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Brapinator

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 1, 2021
11
1
I use facetime video a couple times a week for about 10 to 15 minutes straight. When on wifi and doing it, I see about a 5 percent lose. Ive been away from home more than usual the past few days, so the last one I did was on LTE for 17 minutes. I saw that 5 percent turned into 13 percent. Now granted that was 2 minutes more, so on wifi it would have been about 6 percent, but is it normal to use 13 percent on LTE if the same would have even about 6 on wifi? I checked the signal strength and I had 2 or 3 bars out of 4, so pretty good signal strength.
 

Frijid

macrumors newbie
Jan 25, 2021
16
6
I see you're running an SE, like me. Remember our batteries aren't champs, even when they're new.

That being said, anytime you use a data connection instead of wifi, you're gonna use more battery. Keep in mind also that facetime is about one of the most power intensive things you can do. You're running the camera and audio in real-time, processing it and sending in, while at the same time recieving the signal that then gets processed and displayed on your screen and the speakers. That's why your phone gets warm during, since it's a hit on power. And when you're on wifi, the signal is going maybe 20 feet? That doesn't take much transmitting power. Now when on data, the tower can be half a mile or more. So therefore you need much more transmitting power to reach it than the wifi sitting on the other side of the room. Plus, if you're using auto brightness, when at home your screen probably hovers around 20 to 40 percent brightness. When out and about on data, your screen was probably even brighter. Mine stays from 0 to like 30 or so. But if I pull it out like in a store the brightness shoots up.

The wifi in my area has been spotty lately. They done an update, which had service down for several hours. Then literally the next day they said there was a wreck in another city that knocked out the fiber optics lines and took a few days to get back online, then when it came back, it would drop out every hour or so for 10 minutes. Everyone on Facebook was complaining about it. So I just turned wifi off and will keep it off till they figure everything out, and have been on data since then, and I notice a slight difference in battery life. But, as I said, anytime you're using data, it will use more cause you're having to send a signal a mile away instead of 20 feet away.

I shut my perctange off, but I can notice a difference. Stand by doesn't seem to be much different, but when I watch YouTube, I can notice it doesn't last quite as long, which is too be expected
 
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