iPhone 15 rumored to get a big battery boost from new OLED chip

A few months ago, BGR reported the iPhone 15’s A17 Bionic chip would be 35% more power efficient than its predecessor. While this is good news for all iPhone Pro fans, there could be another reason all iPhone 15 models will have a better battery than their predecessors.

According to Economic Daily News, the iPhone 15 series will use a new OLED driver chip process that will be upgraded from 40nm HV to 28 NM HV. That change would help further reduce power consumption and improve battery life.

The driver chip designers and wafer foundries will likely benefit when Apple makes this change. The publication gives two reasons why the Cupertino firm will adopt this new OLED driver chip process:

• The 28nm HV process can further reduce the power consumption of OLED driver chips and improve the performance o iPhone 15 series;
• The wafer foundry, cooperated by LX Semicon and Samsung System LSI, is migrating the OLED driver chip process from 40nm HV to 28nm HV and converting the 40nm process to other types of chips, such as an eFlash memory.

That said, while battery life for iPhone 14 Pro models wasn’t as good as their predecessors, Apple will compensate this year thanks to the A17 Bionic chip and the new OLED driver chip process.

For the regular iPhone 15 models, even with Apple adopting the Dynamic Island cutout – and maintaining the A16 Bionic chip – the lack of Always-On display technology and ProMotion would help these iPhone versions consume less power, as they will have a fixed refresh rate of 60Hz.

We still need to wait another seven months for the new iPhone models to be announced, but rumors so far indicate this will be an interesting year for those planning to upgrade.