In addition to what’s already been called out, I see these possible contributors:
- Apple touted longer sustained performance. While that will mean higher performance overall, it also means that it can consume more power for longer without throttling (which would reduce power consumption).
- more RAM means more power consumption.
- like you said, other components could require more power (E.g. faster main storage). The upgrade to WiFi6E likely means higher power consumption (it does in routers) and the Ultrawideband 2 chips could be thirstier, too (especially when in Precision Finding mode)
- and all of the new computation photography enhancements (SmartHDR5, next gen portrait mode, etc.) plus AI features (on device Siri processing, ML driven text prediction, etc.) can require more processing power than their predecessors.
- brighter screen == more power
In contrast, we also see better battery life for certain scenarios, like streaming video (likely due to the new AV1 encoder).