new iPhones over the others, but things get a little clearer if you zero in on one metric in particular: battery life. Whether you care about taking the best possible photos, or having the thinnest iPhone ever made, you’re impacted by the size and longevity of the battery inside your iPhone of choice. As such, many of us are absolutely obsessed with battery life and battery health.

Comparing the battery life of all four new iPhones

Apple doesn’t share technical battery stats for its iPhones, so we’ll need to wait until certain reviews teardown these new devices to see how large these batteries really are. But what we can pull from is Apple’s odd battery claims for each device. For iPhones, Apple focusing on video playback time as a measure of overall battery life. When using this comparison tool, we can see the following timelines for each new iPhone:

• iPhone 17: Up to 30 hours (27 hours streamed)

• iPhone Air: Up to 27 hours (22 hours streamed)

• iPhone 17 Pro: Up to 33 hours (30 hours streamed)

• iPhone 17 Pro Max: Up to 39 hours (up to 35 hours streamed)

Solely based on these numbers, if you need the device with the longest possible battery life, you need to go with the 17 Pro Max. It crushes all other iPhone 17 models, especially the iPhone Air. As cool as it is, my guess is this is not the iPhone for people who hate worrying about battery life. While 27 hours isn’t bad by any means, that’s just for video playback. If you’re running more demanding tasks, including taking photos or videos, video calling, streaming, or gaming, that’s going to eat into the battery much faster. According to Apple, the Air has roughly the same battery life as the iPhone 15 Plus or iPhone 13 Pro Max, so if you’re coming from one of those iPhones, you can expect similar battery performance here.

I picked up on the Air’s smaller battery during Apple’s announcement, when the company said the Air still had “all-day battery life,” but didn’t actually share any numbers. You can see why. The company did share numbers when discussing the Air’s new MagSafe Battery accessory, which, when used with the Air, nets 40 hours of video playback, or 35 hours when streaming. Technically, an Air with the MagSafe Battery pack has the best battery life out of all four iPhones, but add a battery pack to any of the other three above, and that advantage is instantly erased. As such, I’m not counting that.

Zooming out, however, these iPhones do have pretty great battery life across the board—at least compared to last-generation’s iPhones. Here’s how the iPhone 16 series compares:

• iPhone 16: 22 hours (18 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Plus: 27 hours (24 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Pro: 27 hours (22 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16 Pro Max: 33 hours (29 hours streamed)

• iPhone 16e: 26 hours (21 hours streamed)

Apple managed to squeeze an extra eight hours of video playback on the base model this year compared to last year’s iPhone 16, while the iPhone Air matches the iPhone 16 Plus’ battery life. The iPhone 17 Pro has the same battery life as the iPhone 16 Pro Max, and the whole comparison clearly shows how large the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s battery is.

Things to consider before buying an iPhone for battery life

If you’re only buying your new iPhone based on battery life, you have no other choice than the 17 Pro Max. However, if you have other qualifications to consider, or if the 17 Pro Max is a bit too large for your taste, my recommendation is to use Apple’s comparison tool to see what the battery life of your current iPhone is. Then, consider that against the new iPhones to see how it fares. If you’re coming from an iPhone 14, for example, your phone is rated for just 20 hours of video playback when it was new. Unless you replaced the battery recently, it’s likely not reaching those highs, so any of the new iPhones will likely last longer. But if you’re coming from a 15 Pro Max, with 29 hours of video playback potential, the Air is going to die a bit sooner than you might be used to.