With each new iPhone, we expect the battery capacity (and as result, battery life) to increase, not decrease.
In one of Apple's videos explaining the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus' 3D Touch feature, we can briefly see the iPhone 6S's battery capacity is smaller than the iPhone 6's battery. That may be true, but it probably won't matter in the grand scheme of things; Apple advertises the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus as having the same battery life as the two older models.
In Apple's video below at around the 2:50 mark, you can see the iPhone 6S has a 1,715 milliamp-hour (mAh) battery, a drop from the 1,810 mAh battery in the iPhone 6.
A battery with a smaller capacity, by logic, should mean less battery life — less time to tweet, less time to watch YouTube, less time to stream music and less time to play games.
According to Apple, that's not the case. The iPhone 6S will get up to 14 hours of talk time on 3G, up to 10 hours of standby time, up to 10 hours on LTE, up to 11 hours on Wi-Fi, up to 11 hours of video playback and up to 80 hours of audio playback. In other words, the same battery life as the iPhone 6. While the video doesn't reveal the exact battery capacity for the iPhone 6S Plus, it's presumably smaller as well, but will have the same battery life as the iPhone 6 Plus, according to Apple's website.
If you look closely at the video above, you'll find a clue as to why the battery may be smaller. The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus have a new haptic feedback motor called the Taptic Engine that works in tandem with 3D Touch. To squeeze the motor in, something had to give and that something appears to be the battery size.
But you probably shouldn't worry. With each new iPhone's processor comes greater power efficiency. And with iOS 9, there are numerous software optimizations to help conserve battery life. The big question is, will the older iPhone 6 and 6 Plus trump the new phones once they're updated to iOS 9; thesoftware update is supposed to give iPhones up to an hour of extra battery life and up to three hours with the Low Power Mode switched on.
There's a reason why Apple never lists the milliamp-hour figures on its iPhone tech specs page. In a comparison chart, the iPhone's battery capacity would look absolutely puny compared to the 2,500 to 3,000 mAh batteries that are common in many Android smartphones.
Other phone makers love to play the checklist game, comparing numbers on a spec sheet, but Apple's always focused on real-world usage — how many hours can you actually use your iPhone for. By controlling the entire hardware and software stack, Apple has always been able to do more with less and it's likely the same with the new iPhones.
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